को तुमको तुम बोलो मोय

A duet for Srimati Ghosh and K.C. Dey from the Devdasi (1945) score. The title is in old Braj — 'ko' for who, 'moy' for me — and reads as a direct question addressed to the deity, with the answer demanded from him rather than supplied by the devotee. Written by Narottam Vyas and composed by Krishna Chandra Dey, like every song in the film.

Built as an exchange between the two voices, which suits a lyric shaped as question and reply. Srimati Ghosh's contribution to this album — two solos and this duet — makes her the film's principal female voice, and the writing keeps her line and Dey's in comfortably separate registers so that the dialogue reads clearly rather than blending. The instrumentation follows the album's restrained pattern of harmonium, tabla and light strings.

Asking the deity to name himself is an old move in Indian devotional poetry, and it is not rhetorical humility: the question is the doctrinal centre. In the bhakti frame the devotee cannot arrive at god by definition or inference, only by being told, so a poem that stops and asks is dramatising the limit of its own knowing. Narottam Vyas keeps the archaic Braj forms rather than modernising into standard Hindi, which anchors the song to the sant-poet register — Surdas and Mira rather than the film lyric of 1945.

Devdasi's soundtrack is unusual for its period in being wholly devotional, and this duet is one of the places where the film puts a woman's voice and the singing-devotee figure in direct conversation — a structure that fits a story named for the temple dancer. Beyond the credits, the film's narrative is not documented in accessible catalogues, and this entry does not reconstruct it.

Srimati Ghosh is one of the mid-1940s singers whose recorded work is now visible only through catalogue entries; the Devdasi album is among the few places her name is preserved with a full set of credits. As with the rest of the film, the song survives as metadata and a 78-rpm side rather than as anything one can watch.