एक चकोरी देव पे अपने

'Ek Chakori Dev Pe Apne' is one of the six Manna Dey numbers in Vikramaditya (1945), with words by Ramesh Gupta and music by Shankarrao Vyas. Its title reaches for the chakori — the female chakor, the partridge of Indian poetic convention that is said to gaze at the moon and feed on its light — and applies that figure to a devotee and their god. Both Hindi Geetmala and Wikipedia carry the title; nothing else about the song is documented and no recording is available.

A chakor lyric almost always calls for the same musical treatment: slow, sustained, sung high enough in the voice to sound like reaching, with space between phrases for the gaze the words describe. Vyas, whose training under Vishnu Digambar Paluskar gave him a working command of raag structure, wrote most of his film melodies on recognisable classical outlines, and a song of longing built on a night image would conventionally have sat in one of the plaintive evening or late-night raags. That is inference from the idiom, not from a heard recording — the arrangement, the raag and the taal are all undocumented for this number.

The chakor is one of the most durable figures in Indian poetry. Sanskrit, Braj and Urdu writers all use it the same way: the bird is said to live on moonbeams and to keep its eyes on the moon through the whole night, so it stands for love that is total, unreciprocated and content to be so. Because the moon is unreachable, the chakor never becomes a figure of possession — only of attention. Turning it toward a deity, as this title does, converts a love image into a devotional one without changing a single term, which is precisely how bhakti poetry has always worked. Ramesh Gupta wrote nine of this film's ten lyrics, and in choosing the chakori he was drawing on a store of images his audience had known since childhood. The lyric text itself is withheld here in full.

Vikramaditya was Vijay Bhatt's commissioned historical for the Vikram Bimillennium Committee, built around the king of Avanti, the poet Kalidas and a war against the Scythian Shakas, with Prithviraj Kapoor in the title role. In a film that installs Kalidas — the classical poet of the Sanskrit canon — as its court poet, a lyric reaching for a Sanskrit-derived image like the chakori is doing thematic work as well as emotional work. Manna Dey, three years into a Bombay career that had begun with Tamanna (1942), sings it.

The song has left no trace beyond the registers. The image, though, kept working: the chakor and the moon recur throughout later Hindi film poetry, and audiences never needed it explained. If this number is worth anything today, it is as one small datum in the long record of how classical Indian imagery passed, unbroken and unremarked, into the commercial film song.