आम्रपाली

Amrapali is a 1945 costume drama directed by Nandlal Jaswantlal, drawn from the legend of Amrapali (Ambapali), the celebrated nagarvadhu — 'bride of the city' — of the ancient Licchavi republic of Vaishali. In the traditional account she was the most honoured courtesan and court dancer of her age, a woman whose wealth was said to rival a kingdom's, and whose life turned when she heard the Buddha preach at Vaishali, invited him to dine at her house against the objections of the city's nobles, and afterwards gave away her mango grove and her entire fortune to his order. The film belongs to the wave of mythological and historical 'costume' pictures that Bombay studios produced through the mid-1940s, and is cast with Sabita Devi, Prem Adib, Jeevan, Arun, Jagdish Sethi, Badri Prasad, Gulab and Sankatha Prasad. No print is known to be in circulation and the surviving documentation is thin: the film is known today chiefly through its eleven-song record list, composed by Saraswati Devi to lyrics by Kavi Pradeep.

Eleven songs are documented on record for Amrapali, all composed by Saraswati Devi, with Kavi Pradeep credited as the film's lyricist — HFGK-derived listings add that he wrote them under the pen-name 'Miss Kamal B.A.'. Amirbai Karnataki is named as the singer on six of them — 'Is Duniya Ki Pagdandi Par', 'Mujhe Naino Ke Bandhan', 'Runak Jhunak Chapal Charan Naach', 'Ud Jaoon Re Main To Taaron Ki Duniya Mein', 'Piya Mere Saath Rahenge' and 'Ankhdiyon Ka Neer Ponch Le' — which makes this effectively an Amirbai album. The singers of the remaining five, including the Devi invocation 'Khadagdhari Vijaykarni Mahashakti Mata' and the bhajan 'Bhagat Tere Bhag Jagenge', are not recorded in the catalogues consulted and have been left blank here rather than guessed. 'Ud Jaoon Re Main To Taaron Ki Duniya Mein' is the only track for which on-screen performers are also listed — Sabita Devi, Prem Adib, Jeevan and Badri Prasad — and it carries the most listener votes of the eleven on hindigeetmala, which suggests it was the promoted number.

Saraswati Devi was born Khorshed Minocher-Homji into a Parsi family in 1912 and trained in Hindustani classical music under Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande. Himanshu Rai heard her radio broadcasts with her sister — the two were billed as the Homji Sisters — and brought her to Bombay Talkies in 1935, making her the first woman to head a major studio's music department and, by the usual reckoning, the first woman to work as a music director in Hindi cinema; her score for Achhut Kanya (1936) is the work she is remembered by. By the mid-1940s she had left the studio and was taking outside assignments, of which Amrapali (1945) sits between Dr Kumar (1944) and Maharani Mrinal Devi (1946). Her lyricist here, Kavi Pradeep, had spent part of the preceding two years out of public view after the colonial government issued a warrant over the Kismet song. The director Nandlal Jaswantlal was then far from the peak of his career: he would go on to make Anarkali (1953) and Nagin (1954) for Filmistan, two of the decade's biggest musical successes.

Amrapali is one of the small number of films Saraswati Devi scored after her Bombay Talkies years — she is usually named the first woman to work as a music director in Hindi cinema — though Jaddanbai and Bibbo were composing in the same years — and by 1945 was working freelance, so every surviving credit from this period matters to her record. It also pairs her with Kavi Pradeep at a particular moment in his career: two years after 'Door Hato Ae Duniyawalon' in Kismet (1943) had brought a British arrest warrant on his head. The eleven-song list is unusually wide for a single 1945 picture, running from a dance number and a maan song through philosophical lyrics and a bhajan to a martial Devi stuti — a useful cross-section of what a mid-1940s costume film asked its composer to cover.

The film itself has effectively vanished; what survives is its gramophone record list, and that list is useful mainly as documentation of two careers at a particular moment — Saraswati Devi's freelance mid-1940s period after Bombay Talkies, and Amirbai Karnataki's run as one of the most-recorded female voices of wartime Bombay, in the seasons just before Lata Mangeshkar's arrival redrew the field. None of the eleven songs entered the standard 1940s revival repertoire. The Amrapali legend returned to Hindi cinema twenty-one years later as Lekh Tandon's colour production Amrapali (1966), which has almost entirely displaced this earlier version in public memory — to the point that catalogue searches for 'Amrapali' now return the 1966 film first.