मैं क्षमा आपसे चाहूँ

A Srimati Ghosh solo from Devdasi (1945), and the one song in the film's set built explicitly on contrition: the singer asks forgiveness of the one she addresses with the respectful 'aap'. In a film named for the temple dancer, a woman's prayer of this kind carries obvious dramatic weight, though the scene it belongs to is not documented. Lyric by Narottam Vyas, music by K.C. Dey.

A slow female solo in the album's restrained manner. K.C. Dey wrote for the women's voices in this score the way he wrote for his own — long unhurried phrases with the ornament stripped back, accompaniment kept to harmonium, tabla and a thin string line, and the melodic weight placed on the sustained note at the end of each phrase rather than on a catchy turn at the start. The result is closer to the recitation of a prayer than to the shapely film song of the period.

Kshama — forgiveness — is a specific and slightly unusual thing to build a bhajan around. Most devotional lyrics of the period ask for darshan, for shelter, for the removal of suffering; asking to be forgiven presumes a fault, and so places the singer in a moral rather than merely a supplicant position. The formal 'aap' keeps the distance intact: this is not the intimate Krishna of the Braj songs elsewhere in the album but a figure addressed with full deference. Narottam Vyas writes it in plain, unornamented Hindi, which makes the admission feel spoken rather than sung.

Srimati Ghosh sings four of the eleven songs in Devdasi, more than anyone except K.C. Dey himself, which makes her the female voice of the film. The production was mounted in Bombay by New Maharashtra Productions with Prithviraj Kapoor and Monica Desai leading the cast; Kapoor's performance won the BFJA Best Actor award for 1945. The film's plot is not recoverable from accessible sources, so no claim is made here about which character sings this.

Almost nothing of Srimati Ghosh's career is documented beyond credit lines in catalogues of the 1940s, and the Devdasi album is one of the more complete records of her work. The song's survival is entirely a matter of the gramophone catalogue: the film itself has no known public print.