मेरे मन मंदिर की देवी

A duet in S. N. Tripathi's Ramayani score, pairing Hamida Banu with the actor-singer Pahari Sanyal. Sanyal belonged to the New Theatres generation that sang its own songs on screen, and his presence on the Ramayani discs is one of the last traces of that practice before playback fully displaced it. The recording is not accessible, so the arrangement is not described.

The conceit — the heart as a temple, the beloved as the deity installed in it — is one of the oldest transfers in Hindi film lyric, borrowing the grammar of worship to describe romantic love. It lets a song be simultaneously devotional and erotic without committing to either, which is precisely why it was so useful to writers working under the censorship and decorum of the period. Bekal uses the figure directly and without irony. Only the title phrase appears here; the lyric is in copyright and withheld.

Ramayani (1945) was directed by Sarvottam Badami for Purnima Productions, with S. N. Tripathi composing to Bekal's lyrics and the songs issued on Columbia Records. The cast was headed by Pahari Sanyal, Nargis, Chandra Mohan and Rose Musleah, with Moni Chatterjee, Kanhaiyalal, Prabha and Amirbai Karnataki. The Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema records the film, and Heidi Pauwels places it among the Ramayana adaptations that followed Vijay Bhatt's Ram Rajya (1943). No plot summary survives in any accessible source, so the scene this song belongs to is unknown and is not invented here.

With 'Aise Na Hame Chhedo', this is one of the two Ramayani tracks whose singer credits survive at all, and the only documented appearance of Hamida Banu on this score.