तोता बोला मोरे कान्हा

One of the two duets in Devdasi (1945). K.C. Dey sings it with the Bengali singer Putul Chatterjee. The title turns on the talking parrot — in Braj poetry a household bird taught to repeat Krishna's name, and therefore a small comic proof that devotion can be caught rather than taught. Lyric by Narottam Vyas, music by Krishna Chandra Dey.

Lighter and quicker than the bhajans around it — a two-voice exchange rather than a single declaimed line, with the male and female parts trading phrases in the call-and-response habit that both kirtan and Bengali folk singing share. Dey keeps the setting small: a dance-adjacent pulse, a tune that turns back on itself so the repeated name lands on the same beat each cycle, and no attempt at the orchestral scale that Bombay composers were then adding.

The parrot is one of the oldest working props of Braj bhakti verse. Because it repeats what it hears without understanding it, and is nevertheless saying the divine name all day, it lets the poet make a joke and a doctrine at the same time: the name works regardless of the speaker's comprehension, so the bird is closer to salvation than the scholar. The affectionate possessive in 'more Kanha' — my Kanha — sets the whole thing in the domestic, maternal register of Krishna devotion rather than the awed register of the film's other songs.

In a soundtrack made almost entirely of prayer, this is the song that lets the film breathe. Putul Chatterjee's appearance is one of the few Bengali singing credits in the album besides Dey's own, which fits a production drawing on the Calcutta devotional-musical tradition even while being shot in Bombay. Where the song sits in the narrative is not documented; no detailed plot summary of Devdasi survives in accessible sources.

Putul Chatterjee is one of the many singers of the 78-rpm decade whose work is now almost entirely undocumented apart from catalogue lines like this one, and songs like this are the whole of what remains of such careers. The parrot-and-Krishna conceit itself outlasted the film comfortably and kept returning in devotional numbers for decades.