बिन काज आज महाराज लाज गई मेरी

This is the film's most-voted song on Hindi Geet Mala (14 votes, more than any other track from the film) and the strongest of Radharani's three numbers. It is a plea addressed to Dwarikanath - Krishna as the lord of Dwarka - by a woman whose honour has been stripped from her without cause, and it belongs to the episode the film's own plot summaries name explicitly: the humiliation in the sabha after the dice game. Sung in plain devotional Hindi rather than the Urdu of the Saigal songs, it is the moment where Kurukshetra stops arguing about social reform and simply performs the epic.

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. For this song he works in the plainest register available to him. A prayer of this kind in a 1945 mythological carries no ornament, because ornament would undercut it; the melodic writing exists to make the words carry, and the singer's job is to sound like a person and not like a performance. Radharani, trained in kirtan before she was trained in thumri, was precisely the voice for it.

The first phrase does all the work: bin kaaj - without cause, for no reason. The complaint is not that suffering exists but that it is unearned, and it is put to a god who is present, watchable and so far silent. That is the theological knot of the sabha episode in the Mahabharata, and Mazhari states it in seven words. Addressing Krishna by his Dwarka title rather than by a familiar name keeps the distance in the poem: the speaker is calling to a sovereign, not to a friend, and the song's tension comes from not knowing whether the sovereign will answer.

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. Radharani, the singer of three of the film's songs, was born in 1903 at Jiaganj in Murshidabad, into a Marwari family long settled in Bengal. She was trained first by the kirtan singer Harimakhan Das and then in thumri and ghazal by Ustad Dabeer Khan, was brought to Calcutta by the zamindar of Jiaganj after he heard her perform, and moved from silent films through New Theatres - Yahudi Ki Ladki (1933), Kashinath (1943) - to playback work in the 1940s. She worked in Hindi films only until 1947 and died in Calcutta on 22 August 1997, aged 94. A Bombay-based singer-actress of the same name is a separate person. The Movie Database lists her as playing Draupadi in this film, which would put this song in her own mouth as a character rather than as a playback voice; the Wikipedia cast list credits the role to another performer, and the point is not settled.

Of the nine non-Saigal songs in Kurukshetra this is the only one with any independent life: it is the film's most-voted entry on Hindi Geet Mala, its text is carried on Hindi lyrics sites, and it is the one number a listener searching for the film today is likely to find. That it is a Draupadi song is the reason - the scene has never stopped being retold, and every retelling pulls its music along with it.