कौन लगाए पार

A song from 'Torpedo' (1941) with lyrics by Kabil Amritsari and music by Shyam Babu Pathak and Shanti Kumar. Its title — a question of who will carry one across to the far shore — reaches for the boatman-and-crossing imagery long favoured in Hindi film verse, suggesting a reflective or philosophical number. The singer is not documented in the available sources.

The imagery of crossing to the far bank — paar lagaana — is among the most deeply embedded in Hindi and Urdu devotional and folk verse. Its roots lie simultaneously in the ferry tradition of bhakti poetry (where paar is moksha, liberation, and the nayya wala or boatman is the guru or God) and in the Sufi metaphor of crossing from the mortal world to the divine presence. Kabil Amritsari — whose takhallus places him in the Amritsar literary tradition, where Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu poetry met — would have been thoroughly familiar with both strands. 'Kaun Lagaye Paar' — 'who will ferry us across, who will bring us to the other shore' — frames the crossing as a question rather than a prayer, investing it with an existential rather than a purely devotional cast. The word kaun (who?) opens the lyric to longing and uncertainty, the hallmarks of a philosophical song addressed as much to the listener as to any deity.

Torpedo (1941) had its music composed jointly by Shyam Babu Pathak and Shanti Kumar, with lyrics by Kabil Amritsari. The cast included Yashwant, Munawar Sultana, Shazadi, Samson, Fazlu, Gulab, and Ameena. Among the singers documented for the film's soundtrack are Rajkumari (Rajkumari Dubey) and Gulshan Sufi — though per-song attribution for specific tracks, including this one, has not been preserved in accessible sources. The film's title — Torpedo — signals an action or adventure narrative, making the pensive, crossing-imagery of 'Kaun Lagaye Paar' a somewhat introspective departure from what the title suggests. Joint music direction between Pathak and Shanti Kumar was a working arrangement seen in several smaller Bombay productions of the period, where studios sometimes employed two composers to split the work on a film's larger song count.