निकल आओ मैदान में

The film's chorus number, sung by Durga Khote, Meenakshi Shirodkar and Khan Mastana with chorus support to lyrics by Dewan Sharar. Atul's Song A Day, which posted it in 2025, files it under war songs and describes it as a battle cry summoning Rajput warriors to take up their spears and show their courage. It is one of the few tracks in the score where the star of the film is heard singing rather than being sung for.

Built as a group call-and-response at marching tempo — the standard 1940s construction for a crowd or army number, where the chorus supplies mass and the lead voices supply the summons. Gyan Dutt keeps the melodic writing broad and repetitive by design, since the point of the form is that everyone on screen and in the hall can join it. Durga Khote was an actress, not a playback singer, and the ensemble setting is exactly what makes her participation workable.

Dewan Sharar writes an exhortation, not a narrative: come out to the field, take up your weapons, show what you are. The rhetorical shape is the oldest in martial poetry — a challenge issued to men by, in this instance, a woman's voice among them. Read against the film's own subject, that is not incidental. Pannadai is a story in which the decisive courage in the house is a nursemaid's, and putting Durga Khote's voice inside the war cry rather than outside it makes the same argument in sound.

Pannadai (1945) was produced by Kamalabai Mangalorekar for Pradeep Pictures, Bombay, and directed by Ram Daryani, with Durga Khote in the title role and Chandra Mohan, Meenakshi Shirodkar, Master Vithal, Mubarak, M. Ismail, Gope and Nana Saheb Phatak in support. The film retells the sixteenth-century Mewar episode in which Panna Dhai, nursemaid to the child heir Udai Singh II, put her own son Chandan in the prince's bed so the usurper Banbir would kill him instead, then carried the heir to safety at Kumbhalgarh. Gyan Dutt wrote ten songs for it, with lyrics split between D.N. Madhok and Dewan Sharar.

The song is the clearest evidence of what Pannadai was trying to be — a patriotic-historical made in the last years of colonial rule, using a Rajput resistance story at a moment when Bombay's historical films were overwhelmingly Mughal-court subjects. Writing on the song has noted that regional cinema of the period took up Indian heroes more readily than Hindi cinema did; Pannadai is one of the Hindi exceptions, and this number is where the intention is loudest.