जय हो आदि भवानी तेरी

'Jai Ho Aadi Bhavani Teri' is the invocatory number of Ramchandra Pal's eight-song score for Nal Damyanti (1945), written by the lyricist credited as Lakshman. Its title is a straightforward jaikara to Adi Bhavani — the primal form of the goddess — and places the song in the oldest convention of the Indian mythological film, which almost invariably opened its musical argument with a devotional address before turning to the human story. No playback credit for the song survives in the Geet Kosh-derived catalogues.

In the mythological grammar of 1945 the invocation was the one place a composer could write for massed voices, and Ramchandra Pal had the training for it: a Bombay Talkies man who had put a Western string section behind Indian melody in Bandhan (1940) and Punarmilan (1940). What that idiom produced here is not recoverable — the recording is not in circulation and no notation survives — but the one contemporary judgement on it is on record, and it is hostile: Filmindia's July 1945 reviewer found every song in the film 'taxing and unworthy of the situations'.

The title is a jaikara — the call-and-answer shout of victory that Indian devotional practice uses to name a deity and affirm her power in the same breath. 'Adi Bhavani' is the goddess in her first, undivided form: Bhavani of the Deccan, the giver of being. Placing that address at the head of the Nala-Damayanti story is not decorative. The tale that follows is one in which a king's fortune is destroyed by forces he cannot see and restored by an endurance he does not know he possesses; opening it by naming the power that governs fortune states the film's moral frame before a word of plot has been spoken.

Nal Damyanti was produced by Chhotubhai Desai's Janak Pictures and directed by Kumarsen Samarth, who according to Filmindia's January 1945 column took the assignment over only after the picture was half-finished. Prithviraj Kapoor played Nala, Shobhana Samarth played Damayanti, Trilok Kapoor played Pushkar and David Abraham played Narad. The film opened at the New West End, Bombay, on 9 June 1945.

The song did not enter the popular repertoire and is not known to survive in circulation. It is recorded here because the eight-title Geet Kosh listing for Nal Damyanti is the only complete account of a score that a hostile contemporary review otherwise erased from the record.