नैन भए मोरे बाँवरे

'Nain Bhaye More Banwre' is the Preet song that has drawn the most listener votes on HindiGeetMala, and MySwar files it under both Filmi and Sugam. Snehprabha Pradhan sings it solo to D. N. Madhok's words and Bulo C. Rani's tune; she is also the film's female lead, so the voice on the disc and the face on the screen are the same person.

MySwar's double filing — Filmi and Sugam — points at the kind of setting Bulo C. Rani favoured for a solo like this: a light-classical melodic line kept clean enough to sit in a film scene, carried on the harmonium-and-tabla core that a 1945 studio orchestra was built around, without the heavy string writing that would become standard later in the decade. No score or recording session detail for the number is documented, so nothing further about the arrangement is claimed here.

The title turns on baanwra — mad, addled, beside oneself — applied not to the speaker but to her eyes: my eyes have gone crazed. It is a characteristic move in the Hindi-Urdu love lyric, where the eyes are treated as semi-independent agents that fall first and drag the rest of the person after them, so that the speaker can report her own condition as though watching it happen to someone else. That displacement is what makes the line playable rather than merely confessional: the woman is not admitting love, she is complaining about her eyes. D. N. Madhok, the most prolific Hindi film lyricist of the 1940s, works squarely inside that convention here. The full text is not reproduced on this page.

HindiGeetMala and MySwar both credit 'Nain Bhaye More Banwre' to Snehprabha Pradhan, with D. N. Madhok as lyricist and Bulo C. Rani as composer. Preet was made at Krishin Movietone, the Bombay banner Ram Daryani had set up with his brother K. S. Daryani in 1938, and Daryani directed it himself. Bulo C. Rani composed all thirteen songs; D. N. Madhok wrote ten of them and Wali Saheb the other three. MySwar records the discs as a Columbia Records release. Cinemaazi and the Wikipedia list of 1945 Hindi films give the cast as Snehprabha Pradhan, Chandra Mohan, Nazir Ahmad, Pahari Sanyal, Swarnalata, Gope, Miss Gulab and Majid. No plot summary of the picture survives in any source that can be consulted without a paywall, and the film has no Wikipedia article of its own, so nothing is asserted here about what happens in it.

Snehprabha Pradhan (1915-1993) is credited as the singer on seven of Preet's thirteen tracks — more than any other voice on the record — while also playing the film's female lead. She belongs to the generation of Hindi and Marathi actress-singers whose own voices went onto the discs, in the years just before dedicated playback singing hardened into a separate profession. She later published an autobiography, Snehankita, in the 1970s. Preet itself survives today only as a catalogue: a thirteen-song list preserved through the Hindi Film Geet Kosh tradition and the databases built on it, with no print known to circulate and no plot summary in open circulation.