विक्रमादित्य

Vikramaditya is Prakash Pictures' 1945 historical drama about the legendary king of Avanti, directed by Vijay Bhatt and made at the request of the Vikram Bimillennium Committee, which was marking two thousand years of the Vikram Samvat calendar. In the story, the Shakas — the Scythian invaders — have overrun Kashmir, and its princess Shreelekha is a fugitive, unable to find a court willing to shelter her from Shakraj. She meets the poet Kalidas, who tells her to seek refuge with Vikramaditya at Avanti; Kalidas's verses win over Madhvi, daughter of Acharya Varamihir, and through her the two are granted an audience. The king takes Kalidas into his court as royal poet, and gives the princess both the shelter and the war she asks for — a decision his minister Vaital opposes bitterly. Rebuffed, Vaital turns the people against the princess and attempts to poison her, and when the king too falls ill the city concludes that both have been poisoned. The film closes with Vikramaditya taking the field against the Shakas, killing Shakraj, freeing Shreelekha's father from captivity and restoring him to his kingdom. Prithviraj Kapoor, by then one of the most popular actors in the industry, played the title role in a picture that ran 166 minutes.

Shankarrao Vyas — a disciple of Vishnu Digambar Paluskar who ran his own music schools in Ahmedabad and Bombay and scored some thirty-two Hindi films between 1937 and 1954 — built the score around Shiva. 'Om Jai Jai Shankar' was recorded twice, once for a mixed group of Amirbai Karnataki, G. M. Durrani and Manna Dey and once as a Manna Dey solo, and Durrani was given the film's single devotional solo, 'Shambho Mahadev Shankar'. Around that Shaivite core sit two sky songs — 'Dekh Gagan Mein', the only duet on the record, sung by Rajkumari with Manna Dey, and the Manna Dey solo 'Neel Gagan Hai' — a philosophical number, 'Ajab Hai Kudrat Ki Maya', two acclamations sung by Amirbai Karnataki ('Jai Jai Se Goonj Utha Bharat' and the title cry 'Jai Ho Vikramaditya Ki Jai Ho'), the chakor-bird song 'Ek Chakori Dev Pe Apne', and the two Roopdas lyrics, 'Tez Phoonk Do Aaj' and 'Neel Gagan Hai'. Ramesh Gupta wrote everything else. Hindi Geetmala lists ten titles; HFGK (Hamraaz) and the Wikipedia song table list nine, omitting 'Jai Ho Vikramaditya Ki Jai Ho' and giving 'Dekh Gagan Mein' as 'Hai Gagan Mein'. HFGK's ninth entry quotes a mukhda that runs through both acclamations, so the two catalogues appear to be splitting and merging the same title song differently; both titles are kept here because Hindi Geetmala documents each separately. No commercially circulating recording of any of the ten has been traced.

The project reached Bhatt through the Vikram Bimillennium Committee rather than through a studio pitch, and he approached it as history: contemporary accounts of the film emphasise that he worked from the factual record instead of inventing around the Vikramaditya legends. The producer credit reads '"Vijay-Shankar" Bhatt', the joint banner name Vijay Bhatt used with his elder brother Shankarbhai Bhatt, who had moved to Bombay with him and become a producer at Prakash Pictures. The casting drew partly on studio regulars — Prem Adib, who had been Prakash's Rama in Ram Rajya two years earlier, and Baburao Pendharkar, from the Kolhapur film and Marathi stage tradition — while Prithviraj Kapoor came from outside, at a moment when he was also running his own newly founded touring company, Prithvi Theatres. At 166 minutes the film was long even by the standards of a period that did not mind length.

Vikramaditya belongs to a small and specific 1940s category — the commissioned historical, made not because a studio saw a market but because a public body asked for one. The Vikram Bimillennium Committee wanted the two-thousandth year of the Vikram Samvat marked on screen, and Vijay Bhatt, by then the industry's most bankable maker of devotional and historical subjects, took the assignment and, by his own account, built the film on documented history rather than on legend — an unusual stance in a Bombay industry where the freedom of myth was normally the whole attraction. Within Prakash Pictures' output it stands as the studio's immediate follow-up to Ram Rajya (1943): the third highest-grossing Indian release of its year, the only film Mahatma Gandhi is said to have watched, and the first Indian picture to premiere in the United States — made again by Bhatt, again scored by Shankarrao Vyas, and again featuring Prem Adib. For Hindi film music the film matters for a quieter reason: the surviving song register credits Manna Dey with six of its ten numbers, an unusually large share for a singer barely three years past his 1942 playback debut.

Vikramaditya has not survived in circulation the way its predecessor did. Ram Rajya is preserved and viewable; Vikramaditya exists today mainly as a credit list, a plot summary and a song register, with no print in general access and no widely available recordings of its ten songs. Vijay Bhatt returned to the historical-musical form seven years later with Baiju Bawra (1952), the Naushad-scored classical blockbuster that remains his best-known film; Shankarrao Vyas, who died in 1956, is now remembered chiefly for Ram Rajya and Narsi Bhagat rather than for this score. What the Vikramaditya song list does preserve is a snapshot of Manna Dey's apprenticeship — six numbers in a single 1945 historical, more than a decade before the songs that made his name — and a reminder of how routinely the pre-Partition industry mixed its singers: two of the three voices on its Shiva chorus, Amirbai Karnataki and G. M. Durrani, were Muslim.