लाज धरो हे भगवान

'Laaj Dharo He Bhagwan' is the second explicitly devotional title in Ramchandra Pal's score for Nal Damyanti (1945), written by Lakshman. Its subject is laaj — honour, modesty, the social standing of a woman — placed in God's keeping, which is the classic Indian formula of the vulnerable calling on divine protection. In the legend the phrase has a precise application: Damayanti is left alone in a forest, her garment torn in half by her husband, and has to travel through the world unprotected. No singer is credited in the surviving catalogues.

Ramchandra Pal had the training for a slow devotional address — he had studied under Ustad Badal Khan and had scored for Bengali and Tamil films before Bombay Talkies — but no recording of this song circulates and its actual setting cannot be described. The only contemporary judgement is Filmindia's, which in July 1945 held that the film's songs uniformly failed the situations they were written for.

'Laaj rakhna' is one of the oldest formulas in Indian devotional speech — Draupadi's cry in the assembly hall is its most famous instance, and every bhakti tradition since has repeated it. What the phrase asks for is not rescue from death but protection of standing: the petitioner is saying that her place in the world is no longer defensible by her own means. Attached to the Nala-Damayanti story it names the exact predicament of the second half of the legend, in which a queen walks alone through forests and foreign courts in a half-garment, recognised by no one, and must hold her identity together until her husband can be found.

The forest separation is the pivot of the Nalopakhyana and the reason the tale has been retold in every Indian language: Nala, ruined at dice and possessed by Kali, abandons his sleeping wife rather than let her share his fate. Janak Pictures' 1945 version, directed by Kumarsen Samarth from a story by K. S. Thackeray, followed the legend closely apart from making Pushkar a step-brother and giving the quarrel over the kingdom a topical partition colouring.

No recording of the song is known to circulate, and it did not enter the devotional repertoire that carried other 1940s film bhajans forward. Its documentary value is that it fixes where in the legend the film placed its second prayer.