विजय लक्ष्मी

A 1943 Hindi social drama directed by G.S. Casshyap and headlined by Motilal and Shobhana Samarth. Made during the closing years of the Second World War, the film carried a current of swadeshi sentiment that surfaced most plainly in its songs. Its production details are thinly documented today, but it survives in the gramophone record as one of the small handful of films for which the celebrated playback singer G.M. Durrani also took up the baton as music director.

The score was composed by G.M. Durrani, with lyrics credited to J.S. Kashyap, Kailash Matwala and Neelkanth Tiwari. The recorded voices include Durrani himself alongside Zohrabai and Rajkumari. The surviving tracks lean toward the patriotic and devotional registers typical of wartime cinema — among them the swadeshi number 'Lo Swadeshi Maal' and the Krishna-leela song 'Chale Charan More Kunjan Ki Ore'.

Vijay Lakshmi is one of the rare films of the 1940s for which G.M. Durrani — far better remembered as a leading male playback voice of the decade — served as music director rather than only as a singer. That distinction, more than any narrative reputation, is what keeps the film on the historical record.