वीर अभिमान से बढ़ता हुआ

'Veer Abhimaan Se Badhta Hua' — 'the hero advancing in pride' — is the heroic march among the nine songs documented for Taramati (1945). HindiGeetMala and MySwar list the title identically. 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 has been traced, no lyric has been found, and nothing is documented about the number's place in the film.

A march is defined by its gait before anything else: an even, emphatic pulse that suggests forward motion whether or not anyone is moving on screen. Scores of the 1940s generally built such numbers on a strong percussive floor with the melody stated in short, declarative phrases, so that the tune could be shouted as easily as sung. That is a description of the form the title implies. It is not a description of this record, which has never surfaced: no singer is credited, the disc is untraced, and no account of the performance exists.

'Abhimaan' is a double-edged word and it is doing the interesting work in this title. In its plain sense it is proper pride, the self-regard a warrior is entitled to; in its moral sense, and especially in the vocabulary of the epics and puranas, it is the flaw that precedes a fall — the vanity that the gods exist to puncture. A line describing a hero advancing 'with abhimaan' can therefore be read straight, as praise, or read as a warning laid quietly into the praise. In a story whose entire subject is a king whose greatness consists precisely in surrendering everything he could be proud of, the ambiguity is unlikely to be accidental. But which reading the verses take, and which character the 'veer' is, cannot be established: no lyric text of this song has been found and no summary of the film survives.

Taramati was directed by Raja Nene — a nephew of the Prabhat partner Vishnupant Damle who had assisted V. Shantaram on Chandrasena (1935) and Amar Jyoti (1936) and was a key figure in the making of Sant Tukaram (1936) — and produced by Ramnik Productions in Bombay. He and his composer Keshavrao Bhole had left Prabhat together along with Datta Dharmadhikari and Athavale, walking out while the studio's Ramshastri was still unfinished. No print of Taramati survives, so the staging of this march, like everything else in the picture, is beyond recovery.

This is the ninth and last of Taramati's documented songs, and it closes a track list that reads like a complete map of the legend: two invocations, a vow, a lament, a grinding song, a dance, a lullaby, a lesson and a march. Not one of the nine has a singer's name attached, not one has a surviving recording, and the film they came from cannot be seen. What is left is the shape of the soundtrack, which is itself the best surviving evidence of what the film was trying to do.