श्याम सलोने आओ आओ

The tenth and last song in the Geet Kosh's listing for the film, marked as a female number. It is a straight invocation: Krishna is addressed as Shyam, the dark and beautiful one, and as Murari, and simply asked to come. A bhajan in the last slot of a 1940s soundtrack was ordinary practice — a devotional number gave a film a reflective close and, in commercial terms, the song most likely to be sung outside the cinema. Zahir Kashmiri and Dr Inayat Husain Qureshi are credited here as on all ten tracks; no singer is recorded by any source.

The film bhajan of this period had a settled shape: a slow to moderate cycle, a short mukhda repeating the deity's name so it could function as a refrain, and antaras that stay close to the tonic. The doubled call in this song's first line — the invitation repeated rather than elaborated — is exactly the construction that makes a devotional refrain work. No recording is known to survive, so the arrangement itself is undocumented, and myswar carries the title with no genre assigned.

Calling Krishna 'Shyam' rather than by his formal name is the choice that sets the register: shyam means dark, and salona carries beauty and charm together, so the address is intimate before it is reverent. This is bhakti poetry's oldest move — approaching the divine as a beloved rather than a sovereign — and it comes to Hindi cinema through centuries of Braj devotional verse. That a Progressive-movement Urdu poet from Amritsar wrote it, in the same set of ten songs as two Urdu ghazals and a Punjabi-inflected folk duet, says something about how routinely the film industry of the 1940s expected its lyricists to cross between traditions.

Pardesi Balam was a Parkar Films production of Lahore, directed by M. A. Mirza for the producer Dr Anand Prakash Parkar, with the young Pran among a cast the Geet Kosh could only list because a collector in Karachi supplied the names decades later. All ten of its songs were written by Zahir Kashmiri and composed by Dr Inayat Husain Qureshi. No print, poster or synopsis survives, and myswar records the picture as unreleased, so the Geet Kosh's song index — first lines and a bracketed note on who sang each number on screen — is very nearly the whole of what is known about the film.

Nothing of this recording is known to circulate and no singer was ever recorded for it, so the song survives as a title, a pair of credits and a bracketed '(Female)'. Its interest is as the closing item in one of the more unusual song lists of the decade: ten songs, one lyricist, one composer, a picture that may never have been released, and a set of credits that reached the Geet Kosh only because a private collector in Karachi supplied them long afterwards.