हे इंद्र तेरी जय हो

'He Indra Teri Jai Ho' — 'O Indra, victory be to you' — is one of two invocations among the nine songs documented for Taramati (1945), the other being 'He Prabhu Aao Prabhu'. Both HindiGeetMala and MySwar list it under this spelling. The credit line is identical on all nine songs documented for the film: music by Ramchandra Pal and Keshavrao Bhole jointly, lyric by Mukhram Sharma 'Ashant'. No singer is named for any of them. No recording of it has surfaced, and HindiGeetMala carries neither a lyric nor a video link for the title, so the song is known only as a line in a catalogue.

A jai-ho invocation is written to be sung by more than one voice: the form is acclamation, and acclamation in Indian film scoring of this period almost always means a chorus, with the refrain built so that a group can take it up. That structural expectation is as far as any statement about this recording can honestly go. Whether it was in fact a chorus number, what instruments carried it, and at what pace it moved are all unknown — no singer is credited, no disc has been traced, and no description of the performance survives.

Indra is an unusual deity to invoke in a 1940s mythological. He is the Vedic king of the gods and the bringer of rain, but by the age of the Puranas he had become a figure more often humbled than praised — the god whose pride is punctured by the stories he appears in. An invocation addressed to him therefore points at a specific register: either the formal, archaic devotion of a court and its rituals, or a scene in which rain, kingship or divine sanction is the thing being asked for. In the Harishchandra story the king's ordeal is a test set in motion from above and watched from above, which makes an address to the lord of the heavens dramatically apt. That is an observation about the title, not a claim about the scene: nothing about the song's placement or its verses is documented, and no lyric text is reproduced here.

Taramati was made by Ramnik Productions under Raja Nene's direction, with Shobhana Samarth heading a cast that also included Vasant Thengdi, Anant Marathe, Baby Shakuntala, S.B. Nayampalli, Paresh Banerji, Kanhaiyalal, Saroj Borkar and Omkar Devaskar. Wikipedia's list of Marathi films of 1945 records the picture as having been shot simultaneously in Marathi and Hindi. Beyond the credits, nothing of the film's content is recoverable — no print, summary or review was found — so the dramatic occasion for this invocation cannot be established.

Nothing of this song is in circulation: the disc is untraced, the film is unseen, and no singer's name attaches to it. It survives because two song indexes preserved its title, which is the ordinary fate of the great majority of Hindi film songs recorded before independence. Its interest now is documentary rather than musical — one of nine titles that together sketch, with unusual clarity, the song plan of a 1945 mythological: two invocations, a vow song, a lament, a work song, a dance piece, a sleep song, a didactic verse and a heroic march.