अब घर आओ बालम मेरी कसम

'Ab Ghar Aao Balam Meri Kasam' is a song from the 1941 Murli Movietone film Pyaas, composed by Khemchand Prakash to lyrics by D. N. Madhok. The title — 'come home now, my love, I implore you' — frames the classic viraha (longing-in-separation) sentiment. The on-screen singer is not documented in the available song listings.

The title 'Ab Ghar Aao Balam Meri Kasam' — 'Come home now, my love, I swear it' — condenses the viraha plea into its most urgent and domestic form. The word balam (beloved, husband, paramour — from Sanskrit balabhadra, simplified in vernacular use) is an intimate, possessive address that already encodes the speaker's claim on the absent one. The phrase 'ghar āo' (come home) is not a lover's call for a rendezvous but a wife's call for a return to the shared domestic space — the poem's register is the ghar (home), not the garden, the riverbank, or the moonlit terrace of the conventional romantic song. This domestic grounding is significant: it places the lyric in the birahā tradition as practised in folk songs associated with wives awaiting absent husbands, a form widespread in the rural and small-town culture from which Hindi cinema's audiences largely came. 'Meri kasam' (I swear by myself, by my love) intensifies the plea with an oath — the speaker stakes something on the return, suggesting that the absence has reached a threshold where only a sworn appeal remains. D. N. Madhok's lyrical style, documented across his extensive career (1900–1982), was characterised by accessibility, directness, and the ability to capture the emotional immediacy of ordinary Hindi speech without sacrificing musicality.

Pyaas (1941) was a Murli Movietone production, with music by Khemchand Prakash and lyrics by D. N. Madhok. The title — pyāas means 'thirst', an evocative metaphor for desire and longing — frames the film's emotional world as one of unfulfilled yearning. Murli Movietone was one of the smaller Bombay studios of the period, distinct from Ranjit Movietone where Khemchand Prakash was most prominently associated; the composer's work for Murli Movietone represents a parallel strand of his output during the same period. D. N. Madhok was the film's lyricist — one of the most prolific and commercially successful lyricists in early Hindi cinema, with credits stretching from the 1930s through the 1960s. His ability to write in direct, emotionally immediate Hindi-Urdu made him the natural choice for a viraha song like 'Ab Ghar Aao Balam Meri Kasam'. A YouTube recording associated with the film (IDs: rZgY1N28xCg, riXyOpE5ufs) suggests that audio from Pyaas (1941) partially survives, which is unusual for a Murli Movietone production of this period. The playback singer for this number is not documented in available sources.