हम तुम दोनों प्रीत के बंदी

A romantic song from the eight-song score of Meri Khwahish (1941), credited to composers Vasant and Shanti Kumar with verse by Baalam Pardesi and A. K. Sindhu. The title's image of two lovers as willing 'captives of love' (preet ke bandi) is a stock romantic conceit of early Hindi cinema, here in plain, song-friendly Hindi. The film's per-song singer credits are not documented in available references; the song-type 'Duet' is inferred from the lyric's plural-lover framing and is unconfirmed.

The phrase 'preet ke bandi' (captives of love) is a classic Hindustani metaphor for the voluntary surrender of the self to love. The word 'bandi' (prisoner, captive) appears in bhakti poetry — Mirabai calls herself 'Hari ke bandi' (captive of Hari) — but in romantic film verse the prison is love itself rather than a deity. By prefacing this with 'hum tum dono' (both of us), the lyric turns the image into an egalitarian pact: neither lover holds power over the other; both are equally bound. This is subtly distinct from the typical hierarchy of classical Urdu ghazal, where the lover suffers while the beloved remains indifferent. The lyricists Baalam Pardesi and A. K. Sindhu, writing in plain, song-friendly Hindi, give the image democratic warmth. The duet structure the title implies — 'we two' together — further reinforces the mutuality: this is love as shared captivity, not domination.

Meri Khwahish (1941) is documented in song catalogues as an eight-song production with music by composers Vasant and Shanti Kumar, and verse by Baalam Pardesi and A. K. Sindhu. The dual credit on both the lyric and music sides points to the collaborative, task-divided arrangements common in smaller Bombay studios of the era, where a two-person composing team might split songs by register or scene-type while two lyricists divided the verse-writing load. 'Hum Tum Dono Preet Ke Bandi' reads as a central romantic number — its framing of two lovers as willing 'captives of love' is the kind of emotional declaration that would anchor the film's romantic narrative and serve as a reprise point in the story. The Urdu-derived 'khwahish' (desire, longing) in the film's title signals a story of thwarted or passionate aspiration, a standard dramatic register for the early 1940s social-romantic film produced outside the larger studio system.