पिंजरे के पंछी उड़ जा रे

'Pinjre Ke Panchhi Ud Ja Re' is one of Preet's better-rated tracks and one of four on which Bulo C. Rani, the film's composer, is himself credited as the singer. D. N. Madhok wrote the words.

A composer singing his own composition was still unremarkable in 1945 — the separation of the two jobs was only then hardening — and it usually meant a song written to the limits of a serviceable rather than a virtuoso voice: a tune that stays in a narrow range and gets its effect from the shape of the phrase rather than from ornament. Bulo C. Rani takes four of Preet's thirteen tracks himself. The arrangement of this recording is not documented.

The caged bird is one of the oldest figures in Indian devotional and Sufi verse, where the cage is the body and the bird the soul, released at death — and it is also, plainly, an image of captivity, which is why it recurs so insistently in Indian songs and poems written under colonial rule. Madhok's line does not choose between the readings, and did not need to: an audience in 1945, two years before independence, could hear the metaphysical sense and the political one in the same breath, and the censor could only object to the first. Whether the film's scene invited either reading is unrecoverable, since no plot summary survives. The full text is not reproduced on this page.

HindiGeetMala and MySwar both credit 'Pinjre Ke Panchhi Ud Ja Re' to Bulo C. Rani, with D. N. Madhok as lyricist and Bulo C. Rani as composer. Preet was made at Krishin Movietone, the Bombay banner Ram Daryani had set up with his brother K. S. Daryani in 1938, and Daryani directed it himself. Bulo C. Rani composed all thirteen songs; D. N. Madhok wrote ten of them and Wali Saheb the other three. MySwar records the discs as a Columbia Records release. Cinemaazi and the Wikipedia list of 1945 Hindi films give the cast as Snehprabha Pradhan, Chandra Mohan, Nazir Ahmad, Pahari Sanyal, Swarnalata, Gope, Miss Gulab and Majid. No plot summary of the picture survives in any source that can be consulted without a paywall, and the film has no Wikipedia article of its own, so nothing is asserted here about what happens in it.

Bulo C. Rani (1920-1993) not only composed Preet but is credited as a singer on four of its thirteen tracks — a composer putting his own voice on the disc, which was still ordinary practice in 1945. He was about twenty-five here and had been composing on his own account only since 1944, after joining Ranjit Movietone in 1939 as an assistant to Khemchand Prakash; his best-known score, Jogan, was five years away. Preet itself survives today only as a catalogue: a thirteen-song list preserved through the Hindi Film Geet Kosh tradition and the databases built on it, with no print known to circulate and no plot summary in open circulation.