तारामती

Taramati takes its name not from the king but from his wife — the queen of the Harishchandra legend, who is sold into servitude along with her small son when her husband, rather than break a word given to the sage Vishwamitra, gives away his kingdom, his wealth, his freedom and finally his family. Raja Nene's 1945 production is entered in the Hindi film registers simply as a mythological, and no print, plot summary or contemporary review of it appears in any accessible source today, so what this particular film did with the legend cannot be recovered. The nine song titles preserved in the HFGK-derived indexes do, however, trace the story's familiar stations with unusual clarity: a vow that will not bend ('Harishchandra Ka Vrat Kabhi Na Tare'), an invocation of Indra and another of the Lord, a woman at a hand-mill, a mother asking whom she may now call her son, a dance piece, a sleep song and a hero advancing in pride. Shobhana Samarth heads the cast — by 1945 the most recognisable mythological heroine in Indian cinema, having played Sita in Bharat Milap (1942) and Ram Rajya (1943) — and the English Wikipedia article on the lyricist Mukhram Sharma states directly that she played the title role, so that credit is documented even though the surviving cast billing itself attaches no character names to any player. Around her the cast brings back three players from Nene's Prabhat years: Vasant Thengdi, Paresh Banerji and Baby Shakuntala.

Nine songs are documented for Taramati in the HFGK-derived song indexes, and the credit line is identical on every one of them: music by Ramchandra Pal and Keshavrao Bhole jointly, lyrics by Mukhram Sharma 'Ashant'. MySwar additionally records the album's label as Columbia Records; it is the only source consulted that names a label at all — HindiGeetMala, indiancine.ma and Pak Magazine name none — so the Columbia attribution rests on MySwar alone. Not one singer is named anywhere — not on HindiGeetMala, not in the MySwar/BollySwar compendium, not in the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema entry — and no audio from the film appears to circulate: HindiGeetMala carries neither a lyric nor a video link for any of the nine titles, and no transfer of the Columbia discs has surfaced in the open archives. The soundtrack can therefore be described only by its architecture, and that architecture is legible: two invocations ('He Indra Teri Jai Ho', 'He Prabhu Aao Prabhu'), a vow song, a mother's lament for a lost son, a woman's grinding-mill song, a dance piece, a sleep song, a didactic verse addressed to flowers, and a heroic march. That is precisely the song plan of a 1940s mythological — prayer, work song, lullaby and lament laid along the spine of the story — and it is the strongest single piece of evidence that the film followed the legend closely. The joint composer credit is itself unusual: the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema names only Bhole, every song index names both men, and no source consulted divides the nine titles between them.

The three principal names on the credits had already worked together at Prabhat. Mukhram Sharma — a Sanskrit and Hindi teacher from Poothi in Uttar Pradesh who wrote poetry and short stories for local magazines — came to Bombay in 1939, found no work, moved to Pune and joined Prabhat as a Marathi tutor on forty rupees a month; his first film assignment was the lyrics and dialogue of the bilingual Das Baje / Daha Wajta (1942), which was Raja Nene's directorial debut and which Keshavrao Bhole scored. Taramati reunites the three of them away from the studio, and it carries over Das Baje's players as well: Vasant Thengdi, Paresh Banerji and Baby Shakuntala all appear in both films. Nene himself (1912-75, born Gajanan Hari Nene) was a nephew of the Prabhat partner Vishnupant Damle, had assisted V. Shantaram on Chandrasena (1935) and Amar Jyoti (1936), was a key figure in the making of Sant Tukaram (1936), and had acted the boorish Pandit in Shantaram's Kunku / Duniya Na Mane. Bhole (1896-1977), from Amravati, was Prabhat's modernist: he had introduced piano, Hawaiian guitar and violin into the vanguard Marathi play Andhalyanchi Shala in 1933, had the actors of Amritmanthan rehearse to a live score so their performance rhythm followed the music, and chose his scales to counterpoint the actors' speaking voices. Wikipedia's register of 1945 Marathi films records Taramati as shot simultaneously in Marathi and Hindi — the same bilingual method Nene had used on Das Baje three years earlier.

Taramati matters less for what was on its screen — which nobody can now see — than for who made it and why. A group of senior Prabhat Film Company men walked out of the Pune studio together: the director Raja Nene, the composer Keshavrao Bhole, Datta Dharmadhikari and Athavale, leaving Prabhat's prestige production Ramshastri unfinished behind them. The Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema records simply that 'the group joined Mohan Studio to make Taramati'. On the available filmographies it is also the first film any of them completed after the split — indiancine.ma's director credits for Nene run straight from Daha Wajta (1942) to Taramati (1945) with nothing in between — which would make it the first visible consequence of the break that ended Prabhat's classical period — the same split that would produce Raja Nene Productions in 1947 and, later, Alhaad Chitra, which Dharmadhikari co-founded with Anant Mane and others in 1950. It is also among Keshavrao Bhole's last Hindi scores: after Taramati the credits recorded against his name are almost entirely Marathi — Kuber (1947), Bhagya Rekha (1948) and Parijatak (1951) — with only Shrikrishna Satyabhama (1951) following it in Hindi. Bhole was the man who had replaced the more orthodox Govindrao Tembe at Prabhat in 1933 and written the music for Amritmanthan, Sant Tukaram and Kunku.

Almost nothing of Taramati survives to be seen or heard: no print circulates, no still or lobby card has surfaced in the open-licence image archives, no transfer of its nine sides is in circulation, and not one singer's name attaches to any of them. What survives is the trajectory of the people who made it. Raja Nene founded his own production house two years later and went on to the Tamasha classic Patthe Bapurao and to the Hindi film Pehli Tareekh (1954), which he also acted in. Mukhram Sharma went from writing these nine lyrics to winning the first Filmfare Award for Best Story, for Aulad (1954), and then wrote Sadhna, Talaq and Dhool Ka Phool. Shobhana Samarth turned producer with Hamari Beti and launched her daughter Nutan. The story itself has outlived the film many times over — it was the subject of Dadasaheb Phalke's Raja Harishchandra in 1913, generally regarded as the first full-length Indian feature though the claim has been contested on behalf of Dadasaheb Torne's Shree Pundalik (1912), and has been filmed repeatedly before and since. Taramati's one distinction in that long line is its title: the wife's name, not the king's.