उठ सोए हुए हुस्न तुझे

Catalogued by hindigeetmala as 'Uth Soye Huye Husn Tujhe' and by the Hindi Film Geet Kosh and pakmag.net with the fuller opening — 'Uth soe hue husn tujhe ishk jagaye, dil kahata hai koi mujhe divana banae' — this is one of only two songs of Ragini for which the HFGK records a singer, and the film's one genuinely contested credit. The HFGK names Zeenat Begum, and a copy of the recording on YouTube is captioned for her; hindigeetmala names Zohrabai Ambalewali, and so does Sharad Dutt's Millennium Post profile of the composer, which describes the song as a romantic solo Pandit Amarnath made in Zohra Bai's voice. pakmag.net leaves the singer blank. This entry follows the HFGK as the project's first-priority source and records the disagreement in full. No lyricist is documented by anyone.

Nothing of the arrangement can be described from a surviving disc, because none has been located. What the title fixes is the song's mode of address — an imperative, 'uth', spoken to a sleeping figure — and in the 1940s Lahore idiom Pandit Amarnath worked in, that mode was normally set as a mid-tempo Urdu-metre number with a firm rhythmic pulse rather than as a lullaby, because the whole point of the form is that it is an awakening. Any statement more specific than that would be invention, and none is made here.

The line sets husn against ishq — beauty against love — as two separate parties, which is standard Urdu practice and not a metaphor for one person's feelings. In that grammar beauty is passive and self-absorbed, love is the active agent that arrives from outside and disturbs it, and to say that beauty is 'asleep' is to say that it has not yet understood what it is for. The imperative 'uth' therefore carries an argument inside it: love is not asking to be admitted, it is announcing that the sleeper's exemption is over. No lyricist is credited for the song in any accessible listing, so nothing further about its authorship is claimed.

Ragini was a Maheshwari Pictures production shot in Lahore under Shankar Mehta's direction, and its score is carried by Zeenat Begum, whom the composer had discovered and whom Atul's Song A Day calls his main singer across many of his films. That is the context in which the two attributions have to be weighed. A Zohrabai Ambalewali credit sits oddly in that company — she was a Bombay singer at the height of her run, having just come off Rattan (1944) — but it is not a careless entry either: hindigeetmala carries it, and Sharad Dutt, writing on the composer, repeats it. Against that, the HFGK, compiled from the record labels themselves, gives Zeenat Begum. Both readings are preserved here and neither is smoothed over. No plot of the film survives, so the song's dramatic placement is unknown.

The song has no measurable afterlife — no reissue, no cover version — but unlike most of the Ragini score it has not vanished: a copy of the recording circulates on YouTube, which makes it one of only two numbers from the film that can still be heard. Its other claim on attention is documentary. It is the single point at which the Ragini song list touches the mainstream Bombay playback world of 1945, and that contact is exactly what is in dispute: if hindigeetmala and the Millennium Post are right it happened, and if the HFGK is right it did not.