प्रभु का घर

Prabhu Ka Ghar — 'the Lord's house' — was a social-religious drama produced by Ranjit Movietone in 1945 and directed by Wajahat Mirza, the Ranjit staff writer who directed only a handful of pictures himself before becoming far better known as the writer of Mother India (1957) and the dialogue writer of Mughal-e-Azam (1960). It starred Khursheed, then the studio's principal singing heroine, opposite Trilok Kapoor, with Sulochana Chatterjee, Bipin Gupta, Prakash, Sheikh Hasan, Nagendra and Munne Agha filling out the cast. No print of the film and no contemporary plot summary is traceable in the accessible record today, so this entry sets down what does survive — the credits and the complete eleven-song soundtrack — rather than reconstructing a story from guesswork. The songs themselves point clearly at the film's material: four of them address Krishna directly, from the flute-player asked to keep playing to Radha on her swing in the groves of Madhuban, and one is a Sanskrit setting of the Bhagavad Gita's most quoted assurance — that the divine takes birth in age after age to protect the good and restore dharma. Around that devotional spine sit domestic numbers in plain village idiom: a husband waking his wife in the middle of the night while she counts off the grinding, the water-carrying and the sweeping still to be done; a young woman asking a friend for advice she has already half decided against; a bride's voice likened to a sarangi. What emerges is the characteristic Ranjit mid-1940s shape — a household drama with a devotional argument running under it, and a title that reads as that argument rather than as an address.

Twelve titles circulate online, but the defensible count is eleven. hindigeetmala lists both 'Pardesi Dhola Kaahe Jagaai Aadhi Raat' and 'Kahe Ko Jagayi Saari Raat Re' with identical singers, composers and lyricist; these are almost certainly two title-forms of the same Mukesh–Mohantara Talpade duet, and the Hindi Film Geet Kosh, myswar's catalogue and Atul's Song A Day all give the film eleven songs. Pandit Indra — also credited on some labels as Pt. Indra Chandra — wrote every one of them. Khursheed carries five numbers, all in the Krishna-bhakti and viraha registers that Khemchand Prakash wrote best for her. Shama sings one solo and two duets with the Kirana gharana vocalist Feroze Dastoor, a rare film outing for a singer whose real life was the classical concert platform. Manna Dey, still years away from being a first-call playback voice, takes two devotional numbers including the Sanskrit Gita setting. Mukesh appears once, in the midnight duet with Mohantara Talpade. The Hindi Film Geet Kosh gives an individual composer for every one of the eleven: five to Bulo C. Rani — 'Piya mera kevade ka phool', 'Meri sajni sarangi si bole' (both also named as his in Down Melody Lane's account of his career), 'Albeli saheli bata de', 'Tum nath ho phir main anath kyon' and 'Pardesi dhola' — and six to Khemchand Prakash: 'Bansi wale Shyam bansuriya baja ja', 'Madhuban mein Radha jhoole hindole', 'Nadi kinare sanjh sakaare', 'Madmate balam madmate', 'Paritranaye sadhunan' and 'Bhagwan Bhagwan deejo jeevan daan'. myswar likewise gives one composer per song and agrees on ten of the eleven, differing only on 'Pardesi dhola', which it assigns to Khemchand Prakash. myswar also preserves fuller record titles that the other catalogues shorten: 'Madmaate Baalam Madmaate (O Rasiya)' and 'Avtaar Liya Jug Jug (Paritraanaay Sadhunan)'.

Wajahat Mirza — Wajahat Mirza Changezi — directed only about five films in his whole career, of which this is one; his lasting reputation was built on the page rather than the floor. Ranjit Movietone was at this point the most prolific studio in Bombay, releasing some fifty pictures across the 1940s, and it was already moving toward the financial collapse that in 1950 forced it to mortgage its property to an insurance company. Shared music credits of the kind seen here were normal in that studio system: a house composer carried the picture, his assistant took a set of numbers under his own name, and the title card listed both. Khemchand Prakash had joined Ranjit in 1940 and composed for around twenty of its films; Bulo C. Rani would go on to work on roughly twenty Ranjit productions between 1944 and 1954, so the two men's Ranjit careers overlap almost exactly at this film.

The film's best-documented importance is a music credit. Khemchand Prakash and Bulo C. Rani are billed together on Prabhu Ka Ghar, and the picture sits exactly on the seam between them at Ranjit Movietone. Bulo C. Rani had joined the studio in 1939 and worked as Khemchand Prakash's assistant on Tansen, Chandni, Sukh Dukh (1942) and Shahenshah Babar (1944) before getting his independent break with Ranjit's Pagli Duniya (1944); here he composes several numbers under his own name alongside his former chief, in what appears to have been Khemchand Prakash's last year at the studio before he moved on to Filmistan and to Ziddi (1948) and Mahal (1949). For Khursheed the film is one of her last Indian assignments — she left for Pakistan in 1948 — and the closing stretch of the Khemchand Prakash–Khursheed partnership that had peaked with Tansen (1943). The soundtrack also catches Mukesh unusually early: the duet 'Pardesi dhola kaahe jagaai aadhi raat re' is counted as only the fourteenth recording of his singing career and the last of his 1945 output, made in the same year as the Pehli Nazar songs that changed his fortunes.

Very little of Prabhu Ka Ghar survives in public memory except its songs, and of those one has outlasted the rest: Khursheed's 'Madhuban mein Radha jhoole hindole', a Krishna-and-swing song that still turns up on vintage-music radio and in the Saregama catalogue, and which the critic behind Songs of Yore singled out as exactly the kind of Khursheed performance he most values — noting that he came upon it on the radio rather than online. 'Pardesi dhola kaahe jagaai aadhi raat re' has a second life among Mukesh collectors as one of the handful of recordings made before he became a star, and is regularly listed among his vintage duets. Bulo C. Rani's two Shama–Feroze Dastoor numbers are the songs named in accounts of his early independent work. For the rest, the film is a name in a catalogue — an ordinary Ranjit release of 1945 whose value now is documentary: it fixes the moment when the studio's music passed from Khemchand Prakash to his own assistant.