श्याम बजाए तोरे घर में मुरलिया

'Shyam Bajaye Tore Ghar Mein Muraliya' is one of the six songs written by Qamar Jalalabadi and composed by Master Krishnarao Phulambrikar for Lakharani (1945), made by the Prabhat Film Company of Poona. Hindi Film Geet Kosh lists the song with its disc number but no singer, and no copy of the recording has been located, so this entry stops where the documentation stops. Its subject places it with the film's Krishna songs, in a story whose resolution is the god's own appearance on earth.

The recording has not been traced, and nothing about its melody or arrangement can be stated without invention. The composer's idiom, however, is well documented: Master Krishnarao worked from Hindustani classical vocal music and the Marathi musical stage, and contemporaries and later historians agree that he never moved towards the lighter folk-and-rhythm style that took over Hindi film music in the mid-1940s — a fidelity that cost him popularity even as it kept his songs musically serious.

The title turns on a small but pointed reversal: Krishna's flute is not sounding somewhere far away in Vrindavan, it is sounding inside the listener's own house. In a film in which a community of devotees is forbidden the temple and finds the deity coming to them instead, that relocation of the sacred from the sanctuary into the ordinary home is exactly the argument the story makes. The rest of the text has not survived in any accessible form, and is not paraphrased here.

Lakharani was Prabhat's 1945 costume-social on temple entry, written and directed by Vishram Bedekar. Durga Khote played Bichwa, queen of a devout community treated as untouchable; the plot moves through her daughter's excommunication and a war between believers and unbelievers to the appearance of God on earth and the abolition of the bar on temple entry. The picture was made as the studio declined — Shantaram had gone, the co-founder Vishnupant Damle died in early 1945 — and it flopped. Its lasting claim on attention is that Guru Dutt acted in it for the first time, as the heroine's brother, while also assisting the director.

Like most of the Lakharani score, this song passed straight from a failed release into silence: no print, no circulating disc, and for decades no way to hear any of it. Recovery has been piecemeal — one track from a collector in 2017, another published on Guru Dutt's birth centenary in 2025, a few more surfacing as Saregama uploads old catalogue. This title has not yet come back, and remains a line in the Geet Kosh awaiting a disc.