परित्राणाय साधूनां

myswar catalogues this song as 'Avtaar Liya Jug Jug (Paritraanaay Sadhunan)', which shows how it is built: a Hindi line about the Lord taking birth age after age, framing the Sanskrit shloka from the Bhagavad Gita that gives the song its better-known title. Manna Dey sings it; the Hindi Film Geet Kosh and myswar both credit the music to Khemchand Prakash; Pandit Indra is credited with the words. It is one of two Manna Dey numbers in the film and the most explicit statement of its devotional argument.

A film setting of a Gita shloka in 1945 had a fixed set of expectations to meet: the Sanskrit had to be intelligible, which means slow tempo, deliberate syllable placement and minimal ornamentation over the recited portion, with the Hindi framing line free to carry melody. Manna Dey, trained under his uncle K.C. Dey and later in Hindustani classical music, was among the few Bombay voices of the mid-1940s who could hold Sanskrit diction and still sing in a film register. The actual arrangement is undocumented and no recording is available.

'Paritranaya sadhunam' opens the second half of Bhagavad Gita 4.8 — the verse in which Krishna states that he takes form in every age for the protection of the good, the destruction of wrongdoing and the establishment of dharma. It is the single most quoted assurance in popular Hindu devotion and the standard scriptural warrant for the whole doctrine of avatar, which is exactly why the Hindi framing line myswar preserves speaks of taking birth age after age. Pandit Indra's contribution is that frame rather than the shloka itself, which is scripture and not authored; the film uses the verse as its thesis, and the song is where the title Prabhu Ka Ghar is given its theological reading.

Prabhu Ka Ghar was a Ranjit Movietone social-religious drama of 1945, directed by Wajahat Mirza. With no print and no plot summary surviving, the song list is the main evidence of what the film was arguing, and this number is the clearest single piece of it: a picture that puts Gita 4.8 into its score is making a claim about divine presence in an ordinary household, which is what its title says. Manna Dey's second song in the film, 'Tum Nath Ho Phir Main Anath Kyon', poses the counter-question.

No recording of this song has been traced and no commentary on it exists. Its interest is chronological: in 1945 Manna Dey was three years into film work and still largely an assistant and occasional voice, well before Mashaal (1950) and the classical-song commissions of the 1950s that defined him. That a Ranjit picture handed him a Sanskrit devotional lead is a small early indication of the specialism he would later be known for.