कर्मफल की सोच मत कर

The title is a plain-Hindi restatement of the most quoted line in the Bhagavad Gita: act, and do not act for the fruit of the action. Given that the film's stated method is to interrupt its Mahabharata with lessons drawn from the Gita as answers to national problems, this is likely to be the song in which that method is most explicit. It appears in Hindi Geet Mala's and MySwar's listings for the film but is absent from the twelve-song list on Wikipedia, and no singer is credited anywhere. No recording is known to circulate.

Pandit Ganpat Rao - Ganapatrao Gurav, a Kirana gharana vocalist from Ratnagiri district who was among the first batch of Ustad Abdul Karim Khan's disciples and served for years as a court musician at Jamkhandi - scored only two films in his life, Kurukshetra and Bebus (1950), before returning to the concert platform. Nothing can be said about how this particular song was set, since no copy is accessible and it is not among the two Kurukshetra masters that remain in the modern catalogue.

Putting the Gita's teaching into the imperative - do not think about the fruit - rather than into the scriptural third person is the move that makes it a song rather than a citation. It is also the move that lets a 1945 audience hear it as advice about their own lives instead of as something Krishna once said to Arjuna, which is precisely what a film arguing against national idleness would want. Jameel Mazhari, an Urdu poet whose published work is in the marsiya and qasida traditions, writes it in unadorned Hindi. The rest of the text is not available.

Kurukshetra (1945) was made by Unity Productions of Calcutta and directed by Rameshwar Sharma, whose entire filmography runs to three titles for the same banner. It welds the Mahabharata to a modern social story: documented plot descriptions have it open on a contemporary strand about social workers campaigning against idleness before moving into the epic proper - the Draupadi swayamvar, the humiliation in the sabha, and the march to the war at Kurukshetra - cutting between the two registers and drawing lessons from the Bhagavad Gita as answers to national problems. K.L. Saigal played Karna. The film's habit of stopping the epic to teach from the Gita is exactly what its contemporary reviewer disliked: Filmindia in July 1946 blamed the director and the story and dialogue writer Kamalkant Varma for the film's failure, while praising Saigal and the music director.

None traceable. The song is recorded here because Hindi Geet Mala and MySwar both carry it, and because a soundtrack list that quietly drops its undocumented entries stops being a record of the film and becomes a record of what happened to survive.