मुरली वाले तुम जवाब दो

'Murali Wale Tum Jawab Do' is one of the six songs of Lakharani (1945), the Prabhat Film Company production in which Guru Dutt made his acting debut. Qamar Jalalabadi wrote it and Master Krishnarao Phulambrikar set it. Hindi Film Geet Kosh, the standard reference for the period, gives the song and its record number but no singer, and no copy of the recording has been traced online; the credits recorded here are therefore limited to those that are documented.

The recording has not been traced, so its melody, scoring and voice cannot be described without inventing them. The one thing that can be said with confidence is the hand behind it. Krishnaji Ganesh Phulambrikar (1898–1974) was a Hindustani vocalist trained from 1911 under Bhaskarbuwa Bakhale and earlier around Sawai Gandharva, a composer for the Marathi musical stage, later a Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellow, and the film songs he wrote stayed loyal to that training.

The title line puts a demand where devotional songs usually put a plea: not a request for grace but a summons to answer. Addressing Krishna as the flute-player and then asking him to account for himself is a recognised strain in bhakti poetry — the devotee's right to complain — and in a film whose whole subject is a community of worshippers kept outside the temple door, the choice of that register rather than a submissive one is legible. Because the recording has not been found, nothing beyond the title is described here.

Prabhat built Lakharani around the temple-entry question, one of the live social reform arguments of the 1940s, and set it among tribal and forest people. Durga Khote plays Bichwa, queen of the devout but excluded community; her daughter Lakharani marries into a neighbouring community of unbelievers and is cast out by her own; the two groups fall into open conflict until God appears on earth and untouchability is abolished. Vishram Bedekar wrote and directed. The film failed, partly because the audience could not identify with the setting and partly, in the judgement of historians of the period, because the music no longer matched the taste of 1945.

No print of Lakharani survives and most of its records vanished from circulation; of the six songs, only a few have resurfaced in the last decade, through a private collector and later through Saregama's own uploads. This one is still missing. Its listing in Hindi Film Geet Kosh and on the standard song databases is the only trace of it, and recovering the disc would add a fifth or sixth data point to a very small body of surviving evidence about Master Krishnarao's film work.