माता की जय हो

The one song of Samrat Chandragupta that the standard reference literature singles out. The Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema's entry on the film ends by noting that it 'also had the nationalist number Mata ki jai, janani ki jai ho' — victory to the mother, victory to the one who gave birth. Catalogues list the title in the shortened form 'Mata Ki Jai Ho'; myswar records the vocal as 'various artists', and no source names an individual singer, so the credit is left empty here.

No recording is in public access, so the setting cannot be described from the music itself. Its function, though, is legible from the form: a jai-ho refrain is written to be taken up collectively, which is why myswar's catalogue records the vocal as 'various artists' rather than a named singer. In 1945 that meant a studio chorus over a march-adjacent pulse, with the melodic line kept inside a range an untrained audience could sing back — the design brief for every nationalist film number of the period.

The full documented line puts 'mata' and 'janani' side by side — mother, and she who gives birth — which is the whole manoeuvre in miniature. Under wartime censorship a song addressed to the motherland could not be sung as such; addressed to a mother, in a costume picture set in the fourth century BCE, in a plot about driving out a foreign army, it could. This double reading was the standard operating method of the 1940s historical, and the reference literature's decision to label this number 'nationalist' rather than 'devotional' shows that the reading was obvious to viewers at the time.

Samrat Chandragupta (1945) was produced and directed by Jayant Desai for Jayant Desai Productions, the Bombay banner he founded in 1943 after fourteen years at Ranjit Studios. It is a large-scale historical about Chandragupta Maurya, founder of the Mauryan empire, built around the legend of his break with Alexander's Macedonians and his marriage to the daughter of the Greek general Seleucus Nicator. Ishwarlal, Renuka Devi, Suraiya, Nayampalli, Sulochana Chatterjee and Mubarak headed the cast; the screenplay was by Mohanlal G. Dave, Shaheed Latif and Sagar Hussain, and Dronacharya photographed it. C. Ramchandra — signing himself Chitalkar Ramchandra at this stage of his career — composed all ten documented songs to lyrics by Buddhi Chandra Agrawal 'Madhur', two years before Shehnai (1947) made him a household name.

This is the only song from Samrat Chandragupta that entered the scholarly record rather than merely the trade catalogues, and it is the reason the film is cited at all in accounts of nationalism in 1940s Indian cinema. It belongs to the same family as the flag-and-motherland numbers scattered through the historicals and mythologicals of 1943-47, a body of songs that did the political work the contemporary social film was not permitted to do.