एक आस की दुनिया थी

'Ek Aas Ki Duniya Thi' is one of the ten songs Pandit Amarnath composed for Ragini (1945), the Maheshwari Pictures production made in Lahore and directed by Shankar Mehta. It heads the film's song list in pakmag.net's ordering and appears in hindigeetmala's list as well. 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 whole argument of the title is in its tense. 'Thi' — there was — places the world of hope in a past that is already closed before the singer opens their mouth, so the song cannot be a plea; it can only be an accounting. The image itself is a familiar one in Urdu-Hindi film verse of the 1940s: a single expectation treated as if it were a whole inhabited world, which makes its disappearance not a disappointment but a depopulation. Nothing beyond that reading of the recorded title is asserted, because no text of the song survives in any accessible source and no lyricist is credited for it.

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.