परदेसी ढोला काहे जगाई आधी रात

The Mukesh duet on the Prabhu Ka Ghar soundtrack, and the film's second-best-documented song. Mohantara Talpade and Mukesh sing a married couple in a joint household: the husband has woken his wife in the middle of the night, and she answers by listing the grinding, the water-carrying and the sweeping that will be waiting for her at dawn. Atul's Song A Day, which posted the song in 2012, records that it is the fourteenth recording of Mukesh's singing career and the last of his 1945 output, completing a tally of five solos and nine duets to that point.

The Hindi Film Geet Kosh credits this number to Bulo C. Rani, as does Atul's Song A Day; myswar assigns it to Khemchand Prakash instead, and the Geet Kosh is followed here. What the song does musically is more certain: it is a call-and-answer duet, the structure the situation requires, with the husband's coaxing lines and the wife's practical refusals alternating. Mukesh sings here well before the voice hardened into the plaintive upper register that made him famous — this is the young singer still working in the general playback manner of the mid-1940s.

'Dhola' is the Rajasthani and western-Hindi word for husband or beloved, and 'pardesi dhola' — the husband who has been away — carries its own history in folk song, where it usually opens a lament. Pandit Indra turns the convention around: the man is back, and the complaint is not about his absence but about his timing. What makes the lyric unusual for its period is that the woman answers in the vocabulary of labour rather than of romance, so the scene is a negotiation between desire and the next morning's chores rather than a straightforward love duet. The catalogue title variant 'Kahe Ko Jagayi Saari Raat Re' preserves the same complaint in another form.

Prabhu Ka Ghar was a Ranjit Movietone social-religious drama directed by Wajahat Mirza. Against the film's four Krishna songs and its Gita setting, this duet is the clearest surviving window onto its domestic side — Atul's Song A Day describes it as depicting the moments of romance a married couple can steal in a joint family, most likely at night. Since no print survives, this is one of the few concrete indications of what the picture actually showed on screen.

This song's afterlife belongs to Mukesh collectors rather than to the film. Because it is fixed in his discography as recording number fourteen — made in the same year as the Pehli Nazar songs that changed his career — it is regularly listed among the handful of pre-stardom recordings, and it is the reason Prabhu Ka Ghar appears at all in writing about him. It is also the only song of the film whose full lyric text and detailed commentary are available online, which is why the title survives in two forms.