बंसी वाले श्याम बंसुरिया बजा जा

'Bansi Wale Shyam Bansuriya Baja Ja' is one of the six songs in Prabhu Ka Ghar (1945) that the Hindi Film Geet Kosh credits to Khemchand Prakash; Bulo C. Rani takes the other five. Khursheed sings it; Pandit Indra wrote the words. The title is a direct address to Krishna as the flute-bearer, asking him to keep playing as he passes, and it belongs to the Krishna-bhakti spine that runs through this soundtrack.

Khemchand Prakash's individual credit here matters: this is one of the numbers he kept for himself on a picture he was otherwise sharing with his former assistant. His Krishna songs of this period tend to be built on a simple, repeatable melodic phrase in a folk-devotional shape, pitched to let a singer like Khursheed carry the line without heavy orchestral competition. A flute figure would be idiomatically expected in a bansi song of this kind, but the actual scoring is not documented and no recording is available to check it against.

The bansi — Krishna's flute — is the single most worked image in Braj devotional poetry, and the grammar of the title follows the tradition exactly. 'Baja ja' is not 'play' but 'play as you go': the devotee is not asking the god to stay, only to leave the sound behind him. That formulation, the plea addressed to a passing divinity, is what separates the Braj viraha idiom from ordinary petition — the loss is assumed, and only the trace is bargained for. Pandit Indra writes it in the Braj-inflected Hindi that this repertoire demands rather than in the Urdu-leaning filmi register of the period.

Prabhu Ka Ghar — 'the Lord's house' — was a Ranjit Movietone social-religious drama of 1945 directed by Wajahat Mirza. Four of its eleven songs address Krishna directly, and a fifth sets a verse of the Bhagavad Gita, which is the clearest surviving evidence of what the film's argument was about, since no print and no plot summary have been traced. This song is one of that Krishna group, and its individual Khemchand Prakash credit suggests it was among the numbers the studio considered central.

The song is listed in Saregama's catalogue for the album and in the standard song indexes, but has not been reissued or discussed, and no audio of it circulates. Of Prabhu Ka Ghar's four Krishna songs only its companion piece, 'Madhuban Mein Radha Jhoole Hindole', found a second life on vintage-music radio. This one remains a catalogue entry — evidence of the devotional repertoire Khemchand Prakash was writing for Khursheed at the very end of their years together at Ranjit.