होली खेले नंदलाला फागन आ गया

'Holi Khele Nandalala Phagan Aa Gaya' is Preet's festival song, credited to Snehprabha Pradhan and written by D. N. Madhok. MySwar files it under three genres — Filmi, Sugam and Hindi Folk — the widest classification given to any song on the record, and carries a trivia note reporting a second, uncredited female voice on the track.

The filmi Holi song is a fixed genre with fixed equipment — dholak driving the rhythm, a fast tempo, a call-and-response shape borrowed from the actual seasonal singing that goes on in north Indian courtyards during Phagun — and MySwar's triple classification of this track as Filmi, Sugam and Hindi Folk describes exactly that hybrid. The reported extra voice, if it is there, would fit the form rather than break it: Holi songs are group songs by nature.

Nandalala — the son of Nanda — is one of the household names for Krishna, and naming him rather than Krishna keeps the register domestic: this is the cowherd boy of the Braj villages, not the god of the Gita. Phagan is the month, February-March, in which Holi falls, and the second half of the title simply announces its arrival. Between them the two halves do everything a Holi mukhda needs to do: they place the season and they place the divine mischief-maker in it, and the audience supplies the colour, the water and the licence for the rest. The full text is not reproduced on this page.

HindiGeetMala and MySwar both credit 'Holi Khele Nandalala Phagan Aa Gaya' to Snehprabha Pradhan, with D. N. Madhok as lyricist and Bulo C. Rani as composer. Preet was made at Krishin Movietone, the Bombay banner Ram Daryani had set up with his brother K. S. Daryani in 1938, and Daryani directed it himself. Bulo C. Rani composed all thirteen songs; D. N. Madhok wrote ten of them and Wali Saheb the other three. MySwar records the discs as a Columbia Records release. Cinemaazi and the Wikipedia list of 1945 Hindi films give the cast as Snehprabha Pradhan, Chandra Mohan, Nazir Ahmad, Pahari Sanyal, Swarnalata, Gope, Miss Gulab and Majid. No plot summary of the picture survives in any source that can be consulted without a paywall, and the film has no Wikipedia article of its own, so nothing is asserted here about what happens in it.

Snehprabha Pradhan (1915-1993) is credited as the singer on seven of Preet's thirteen tracks — more than any other voice on the record — while also playing the film's female lead. She belongs to the generation of Hindi and Marathi actress-singers whose own voices went onto the discs, in the years just before dedicated playback singing hardened into a separate profession. She later published an autobiography, Snehankita, in the 1970s. Preet itself survives today only as a catalogue: a thirteen-song list preserved through the Hindi Film Geet Kosh tradition and the databases built on it, with no print known to circulate and no plot summary in open circulation.