नटखट सी रसीली राधिका

One of the eleven Devdasi (1945) songs, composed by K.C. Dey to words by Narottam Vyas. The title is a portrait rather than a prayer: 'natkhat' (mischievous, up to something) and 'raseeli' (steeped in ras — juice, savour, aesthetic relish) are the two adjectives Braj poets reach for when they want Radha as a person rather than as a principle. No singer is recorded for the title in the catalogues that preserve the film's song list.

The recording's performance credits are not documented. Structurally, a Radha-portrait of this kind belongs to the lighter, faster half of a devotional score — the material a composer sets in a dance-friendly cycle rather than in the slow declamatory line used for surrender bhajans. K.C. Dey's writing across Devdasi stays at chamber scale throughout: harmonium, tabla, a thin string line, and the voice placed well forward.

Braj bhakti is unusual among devotional literatures in insisting that its central figures be charming rather than awe-inspiring, and 'natkhat' is the load-bearing word in that project: it makes Radha a girl who teases, hides things, gets caught, rather than a goddess who is petitioned. 'Raseeli' does the aesthetic half of the work — ras is the technical term for the relish an audience takes in a work of art, so calling Radha raseeli is saying she is herself the aesthetic experience, not merely its subject. Narottam Vyas is writing from inside that Braj tradition, and the diminutive affection of the title is closer to Surdas's vatsalya register than to anything the Hindi film lyric of 1945 was doing.

In a film built almost entirely of prayer, this and 'Jai Radhe Shriradhe' carry the Radha material, and 'Tota Bola More Kanha' the Braj domesticity — together they give the score a Vrindavan colour that its Vishnu litanies and surrender bhajans do not. Devdasi was produced in Bombay by New Maharashtra Productions with Prithviraj Kapoor and Monica Desai; Kapoor's work in it won the BFJA Best Actor award for 1945. The film's plot is not documented in accessible sources.

The mischievous-Radha song has been a permanent fixture of Hindi film devotional music from the 1930s onward, and this is a 1945 instance of it by a composer whose authority in the devotional idiom was as high as anyone's. What survives, however, is the title and the credit pair — the performance is undocumented and the film is not in public circulation.