ये दिल है तुम्हें पुकारे

One of the seven solos Kanan Devi sings on the Ban Phool soundtrack, and the one the Hindi Geet Mala catalogue lists first among her numbers for the film. The title — 'this heart is calling you' — is about as plain a statement of the longing situation as a 1945 film song could make: not a plea for a reply but a report that the calling is happening anyway. Dhiren Mitra set the tune; Pandit Madhur is credited with the words. Kanan Devi was, at this point, the most bankable singing voice in Bengali cinema, and Ban Phool was one of the handful of Hindi films through which she reached the wider subcontinental audience.

No recording of this song was located in public circulation, and no notation, review or musicological description of it appears in the sources consulted, so its melody is simply not recoverable here. What is documented is the instrument Dhiren Mitra was writing for. Kanan Devi's style, formed inside the New Theatres house manner, is usually described as fast-tempo and used almost instrumentally — a voice deployed as a line of melody as much as a carrier of text. A composer building seven of nine songs around her, as Mitra did, was writing for agility and forward motion rather than for weight.

Pukarna — to call out, to hail across a distance — is the verb that separates this kind of song from a love song of nearness. Distance is built into the grammar before any image arrives. The second move is the displacement: it is 'this heart' that calls, not the speaker, and in Hindi-Urdu song that transfer of agency to the organ is the conventional way of disowning responsibility for one's own desire. For a woman singing on screen in 1945 the device is not decorative. It permits an expression of want that the propriety binding her character would otherwise forbid, and it is one reason so many film heroines of the period address their own hearts rather than their lovers.

Ban Phool places Kanan Devi as Champa, a flower-named girl in a village organised around Devi Mukherjee's zamindar Narendra, with Krishnakant as Kishore. No source consulted records where in that story this song falls, and no plot summary of the film has survived — IMDb's entry carries none, and the Encyclopaedia-derived record at indiancine.ma lists only credits. The film was produced by P.N. Roy for P. R. Productions and directed by Niren Lahiri, who would direct Kanan Devi again the following year in Arabian Nights (1946).

Ban Phool is not a title that entered the canon, and this song did not become a standard. Its interest is that it is Kanan Devi in Hindi, at the point where she was choosing her Hindi projects carefully rather than relocating for them — Jawab (1942), Hospital (1943), Ban Phool (1945), Rajlakshmi — and where the record, not the film, was the durable object. Almost everything now recoverable about Ban Phool comes from its song listing; this is the number at the head of it.