गीता धर्म की ये कहानी

'Geeta Dharm Ki Ye Kahani' is one of two songs in Shri Krishnarjun Yudh that carry no lyricist credit at all in the surviving catalogues — the composer, Jagannath Prakash, is named, the writer is not, and no singer is recorded either. Both blanks have been left as blanks here. The title announces the film's frame: whatever quarrel the plot stages between Krishna and Arjun, it is to be understood as a chapter of the same dharma the Bhagavad Gita sets out.

Nothing is documented about the setting beyond the composer's name. A title of this kind in a 1945 mythological would ordinarily be a narrative or expository number rather than a melodic showpiece, but that is a statement about the genre, not about this recording, which no one appears to have heard in several decades.

The line names the Gita not as scripture to be quoted but as a 'kahani', a story — which is exactly how the mythological film handled doctrine, converting argument into narrative so that an audience could receive it as entertainment. Who wrote it is unknown. The film's two credited lyricists, Yashodanandan Joshi and Safdar Aah, account for eight of the ten songs between them; this is one of the two that fell out of the credit record, and no attribution has been invented for it here.

Shri Krishnarjun Yudh was produced and directed by Mohan Sinha for his own banner, Murari Pictures, and dramatises the Puranic quarrel in which Krishna's vow to behead Chitrasen collides with Subhadra's promise to protect him, forcing Arjun to take the field against his closest friend. Prithviraj Kapoor, Shobhana Samarth, Shahu Modak, Trilok Kapoor, Kanhaiyalal Chaturvedi, Menaka Devi and Rattan Bai are in the cast. Jagannath Prakash composed all ten documented songs; Yashodanandan Joshi and Safdar Aah wrote the lyrics that carry a credit.

No recording of this song is known to circulate today — it is absent from the streaming catalogues, from YouTube, and from the archival compilations of 1940s film music. What survives is the catalogue line: a title, a composer, and in most cases a lyricist. That is a common fate for the output of a small independent banner in the mid-1940s, when only songs that sold well as 78-rpm discs were repressed often enough to survive the decades that followed.