वंदन करे री सखी

'Vandan Kare Ri Sakhi' calls on a female companion to offer salutation, and in doing so steps directly into the sakhi convention of Braj devotional poetry, where worship of Krishna is voiced not to the god but sideways, between women. For a film about Krishna the choice is apt rather than decorative. Yashodanandan Joshi wrote it and Jagannath Prakash composed it; no singer credit survives and no recording is accessible.

The composer credit is the only music fact on record. No disc, broadcast log or compilation entry has been traced, so the setting is undescribed here. Within the ten-song list this is the clearest candidate for the film's devotional set piece, but that is an inference from the title and not a documented placement.

Two words carry the whole register: 'vandan', the formal act of obeisance, and the Braj vocative 'ri sakhi', which is intimate and unliterary. Putting them in one line is exactly the manoeuvre of the bhakti lyric — it makes reverence conversational, and turns the audience into the friend being addressed. Joshi is writing in a tradition that reaches back to Surdas, and the film's Krishna subject gives him the licence to use it straight.

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.