जय हो, विक्रमादित्य की जय हो

'Jai Ho Vikramaditya Ki Jai Ho' is the film's title acclamation, sung by Amirbai Karnataki to words by Ramesh Gupta and music by Shankarrao Vyas. Hindi Geetmala lists it and attaches the film's four principal players — Prithviraj Kapoor, Baburao Pendharkar, Prem Adib and Ratnamala — to the entry, which suggests a full-cast court sequence rather than a single character's song. Wikipedia's nine-song table omits it entirely; this entry follows Hindi Geetmala, which is the more complete register.

A named acclamation is the most formulaic thing a court film can put on a record, and that is a design choice rather than a failure: the king's name has to be intelligible on first hearing, so the melody stays inside a few notes, the rhythm is emphatic and squarely metred, and the refrain repeats the name enough times to fix it. This is also the number that would most naturally play under a durbar or a victory procession. Nothing about the actual arrangement — instruments, tempo marking, taal — is documented, and no recording is available.

A jaikara — the shouted acclamation of a name — is not really poetry and is not trying to be. Its purpose is collective: it takes a single name and turns it into something a crowd can say together, which is why the form survives everywhere from temple processions to political rallies. Putting the film's own title inside its refrain is a commercial calculation as much as a dramatic one; a listener who bought the record would be repeating the film's name every time the song came round. Ramesh Gupta wrote nine of this soundtrack's ten lyrics and would have understood exactly what this one was for. The text has not survived and no lines are reproduced here.

Vikramaditya of Avanti is the legendary king after whom the Vikram Samvat calendar is named, and the film was made because the Vikram Bimillennium Committee wanted the calendar's two-thousandth year marked on screen. Prithviraj Kapoor played him — an actor already famous enough that his casting was itself a statement — in a story that runs from a Kashmiri princess's flight to a war against the Scythian Shakas. Hindi Geetmala's listing of four leading players against this song is the only picturisation clue that survives for any number in the film.

This is the song that most clearly demonstrates why the Vikramaditya soundtrack has to be assembled from more than one source: it appears in Hindi Geetmala's ten-title list and not in Wikipedia's nine, which is exactly the kind of gap that makes 1940s song registers unreliable in isolation. Beyond that documentary point, nothing of it survives — no recording, no sheet, no contemporary notice.