तेज फूँक दो आज

'Tez Phunk Do Aaj' — printed as 'Tej Phoonk Do Aaj' in Wikipedia's table — is a Manna Dey solo and the only song in Vikramaditya (1945) that Hindi Geetmala credits to Roopdas rather than to Ramesh Gupta. Shankarrao Vyas composed it. Its title is an imperative built on 'tej', the word for fiery lustre or radiance, and on 'phoonk do', to blow or breathe forth, which in a film ending with a war against the Scythian Shakas reads as a summons rather than a reflection.

A call-to-arms number is written against the grain of everything else on a devotional soundtrack: faster tempo, hard attack on the first syllable of each phrase, a rising line rather than a settling one, and percussion pushed forward instead of held under the voice. Giving it to Manna Dey rather than to a heavier or more theatrical voice is the one genuinely interesting choice visible from the credit list — he was the trained classicist on this record, not its shouter, and Vyas used him for all six of his other registers here as well. Nothing of the arrangement is documented.

'Tej' is one of those Sanskrit-derived words that Hindi keeps in circulation without quite translating: it means brilliance, heat, edge, the visible glow of power — the quality a king or a weapon or a sacrificial fire is said to possess. To be told to breathe tej into something today is to be told to put fire into it now, and the compression of the phrase is the point. Roopdas, credited here and nowhere else in the film, is among the least documented lyricists of the decade; roughly thirty film songs are attributed to him in surviving registers, and no reliable biographical detail — dates, birthplace, later career — has been recorded. The lyric text has not survived and none is reproduced here.

The film's last act is a war: Vikramaditya takes the field against the Shakas, kills Shakraj and frees the Kashmiri princess's father from captivity. A rousing number placed anywhere in that stretch would be doing obvious work, and this is the only song on the record whose title points that way — the rest are devotional, philosophical or acclamatory. Whether it was in fact used there cannot be confirmed: no print of Vikramaditya is in general access and no contemporary account describes the film's song placements.

Untraced, uncollected and uncovered. What it usefully preserves is a name: Roopdas, one credit on one film, who also wrote for Paristan (1944) and Samaaj Ko Badal Dalo (1947) and then disappears from the record entirely. Song registers like Hindi Geetmala's are the only reason such a lyricist is recoverable at all, and a single line in one of them is the whole of his presence on this soundtrack.