आजा रे ओ गीता के भगवान (रेणुका देवी और कोरस)

The second of Ghulami's two recordings of Bharat Vyas's invocation to the God of the Gita, credited on the Saregama and JioSaavn listings as 'Renuka Devi and Chorus' and running three minutes twenty-six seconds — half a minute longer than the Vyas duet. The extra length is the chorus: where the duet is two people praying, this version enlarges the same words into a group act, the standard 1940s solution for staging a devotional song as a scene rather than a moment.

S. K. Pal's second setting keeps Renuka Devi as the lead voice and uses the chorus as an answering body rather than a backing texture, which is how film bhajans of the period were normally built: the lead states, the group repeats, and the repetition does the work of making the audience feel included. The additional thirty seconds over the duet version is almost entirely the room this call-and-response needs. It is the only track on the album credited with a chorus.

The text is Bharat Vyas's, unchanged from the duet: an imperative addressed to the God of the Gita rather than to a named deity, which keeps the prayer textual and non-sectarian. What changes between the two versions is not the poetry but who is understood to be speaking it — one voice or many — and in Hindi devotional convention that shift moves the song from personal bhakti to collective satsang without a word being rewritten. No lines are reproduced here.

Ghulami (1945) was directed by Mohan Wadhwani for Shalimar Pictures, W. Z. Ahmed's studio at Poona. Renuka Devi — Begum Khurshid Mirza — sings on eight of the album's nine tracks, and this is the one where she carries a group. She had announced her retirement from films in February 1945, so this soundtrack sits at the very end of her career as a leading lady; after Partition she moved to Pakistan and returned to performance only in the 1960s, as a character actress on Pakistan Television. The film's plot is not documented in any source consulted, so the scene this version accompanied is unknown.

This is the most obscure track on an already obscure album — an alternate version of a song from a film with no surviving print. It has no independent circulation and is known only from the Saregama catalogue and its digital reissue. Its documentary use is narrow but real: paired with the duet, it preserves an intact example of the two-version devotional convention, and it is one of the very last recordings of Renuka Devi's singing voice made in India before she left.