सैंयां तोरे राज में

The Marathi singer Lalita Parulkar takes a single side in Kul Kalank, and it is the one song in the film whose title sits most clearly in a folk register rather than a filmi one. 'Saiyan' and the 'tore' possessive are braj-bhasha usages carried into Hindi film song from the thumri and the village women's repertoire, and the phrase 'in your kingdom' is the standard opening of the wife's half-teasing, half-serious account of life under her husband's rule. No recording of the side has been traced; the credit survives in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh-derived catalogues.

No copy of the recording is known, so any account of the music has to stay at the level of context. A folk-register title in a 1945 Bombay score would ordinarily have been set to a dholak or keherwa pulse with a short instrumental refrain between stanzas, and in this particular score that pulse was being written by a classical tabla player of the Punjab gharana working under a film pseudonym — a composer whose surviving film work is consistently more interesting rhythmically than melodically. Whether the setting was folk-plain or dressed up for the screen cannot be determined from the surviving documentation.

Roopbani's line puts the household in the vocabulary of the state: the husband has a raj, a rule, and the wife reports on conditions inside it. It is one of the most durable framings in north Indian women's song, because it lets a complaint be made as a joke and a joke be heard as a complaint, and because it names the domestic arrangement as a form of power without ever raising its voice. In a film whose title accuses a family of harbouring a disgrace, that framing is not decoration — it is the film's subject, dropped into a song where it can pass as charm.

Kul Kalank was made by Sunrise Pictures and directed by Nanubhai B. Vakil, one of the busiest journeyman directors of the period, whose career ran from the silent films of 1929 to the early 1970s. The cast — Shanta Hublikar, Masood, Amirbai Karnataki, Shahzadi, Dulari, Majid, Pratima Devi and Wazir Mohammed Khan — is documented; the plot is not. Lalita Parulkar, who sings this side, was one of several Marathi-trained voices working across Bombay's Hindi studios in the 1940s.

The side did not survive into the Saregama digital catalogue and is not discussed anywhere in the later writing on 1945. Its remaining value is as a credit: it fixes Lalita Parulkar's presence in a Hindi film score of 1945, and it records one more assignment in the film career that Allah Rakha would later leave behind for the concert stage.