तू सुन ले मतवाले

The second of Talat Mahmood's two sides in Raj Laxmi, and the less known of them. A transfer of about three minutes and twenty seconds circulates, including on Talat Mahmood's official artist channel and on two collector uploads. Both of his songs in this film come from the year in which he appeared on screen as well as on the soundtrack — MySwar records Raj Laxmi as his first film as actor as well as singer.

The transfer runs three minutes and twenty seconds — the same length as 'Jaago Musafir Jaago', which is simply what a ten-inch side gave a composer to work with. The voice is the documented fact worth stating: Talat Mahmood was twenty-one, trained in the ghazal tradition of Lucknow and already recording non-film discs since 1941, and the tremulous quality that later made him instantly identifiable was formed before he ever reached a film studio. How Dhiren Mitra and Robin Chatterjee set him is not something that can be described honestly from the surviving transfer, and no contemporary account of the scoring has been traced.

'Tu sun le matwale' — listen, you intoxicated one. The address is direct and slightly admonitory: someone lost in his own absorption is being told to pay attention. 'Matwala' can carry either affection or reproach depending on where the line goes next, and where it goes next is not documented. It is worth noting that Suresh Chaudhari uses the same word elsewhere in this film, in Kanan Devi's 'O Kali Matwali O Matwale Phool', where it is applied to a bud and a flower rather than to a person. Whether that repetition was designed as a link between the two songs is not recorded and is not asserted here. No lyric text for this side has been traced.

Raj Laxmi was made in Calcutta by M.P. Productions, written and directed by the Bengali writer Premendra Mitra, with Kanan Devi and Jahar as its principal actors and Talat Mahmood appearing both on screen and on the soundtrack. No plot summary of the film survives in any reference listing traced, so nothing is said here about the scene this song belonged to. Talat Mahmood had come to Calcutta after his 1944 non-film disc 'Tasveer Teri Dil Mera Behla Na Sakegi' made his name across India; Calcutta was the film hub of the 1940s and it was there, not in Bombay, that his screen career began.

The side is on Talat Mahmood's official artist channel and on collector uploads, and it also turns up inside at least one compilation of his early songs. Its interest is chronological: Talat did not become a major playback voice until 'Ae Dil Mujhe Aisi Jagah Le Chal' from Arzoo (1950), composed by Anil Biswas, so anything from 1945 is a recording of the voice before the career, and this is one of only two such Hindi film sides the year produced for him.