निंदिया आजा आजा री

"Nindiyan Aaja Aaja Ri" appears in Sant Sakhu (1941), the Hindi-Marathi saint biography produced by the Prabhat Film Company of Poona and directed by the Damle–Fattelal partnership. The music is by Keshavrao Bhole. The film's score is rooted in the devotional bhajan and abhang idiom of the Maharashtrian Bhakti tradition, in keeping with Prabhat's celebrated lineage of saint films. Full lyrics are not reproduced here; this is a metadata and discovery page only.

'Nindiyan Aaja Aaja Ri' is an invocation song — a direct address to sleep ('nindiyan', feminine; 'ri', feminine vocative) summoning rest. This form, closely related to the 'lori' or lullaby, is one of the oldest vocal genres in the Bhakti tradition: the saint-poet pleads for the peace of sleep, or calls on the divine to come and rest in the heart as sleep visits the body. In the context of Sakhubai's story — a devout woman persecuted by her in-laws but sustained by her devotion to Vitthal — the song takes on an additional spiritual dimension: sleep is also surrender, the cessation of willed effort that devotional poetry regards as the ideal posture before the divine. Keshavrao Bhole's setting for Prabhat's Sant Sakhu (1941) would have drawn on the abhanga metre and Varkari devotional melody-types he had mastered since joining Prabhat in 1933 — a tradition rooted in the compositions of Tukaram and Namdev.

Sant Sakhu (1941) was produced by the Prabhat Film Company of Poona and directed by the team of V. Damle, S. Fattelal, and Raja Nene — the same trio who had made Sant Tukaram (1936), which won acclaim at Venice. The film starred Hansa Wadkar in the title role of Sakhubai, a Maharashtrian saint-poet of the Bhakti movement. Music was composed by Keshavrao Bhole, Prabhat's chief music director since 1933, who had pioneered the integration of Western orchestral instruments with the bhajan and abhanga idiom. The film was produced in both Hindi and Marathi versions. 'Nindiyan Aaja Aaja Ri' fits the film's devotional register: a lullaby or sleep-invocation song would be consistent with the film's scenes of domestic piety, depicting Sakhubai singing to her household or to the divine.

Sant Sakhu (1941) holds a permanent place in Prabhat Film Company's celebrated canon of saint films, which includes Sant Tukaram (1936) and Sant Dnyaneshwar (1940). The film's lead, Hansa Wadkar, considered her performance as Sakhubai the defining role of her career. Keshavrao Bhole's scores for Prabhat's devotional films are studied as foundational examples of how Marathi Bhakti music was adapted for the early sound cinema, blending the abhanga's meditative pulse with orchestral arrangement. While no specific revival or cover of 'Nindiyan Aaja Aaja Ri' has been documented, the Sant Sakhu soundtrack as a whole is preserved in Prabhat-era collections and cited in histories of Marathi-Hindi cinema as evidence of the studio's commitment to serious devotional art.