कभी तो जागो ऐ सोने वालो

'Kabhi To Jago Ae Sone Walo' closes the Parinde (1945) record listing as its eighth and final track. HindiGeetMala and MySwar agree on the credit — a solo for the singer both bill as Srimati or Shrimati Ghosh, words by Rammurti Chaturvedi, music by Pandit Gobind Ram — and the collectors' archive that carries the film's audio preserves it as file eight. It is one of the four songs of the film that have never been written about individually, so what is known about it is the credit, its position on the record, and its title.

The credit is a female solo, in the same voice the film used for its heroine's songs, and it sits at the end of the record listing where a film of this period would usually place either its heaviest number or its reprise. No published account describes the recording, and the surviving print of the film is cut and in places soundless, so no claim is made here about its melody, tempo, orchestration or the raag it might use. What can be said is that Gobind Ram was working in the year of his strongest reputation, and that the same singer carries four of the eight songs on this record, which makes her the film's principal voice as much as Surendra is.

The title is an address to sleepers, asking them to wake at last, and it is the only song on the record that speaks outward rather than to a lover. Read against the rest of the album — four romantic numbers for the separated couple, and beside this one a prayer for a drowning country and a call sending a warrior to the field — it belongs to the film's public half rather than its private one. Whether the sleep it names is literal, moral or political is not something any surviving account settles, and the full text is not available in a source that can be consulted, so the reading is offered as a reading of the title and its company on the record, not as a documented account of the lyric.

Parinde runs its love story — a teacher who enlists, a pilot posted to Burma, a rescued girl, a scheming doctor and a nurse who learns the truth in a base hospital — against a second story about what the war was doing at home, where the heroine's own father is making money out of hoarding and the black market with that doctor as his silent partner. A song calling on people to wake up has an obvious bearing on that second story, but the film's print is missing whole passages and no account places this number in a scene, so its picturisation is left unstated here rather than assumed.

Unlike the film's parting duet or its patriotic prayer, this song has attracted no separate commentary at all: it has never been posted on the blogs that revived four of Parinde's other tracks, and it appears in no survey or list. Its survival is entirely down to record collecting — a catalogue line in two databases and an audio file numbered eight on a collector's page. For a film whose picture is damaged and whose story had to be reconstructed by a listener working from a mutilated print, that is the ordinary fate of a track that was neither the hit nor the anthem.