एक दिन का सुल्तान

Ek Din Ka Sultan — “King for a Day” — is Sohrab Modi's Minerva Movietone historical of 1945, written by Agha Jani Kashmiri, the screenwriter who had just given Bombay Talkies its record-breaking Kismet (1943). Surviving accounts describe it only as a “minor historical” built on “a small incident from the time of Emperor Humayun's reign”, and the title points unmistakably at which incident: after Sher Shah Suri routed Humayun at Chausa in 1539 and the emperor was nearly carried off by the flooded Ganga, a bhishti (water-carrier) named Nizam inflated his goatskin mashak and floated him to safety, and was rewarded with the imperial throne for a single day — during which, the accounts say, he cut his water-skin into discs and issued them as stamped leather coin. Modi produced and directed the film and appeared in it himself, casting Mehtab — who had made her acting debut for him the previous year in Parakh (1944) — alongside Wasti, Sadiq Ali, Pratima Devi and Ghulam Mohammed, with Y. D. Sarpotdar behind the camera. At 147 minutes in black-and-white it was a deliberately smaller canvas than the Minerva spectacles that preceded it, Sikandar (1941) and Prithvi Vallabh (1943), but the film historian Amrit Gangar records that it was received as “well-directed”, with “some beautiful production values”.

The nine documented songs split cleanly three ways. Dattaram V. Gadkar took “Meri Banri Ki God Hari”, “Ho Ho Khwaja Ajmeri” and “Saza Naseeb Ne De Di Nazar Milane Ki”; Rafiq Ghaznavi took “Kisi Ke Kooche Mein Gardan Kataane Jaate Hain”, “Garibon Ki Duniya Jahan Se Nirali” and the chorus piece “Hum Bahisht Ke Maalik”; Shanti Kumar Desai took “Unse Jo Sahab Salamat Ho Gayi”, “Duniya Hai Ek Kahani” and “Falak Ke Chand Ka Hamne Jawab Dekh Liya”. Wali Saheb wrote all nine. The spread of registers matches the subject: a banna–banri wedding-blessing folk song, a Chishti devotional addressed to Khwaja Moinuddin of Ajmer — the shrine where the historical Nizam bhishti is said to lie in an unmarked grave — Urdu ghazal-manner solos for G. M. Durrani, and a chorus number whose title turns on bahisht, “paradise”, the same word from which bahishti / bhishti, the water-carrier, takes his name. Amirbai Karnataki is documented on three numbers, Zohrabai Ambalewali on two and G. M. Durrani on two; one song is credited to a chorus and one has no singer recorded in any source consulted.

Minerva Movietone was Modi's own studio, founded in 1936, and by 1945 it was the Bombay house most identified with Urdu-language historical drama. Rafiq Ghaznavi — born in Rawalpindi in 1907, trained by the Patiala gharana ustads Ashiq Ali and Asif Ali, and the man G. M. Durrani called “my guru” — had already scored Modi's Sikandar (1941), so his presence here was a continuing association rather than a new hire; Durrani sings one of Ghaznavi's three numbers in this film. Shanti Kumar Desai, born in Amreli in 1908, had come to films from a broadcasting job at His Master's Voice and was a harmonium player by trade; by 1945 he had roughly forty scores behind him. The fourth name attached to the music, Walter Kaufmann, was the Czech-born composer who wrote the All India Radio signature tune and ran music at AIR Bombay from 1937 to 1946; his own filmography lists this title, which suggests a background-score or orchestration role rather than song composition, though none of the sources consulted spells out the division of labour.

Ek Din Ka Sultan belongs to the strand of Sohrab Modi's work that Pukar (1939) opened — the Mughal-court anecdote in which an ordinary subject's claim is weighed against imperial power — rather than to his battlefield epics. Its music credits are unusual even for the period: nine songs divided into three equal blocks of three among Dattaram V. Gadkar, Rafiq Ghaznavi and Shanti Kumar Desai, all set to the words of a single lyricist, Wali Saheb, with Walter Kaufmann — then director of music at All India Radio, Bombay, and the composer of the AIR signature tune — additionally listed among the film's composers. Ghaznavi was returning to Minerva after scoring Sikandar (1941), and the voices Modi engaged (Amirbai Karnataki, Zohrabai Ambalewali and G. M. Durrani) were at that moment three of the busiest in Bombay. The film is also a document of the Modi–Mehtab partnership at its start: she had debuted for him in Parakh (1944) and married him in April 1946.

Ek Din Ka Sultan is among the least-seen of Sohrab Modi's historicals. No restored print circulates, and the film's record now rests largely on Hindi Film Geet Kosh–derived song listings, an Osian's-archived song-and-synopsis booklet, and a paragraph in Amrit Gangar's study of Modi. Modi went on from here to Manjhdhar (1947), to Jhansi Ki Rani (1953), India's first Technicolor feature, and to Mirza Ghalib (1954), which won the President's Gold Medal; he received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 1980. The anecdote behind the title has outlasted the film itself: “ek din ka sultan” survives as a living Hindi-Urdu idiom for authority that is genuine but borrowed and brief.