Raam naam dhan paayaa maine
Posted by: Atul on: April 5, 2025
This article is written by Sadanand Kamath, a fellow enthusiast of Hindi movie music and a contributor to this blog. This article is meant to be posted in atulsongaday.me. If this article appears in other sites without the knowledge and consent of the web administrator of atulsongaday.me, then it is piracy of the copyright content of atulsongaday.me and is a punishable offence under the existing laws.
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‘Prithvi Vallabh’ (1943) was produced and directed by Sohrab Modi under his banner, Minerva Movietone. The main cast included Sohrab Modi, Durga Khote, Sankatha Prasad, Sadiq Ali, Al Nasir, Meena Shorey, K N Singh, Navin Yagnik, Jahanara Kajjan etc. The film was based on a Gujarati novel of the same name written by K M Munshi. The screenplay, dialogues and the songs were written by Pandit Sudarshan. Incidentally, Manilal Joshi made a silent film, Prithvi Vallabh’ (1924) based on the same novel with Fatma Begum, Sandow, Sultana, Zubeida etc.
I have recently watched the full film which is available in good quality on a video sharing platform. It is a story of the long-standing feud between the King of Malwa, also called Avantipur (present day parts of Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat) and the King of Telengna (present day parts of Telangana, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh). Both the kingdoms have fought many battles. On the 16th occasion, the King of Telengna is once again defeated. His dominating sister is upset with him. She instigates him to make the King of Malwa to come to Telengna for the battle during which the King of Malwa is imprisoned. During this time, the sister falls in love with him and is ready to elope with him when he reveals to her the rescue plans made by his aides. True to her character who is always in dilemma, she reveals the secret to her brother who issues the order of execution of King of Malwa. It was a subtle romance between two middle-aged person in which the woman’s stubbornness always prevailed over her incipient love which led to her unintended betrayal. The film had a tragic end with both the lovers dying in the end.
The story of the film in detail is as under:
King of Malwa, Munj (Sohrab Modi) after defeating the King of Telengna, Tailap (Sankatha Prasad) for the 16th times has taken him into custody and has announced himself as Prithvi Vallabh. After visiting Shiva temple seeking Lord Shiva’s blessing, King Munj comes to his court where King Tailap is to wash his feet as a pre-condition for his release which he does reluctantly. After this ritual, King Tailap is treated as a friend and is honourably released.
After reaching his capital, King Tailap faces his hot-headed sister, Mrinalwati (Durga Khote). She taunts him for his continuous defeats from King Munj and getting humiliated by washing his feet on each occasion of his defeat. Instead of meekly facing humiliation, she orders him to work out a new battle strategy. King Tailap says that he was defeated on each occasion when the battle was fought on the enemy’s territory. Both brother and sister plan a strategy by which King Munj is forced to fight the battle in Telengna to get the home advantages. They take into the custody Kaviraj Dhananjay (Sadiq Ali) who is an adviser to King Munj and his young disciple, Rasnidhi (Al Nasir). This forces King Munj to proceed with his troops to Telengna to get them released.
King Munj is defeated in the battle fought in Telengna by King Tailap with the help of troops from King Bhillamraj (K N Singh). King Munj is captured and paraded in the street as King Tailap returns to his capital amidst the welcome celebrations in the street, Later, King Munj is imprisoned in a royal prison. King Tailap suggests to his sister that King Munj should be executed. However, Mrinalwati has other plan to psychologically torture him so that his pride is wounded. A happy King Tailap asks King Bhillamraj to ask any reward for his help. He says that he wishes his daughter Vilaswati (Meena) to get married with King Tailap’s son (Navin Yagnik). The wish is granted. King Tailap says that he can ask one more reward from him to which he asks for the release of Kaviraj and his disciple. This wish is also granted with a condition that both stay under King Bhillamraj’s supervision.
Mrinalwati visits the prison to see as to how much the pride of King Munj has been hurt. As soon as she sees him prison sleeping peacefully, a faint smile comes on her face. However, soon she comes to her usual posture of a stern and tough woman. King Munj says that throughout his life, he has enjoyed his younger days with the luxuries of life keeping his head high. Looking at Mrinalwati, he says that she is supressing her desires by becoming an ascetic. After listening to his philosophical talks, Mrinalwati walks out of the prison in a huff with a confused mind. But she is determined to hurt the pride of King Munj. She orders King Munj to be shifted in a big cage which should be placed in a busy intersection of the street to become an object of people’s insults.
After the consecutive defeats of King Tailap, Mrinalwati has taken a vow of celibacy and has banned singing and dancing in the kingdom. King Munj, now imprisoned in a cage in the street, attracts attention of a large crowd of onlookers. He takes advantage of the situation by singing a satirical song for which he gets chorus support from the enthusiastic crowd. This is not liked by Mrinalwati. King Munj is put back in the royal prison.
Mrinalwati makes one more visit to the prison. King Munj says that he has expected her visit as he has the power to attract people and woo them. He once again gives her a long discourses on romance and by doing this he touches her. Momentarily, Mrinalwati feels tranquil but her stubbornness wins over her evolving love. She orders to burn his palm that has touched her. King Munj is unperturbed. When he offers his hand to be burned by a hot iron rod, she hesitates to witness the act but does not stop it.
Realising that she has been caught in a bind between her evolving love for King Munj and her vow of austere life to achieve the goal of the kingdom, Mrinalwati orders King Tailap to call King Munj in his court and asks him to wash his feet in front of distinguished people of the kingdom, failing which he should be executed. But instead of washing King Tailap’s feet, King Munj throws away the water pot and tells the King Tailap that he would rather die than wash his feet. The King orders his guards to kill King Munj. However, Mrinalwati intervenes and suggests to her brother that it is better to postpone his execution to a future date. This action gives a subtle hint to King Munj that Mrinalwati has fallen in love with him. Later, Mrinalwati visits the prison and spend a night with him. She assures that she would visit him the next day.
Meanwhile, Rasnidhi and Vilaswati have fallen in love while the former was teaching her poem writing. He and Kaviraj have planned an escape route for King Munj with the assistance from King Bhillamraj. So, Rasnidhi will have to separate from Vilaswati. However, she says that wherever, he goes she will accompany him. Both Rasnidhi and Kaviraj reach the prison via an underground tunnel. King Munj is surprised to see Rasnidhi to whom he addresses as Bhoj. Actually, Bhoj is the son of King Munj who has assumed the name of Rasnidhi to conceal his identity while he is in Telengna. Both of them request the King to accompany them at once through the escape route. However, King Munj reveals that he cannot escape now because he will now be accompanied by Mrinalwati who will elope with him. So, they plan the escape the next day.
As is her nature, Mrinalwati once again falls into dilemma. She weighs the pro and cons of her eloping with King Munj. She decides that it is better for her to keep King Munj in the royal prison in which she continues to have the power in the kingdom and at the same time the company of King Munj. In other words, she does not want King Munj to escape from the prison. So, she reveals the plan of escape to King Tailap. The escape plan gets aborted. However, Kaviraj, Prince Bhoj/Rasnidhi with Vilaswati escapes to Malwa kingdom along with the King Bhillamraj who deserts King Tailap. King Munj is sentenced to death by under an elephant’s foot. Mrinalwati is sad but does not interfere with the decision as she herself is under question mark.
On the day of the execution of the death sentence, King Munj delivers a long monologue to the people of Telengna which creates a favourable impression of him and the hatred for King Tailap. As King Munj is about to come under the foot of the elephant, Mrinalwati runs from her seat and cover King Munj with herself. Both are killed. Later, the troops led by Prince Bhoj/Rasnidhi storms the capital of Telengna and captures King Tailap.
The film ends with Prince Bhoj’s coronation as the King of Malwa with Vilaswati as his queen.
It was an amazing experience for me when I recently watched the film in one go. The film excelled in almost every aspects of film making – excellent performances by Durga Khote and Sohrab Modi, Pandit Sudarshan’s tight screenplay and excellent dialogues, grandiose sets and costumes with minute details and the music and dance with semi-classical base. Almost all the songs in the film supplemented the story. It is my personal opinion that in terms of production value and extravagance, ‘Prithvi Vallabh’ (1945) was closed to that of ‘Mughal-e-Azam’ (1960) with later having advantages of technological advancement in the film making. I get a feeling that K Asif may have got the inspiration of making ‘Mughal-e-Azam’ from ‘Prithvi Vallabh’ (1943) as the first advertising poster of ‘Mughal-e-Azam’ appeared on ‘Filmindia’ magazine sometime in 1945.
One interesting feature which I have observed in the film is that the characters of an ascetic, Mrinalwati played by Durga Khote and King Munj played Sohrab Modi are almost the replica of the characters of Yogi Kumargiri (Ashok Kumar) and Chitralekha (Meena Kumari) respectively, in ‘Chitralekha’ (1964). Both Mrinalwati and Kumargiri secretly love their counterparts but they cannot proceed due to the dilemma over societal fears. A series of dialogues delivered by Sohrab Modi reflecting the philosophy of love, romance and enjoyment (Bhog) to Durga Khote is partly reflected in Sahir Ludhianvi’s song, sansaar se bhaage phirte ho.
The film had seven songs written by Pandit Sudarshan which were set to music by Rafique Ghaznavi and Saraswati Devi. Three songs have been covered on the Blog. I present the 4th song, ‘Raam naam dhan paaya maine’ rendered by Menaka Bai (Shirodkar) which is picturised on Meena Shorey.
The context of the song is that after King Tailap grants King Bhillamraj (K N Singh) his wish to set free Kaviraj (Sadiq Ali) and his disciple, Rasnidhi (Al Nasir) from his custody, K N Singh takes them to his house as his guest during which they encounter Vilaswati (Meena Shorey), the daughter of King Bhillamraj, singing the devotional song in his garden. This song is mainly to establish that Vilaswati is spiritual by nature and it is Al Nasir’s first encounter with her. Later, she becomes his disciple for teaching poems. After he teaches the story of Abhijnana Shakuntalam to her, Meena Shorey is transformed from spirituality to romance and falls in love with Al Nasir. Later, they get married – both in the film as well as in the real life.
Video Clip:
Audio Clip:
Song-Raam naam dhan paayaa maine (Prithvi Vallabh)(1943) Singer-Menaka Bai Shirodkar, Lyrics-Pt Sudarshan, MD-Rafiq Ghaznavi
Lyrics:
Raam naam dhan paaya maine
Raam naam dhan paayaa
Raam naam dhan paayaa maine
Raam naam dhan paaya
na main teerath karne niksee
na main brahm rijhaayaa
na main tirath karne niksee
na main brahm rijhaayaa
Raam naam dhan aap simat kar
morey ghar mein aayaa
maine Raam naam dhan paaya
Raam naam dhan aap simat kar
morey ghar mein aayaa
maine Raam naam dhan paayaa
Raam naam dhan paaya maine
Raam naam dhan paayaa
naa main ganga gayee nahaane
naa main shankh bajaayaa
naa main ganga gayee nahaane
naa main shankh bajaayaa
janam janam kee kismat jaagee
mann mein Raam samaayaa
maine Raam naam dhan paayaa
janam janam kee kismat jaagee
mann mein Raam samaayaa
maine Raam naam dhan paayaa
Raam naam dhan paayaa maine
Raam naam dhan paayaa
[dialogues]
doojaa dhan hai aanaa jaanaa
chaltee phirtee chhaayaa
doojaa dhan hai aanaa jaanaa
chaltee phirtee chhaayaa
Raam naam dhan ghatat ghate nahee
dam dam honthh samaayaa
maine Raam naam dhan paaya
Raam naam dhan ghatat ghate nahee
dam dam honthh samaayaa
maine Raam naam dhan paayaa
Raam naam dhan paaya maine
Raam naam dhan paayaa
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