दाता बंद पड़ी हैं द्वार तेरे

Every Hindi film of the 1940s carried a devotional number, and this is Champa's. Zeenat Begum sings it alone, and the surviving 78-rpm transfer runs three minutes and twenty-one seconds — the longest of the four Champa sides that have been digitised, which suggests the composers were given the full width of the disc for it. The title addresses the daata, the giver, and describes his doors as shut: a supplicant's complaint rather than a hymn of praise, which is the harder and more interesting of the two devotional modes available to a film composer.

The extra running time is the one concrete thing the surviving disc tells us about the setting: at three minutes twenty-one it is longer than the album's love songs, and a devotional number given that much room in 1945 usually means an unhurried tempo with space for the voice to hold notes at the ends of lines. Zeenat Begum was a trained classical singer, discovered by Pandit Amar Nath in the late 1930s, and that is the reason a Lahore studio would hand her this kind of piece rather than a lighter singer. Nothing further about the instrumentation can be established from the transfer that circulates.

The title states a grievance in devotional grammar: the giver's doors are closed. In the Hindi and Punjabi bhakti registers a film lyricist of 1945 could draw on, the door of the divine house is the standard figure for access — the beggar stands at it, and the whole spiritual transaction turns on whether it opens. To declare it shut is to make the prayer an accusation, and the form permits that; the tradition is full of poems that argue with God rather than flatter him. Whether the verses stay with the complaint or resolve it is not recoverable — no lyric text for this song survives online, and none is reconstructed here.

Champa was made at Shorey Pictures in Lahore for the producer Roop K. Shorey and directed by Barkat Ram Mehra; it opened at the Crown cinema in Lahore in October 1945 with Manorama, Asha Posley, Hari Shivdasani, Majnu, Salma and Zahoor Shah in the cast. No plot summary of the film survives, and no print is known to circulate — the discs, issued on Columbia and now in the Saregama catalogue, are effectively the whole of what is left of it. The presence of a devotional number in the running order is one of the few structural things the surviving song list tells us about the film: alongside a folk washing song, a ghazal, a flirtation duet and a drinking number, it sketches the standard mixed programme a 'social' of 1945 was expected to deliver.

The song is documented in the standard catalogues — HindiGeetMala, MySwar and the Wikipedia film list all carry the title — and one 78-rpm transfer preserves the audio, but it has no separate afterlife: no cover version, no compilation appearance, no reference in the writing on 1940s film bhajans. It is preserved rather than remembered, which is the ordinary fate of the devotional side of a Lahore programme picture.