प्रभु जी खोलो बंद किवाड़ा

'Prabhu Ji Kholo Band Kivada' is one of the ten songs Pandit Amarnath composed for Ragini (1945), the Maheshwari Pictures production made in Lahore and directed by Shankar Mehta. hindigeetmala lists it as 'Prabhu Ji Kholo Band Kivada' and pakmag.net as 'Prabhu ji, kholo band kivara'. No singer and no lyricist are recorded for it by the Hindi Film Geet Kosh, by hindigeetmala or by pakmag.net, and no recording has been located, so this entry carries only what the catalogues actually document.

No disc of this song has been recovered, so its arrangement cannot be described. What is known is the hand behind it: Pandit Amarnath, born in Jalandhar in 1912, a Punjab-school composer who worked in a folk-inflected idiom of direct melody over dholak and harmonium, and who was scoring several films at once in 1945. No claim is made here about how this particular number was set.

The door is the oldest image in the bhakti repertoire and it works in both directions at once: the devotee stands outside asking to be let in, and the same closed kivaad is the barrier inside the devotee that only the lord can unbolt. Addressing him as 'Prabhu ji' — with the honorific suffix that Hindi uses for a respected elder rather than for a distant deity — keeps the register domestic rather than liturgical, which is the characteristic move of the nirgun sant tradition that Kabir and Mirabai's songs carried into the film bhajan. That a Lahore Urdu-language production of 1945 included a bhajan in this register is unremarkable for its moment: the composite song list was standard commercial practice across the industry, not a statement. No lyricist is credited for this song and no text survives.

Ragini was made at Maheshwari Pictures in Lahore in 1945, directed by Shankar Mehta from a screenplay by M. R. Kapur, photographed by Harcharn Singh Kwatra, and led by Smriti Biswas and Najm-ul-Hassan with Pran in support. No print and no plot summary of the film survive, so the dramatic placement of this song cannot be stated. It is one of the five numbers in the score for which no accessible catalogue — the HFGK, hindigeetmala or pakmag.net — records either a singer or a poet.

There is no documented afterlife for this song: no reissue, no recovered disc, no cover version, no contemporary notice. It survives as an entry in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh song list for Ragini and in the two online catalogues that carry the same list, hindigeetmala and pakmag.net. That is the whole of the record, and this catalogue does not add to it.