मैं किसको कहूँ लाल

This is the lament of Taramati's nine songs — 'Main Kisko Kahoon Lal', 'whom shall I call my son'. HindiGeetMala records the title as 'Mai Kisko Kahun Lal' and MySwar as 'Main Kisko Kahoon Lal'; the two spellings are the same track, and an earlier draft of this film's data mistakenly counted them as separate songs, inflating the film's total to ten. The credit line is identical on all nine songs documented for the film: music by Ramchandra Pal and Keshavrao Bhole jointly, lyric by Mukhram Sharma 'Ashant'. No singer is named for any of them. No recording has been traced.

A lament built around a question repeats that question rather than developing away from it, and settings of such lyrics generally keep the melodic line low and let it fall at the end of each statement, so that the phrase lands where the sense does. Nothing more definite can be offered here. The singer is not named in any source, no disc has been traced, and no description of the recording survives, so the tempo, the scale and the accompaniment are all unknown and are not guessed at.

'Lal' is the ordinary Hindi endearment a mother uses for her son — literally 'ruby', used the way English once used 'my jewel' — and it belongs to domestic speech rather than to poetry. Putting it at the end of the line is what gives the title its force: the grand words are absent, and what is left is the household name for a child, addressed to nobody. The question is not 'where is my son' but 'whom may I call by that name', which is a different and worse loss — the name survives the child and has nowhere to go. In the Harishchandra legend Taramati is separated from her son Rohitashva and later loses him altogether, so the register of the title fits the story's central wound; that the song belongs to that moment is an inference from the words, not a documented fact, and no lyric of it has been found.

The film was directed by Raja Nene and produced by Ramnik Productions, with Shobhana Samarth at the head of the cast — by 1945 the most recognisable mythological heroine in Indian cinema. The surviving billing attaches no character names to any player, however, so even the assumption that she played the title role is drawn from the film's title and her standing rather than from a credit. No print, summary or review of the picture has been found, so this song's placement and its singer are both beyond recovery.

Of the nine titles preserved for Taramati this is the one that reads most like a song people would have remembered, and it is exactly as lost as the other eight: no disc in circulation, no singer named, no verse recorded anywhere. The only claim that can be made for it is structural — a mother's lament sits at the heart of the Harishchandra story, and the survival of this title is among the better pieces of evidence that the film followed the legend closely rather than departing from it.