JAWANI KI REET/PARAJAY

1939 144’[H]/136’[B] b&w Hindi/Bengali

d/sc Hemchandra Chunder pc New Theatres st Ranajit Sen dial Binoy Chatterjee[B], Amjad Hussain, Kidar Sharma[H] lyr Ajoy Bhattacharya[B], Arzoo Lucknowi[H] c Yusuf Mulji m Rai Chand Boral

lp Kanan Devi, Rajalakshmi, Chhabirani, A.H. Shore, Bhanu Bannerjee[B], Amar Mullick[B], Sailen Choudhury[B], Indu Mukherjee[B], Jiban Bose[B], Biren Das[B], Sailen Pal[B], Jiban Ganguly[B], Najmul Hussain[H], Jagdish Sethi[H], Nemo[H], Bikram Kapoor[H], Bipin Gupta[H], Kalavati[H], Nandkishore[H]

Seminal film on the inheritance theme (cf. Udayer Pathey, 1944, and Andaz, 1949). The lawyer Bholanath Roy adopts Anita (Kanan Devi) who grows up into a beautiful and fashionable teenager. She meets Dilip, the lawyer’s estranged son, working on a flood-relief programme and they fall in love. Their lineage problems (she does not know hers, he keeps his a guilty secret) are solved when Bholanath dies, leaving his estate to Dilip and thus rehabilitating him as well as their relationship.

JAYAPRADHA

aka Pururava Chakravarthi

1939 c.190’ b&w Telugu

d Ch. Narasimha Rao pc Sharada-Rayalseema Films dial/lyr Varanasi Seetarama Sastry, Ch. Hanumantha Rao m Saluri Rajeshwara Rao

lp C.S.R. Anjaneyulu, K. Pichhaiah, Narasimha Rao, Lalita, Sampurna, Sheshu, Chitti, Seeta, Yashoda, Rajkumari, Anjamma, Ramudu, Saluri Rajeshwara Rao

By way of an Ayodhyecha Raja (1932) type of story, the film offers an invented legend as a nationalist allegory aligned with the Gandhian opposition (including a scene showing Jayapradha using the spinning-wheel associated with Gandhi’s campaign). Rather than resorting to violence to defend his country, the peace-loving Emperor Pururava leaves his palace with his wife Jayapradha and his two sons. The royal couple attempt manual labour, which is abhorrent to the wife, and face the evil machinations of the merchant Navakoti Narayana Shetty. When Shetty captures and tries to molest Jayapradha, his house is accidentally set on fire. Rajeshwara Rao’s first full assignment as composer.

JEEVAN SAATHI

aka Comrades

1939 157’ b&w Hindi

d Nandlal Jaswantlal pc Sagar Film s Babubhai Mehta dial/co-lyr Zia Sarhadi co-lyr Kanhaiyalal c Faredoon Irani m Anil Biswas

lp Surendra, Maya Bannerjee, Harish, Jyoti, Jilloo, Sankatha, Kayamali, Bhudo Advani, Jamoo Patel

A mildly socialist realist (esp. in the music) family drama exemplifying the spirit of camaraderie and sacrifice. Seth Madhavlal’s household includes two sons, Jatin (Surendra) and Kiran (Harish), and the adopted orphan Rekha (Maya). When the trio grow up, both Jatin and Kiran love Rekha. To solve the dilemma Jatin becomes a social outlaw. The love duets of Surendra and Maya Bannerjee are emotionally contrasted with Surendra’s political addresses, the solo Hame hua hai desh nikala and his duet with Jyoti, Aan base pardes sajanava, both being songs of exile.

KANGAN

1939 139’ b&w Hindi

d Franz Osten pc Bombay Talkies p S. Mukherjee st Gajendra Kumar Mitra’s Rajanigandha sc Saradindu Bannerjee, S. Mukherjee dial/co-lyr Narottam Vyas co-lyr Pradeep c Josef Wirsching, R.D. Parineeja m Saraswati Devi, Ramchandra Pal

lp Leela Chitnis, Ashok Kumar, V.H. Desai, P.F. Pithawala, Mubarak, Saroj Borkar, Nana Paliskar, Pratima

Leela Chitnis’ first big film at Bombay Talkies is a love story between the beautiful village belle Radha (Chitnis) and Kamal (Kumar), the son of the village zamindar who wants to be a great poet. The zamindar sends his son to the city where Kamal becomes a noted novelist and playwright while Radha is persecuted by the zamindar and his henchman Banwari. She feigns suicide but in fact goes to join her beloved in the city (on the same train as the now repentant father). When she eventually reaches Kamal’s house, she hears him declaring his love to a woman. Unaware that he is merely reading lines from his latest play, Radha withdraws, but eventually the father brings about the happy end. Unlike the studio’s Niranjan Pal melodramas written for Devika Rani, this production ignored the reformist dimensions of the story and opts for a conventional romance. Chitnis’s acting style, continued in Bandhan (1940) and in Jhoola (1941), both S. Mukherjee productions, heralded a new era for Bombay Talkies and culminated in Filmistan’s seductive performance techniques.

LEATHERFACE

aka Farzande Watan

1939 166’ b&w Hindi

d Vijay Bhatt pc Prakash Pics s Batuk Bhatt dial/lyr Sampatlal Srivastava ‘Anuj’ c G.N. Shirodkar m Shankarrao Vyas, Lallubhai Nayak

lp Jairaj, Mehtab, Shirin, Jal Writer, M. Zahoor, Lallubhai Naik, Bholaram, Faizy

The remake of Royal Film’s silent Badmash Ka Beta (1933) is a typical example of Vijay Bhatt’s stunt-film origins. Hero Samar (Jairaj) singlehandedly takes on the might of the oppressive state led by the warlord chief (M. Zahoor). He falls in love with the chief’s sister Ila (Mehtab) and fights his revolution from the tavern of Dulari (Shirin) with little more than a band of adventurers, a leather face mask, his faithful dog Tiger, and horse Bahadur.

MALLI PELLI

1939 187’ b&w Telugu

d/st Y.V. Rao pc Jagdish Films dial/lyr Balijepalli Lakshmikanta Kavi m Ogirala Ramchandra Rao

lp Y.V. Rao, Balijepalli Lakshmikanta Kavi, Kanchanmala, Bezwada Rajarathnam, Rangaswamy, K. Satyanarayana, Natesa Iyer, Manikyamma

Reformist melodrama about widow remarriage made to upstage Vauhini’s film on the same theme, Sumangali (1940). Villain Janardhanarao Panthulu has his 6-year-old daughter Lalitha married to an old man who dies shortly after. Lalitha (Kanchanmala) is brought up by her father under the strictures of widowhood. She meets the reformist Sundarrao (Y.V. Rao) who eventually defies tradition and marries her. Probably the first instance in Telugu cinema of the use of playback, according to music historian V.A.K. Ranga Rao, who also notes that it is the composer Ogirala who sings the duet with Kanchanmala, Na sundara suruchira roopa, although the record credits the male voice to hero Y.V. Rao.

MANOOS/ADMI

aka Life is for the Living

1939 160’[M]/164’[H] b&w Marathi/Hindi

d V. Shantaram pc Prabhat Film st A. Bhaskarrao sc/dial/lyr[M] Anant Kanekar dial/lyr Munshi Aziz[H] c V. Avadhoot
m Master Krishnarao

lp Shahu Modak, Shanta Hublikar, Sundarabai, Budasaheb, Ram Marathe, Gauri, Manju, Narmada, Ganpatrao, Raja Paranjpe, Manajirao

Shantaram’s classic adaptation of the Kammerspiel style is a love tragedy featuring a policeman, Ganpat[M]/Moti[H] (Modak) and a prostitute, Maina[M]/Kesar[H] (Hublikar). Ganpat saves Maina from a police raid on a brothel and they fall in love. Her reputation and sense of guilt resist his attempts to rehabilitate her. Ganpat’s respectable middle-class mother (Sundarabai) symbolises all that Maina would like to be, but she is arrested for murdering her evil uncle and refuses Ganpat’s offer to release her from prison. The film ends on a falsely positive tone set to the rhythm of marching policemen. The film is shot entirely on sets including street corners, alleys, corridors etc., and consists mainly of night scenes often in heavy shadows. The only location sequence is the film’s romantic duet (Hum premi premnagar mein jaayen) as the loving couple blunder on to a film set. Shantaram uses the occasion to include a surprising spoof on the Bombay Talkie style of cinema: hero and heroine sit by a tree in a posture similar to Ashok Kumar and Devika Rani in the Main ban ka panchhi song of Achhut Kanya (1936), after which the Anglo-Indian heroine, who speaks and sings with an English accent, throws off her sari to walk away in Western dress. Shantaram deploys the expressionist technique of making physical spaces represent mental states, perhaps because Modak and Hublikar use a fairly restrained gestural repertoire rare in Shantaram’s work. The film’s classic number Ab kis liye kal ki baat (Hublikar’s seduction number) is also a kind of spoof set in five different languages (Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Gujarati and Punjabi in addition to its Marathi/Hindi refrain) alluding to familiar stereotypes from the corresponding film centres. There were suggestions that the plot was borrowed from Robert Sherwood’s Waterloo Bridge (James Whale, 1931).

Shanta Hublikar in Manoos

MATHRU BHOOMI

aka Motherland

1939 c.200’ b&w Tamil

d H.M. Reddy pc Vel Pics, Al. Rm. Company, Madras st Dwijendralal Roy’s play Chandragupta (1911) sc/dial T.V. Chari c E.R. Cooper lyr Papanasam Sivan m K. Subba Rao

lp S. Santhanam, P.U. Chinnappa, Kali N. Rathnam, C.S.D. Singh, K.K. Perumal, T.V. Kumudini, A.K. Rajalakshmi, P. Saradambal, M.S.J. Kamalam, Devulu Venkataraju

Reddy, the director of the first Tamil talkie (Kalidas, 1931), adapted Roy’s important Bengali play for this nationalist allegory about an Indian king’s resistance to Alexander the Great. It was briefly banned by the British. Greek general Seleucus Nicator, here called Minander (C.S.D. Singh), is left in charge by Alexander. He is opposed by Ugrasen (Santhanam), the king of Udaygiri and the founder (321BC) of the Maurya dynasty. Minander’s daughter Helen (Rajalakshmi) falls in love with the king and eventually marries him after Minander has been defeated and returns to Greece. The real heroine is Kumudini, making her screen debut as a fiercely nationalist character of the same name who throws out her husband Jayapala (Santhanam again, in a dual role) when she learns that he is a Greek spy. Her brother Prathapan is played by the future star Chinnappa. Although the costumes bear scant relation to history, the battle scenes are shot at the actual forts of Gingee and Krishnagiri in Tamil Nadu. Two songs proved particularly popular: Bharatha desam (‘The Country of Bharat’) and Namadhu Janma bhoomi (‘The Land of our Birth’), the latter becoming a marching song widely used in schools.

NAVJEEVAN

1939 134’ b&w Hindi

d Franz Osten pc Bombay Talkies
s Saradindu Bannerjee dial/co-lyr J.S. Casshyap co-lyr L. Meghani, Narottam Vyas c Josef Wirsching m Saraswati Devi

lp Hansa Wadkar, Rama Shukul, V.H. Desai, Mumtaz Ali, Saroj Borkar, P.F. Pithawala, Rai Mohan, M. Nazir, Pratima, Lalita Devulkar

Osten followed Durga (1939) with this musical fantasy, giving Wadkar her first lead role in a big studio production. Although Mahendra (Shukul) belongs to a clan of proud warriors, he is a hypochondriac. This poses a problem when he woos Menaka (Wadkar) who is fixated on swashbuckling heroics and appears more impressed with Mahendra’s rival Jeevan. The ‘hero’ overcomes his cowardice by taking a magic pill and dreaming that he is his own ancestor, overthrowing a band of robbers (led by Jeevan) and rescuing the damsel (Menaka). The enacted dream, which occupies most of the film’s 2nd half, transforms the hero. Wadkar sings four songs in the film.

NETAJI PALKAR

1939 136’ b&w Marathi

d/s/p/lyr Bhalji Pendharkar pc Arun Pics c Saju Naik m C. Balaji

lp Lalita Pawar, Bakulabai, Bhaurao Datar, Master Vithal, I.T. Nimbalkar, G.R. Sandow, Krishnarao Gote, Shahir Nanivadekar, Anandrao, Sheikh

The debut production of Pendharkar’s Arun Pics is also the first of his major Maratha historicals focusing on Shivaji (cf. Thoratanchi Kamala, 1941; Chhatrapati Shivaji, 1952). The villainous Subedar of Kalyan, in his effort to defeat 17th-C. Maratha emperor Shivaji, abducts a Maratha damsel (Pawar). However, Shivaji and his trusted lieutenant, the equally legendary Netaji Palkar, overcome this threat.

PUKAR

1939 151’ b&w Urdu

d Sohrab Modi pc Minerva Movietone s/lyr Kamal Amrohi c Y.D. Sarpotdar m Mir Saheb

lp Sohrab Modi, Chandramohan, Naseem Banu, Sheela, Sardar Akhtar, Sadiq Ali

One of Kamal Amrohi’s best-known scripts and the first of the megabudget epics characteristic of Modi and his Minerva Studio (Sikandar, 1941 Jhansi Ki Rani, 1953). Set at the court of the harsh Mughal Emperor Jehangir (Chandramohan), the film tells two separate love stories: the first of Mangal Singh (Ali) and Kanwar (Sheela) amid the violent feud raging between their families, and the second, the famous one of Jehangir and Nurjehan (Banu). Mangal kills the brother and father of his lover. His father, the loyal Rajput chieftain Sangram Singh (Modi), captures his son and Jehangir passes the death sentence. Jehangir’s claim that the law knows no class distinction is put to the test when a washerwoman (Akhtar) accuses Queen Nurjehan of having inadvertently killed her husband during a hunt. Jehangir offers his own life but the washerwoman magnanimously forgives him. The queen and the emperor then in turn pardon Mangal Singh, thus proving that class position does count after all (or, since the film was made in 1939, suggesting that the death penalty should never be applied). The film was known mainly for some of the most spectacular scenes of palace grandeur in the Indian cinema.

RAITU BIDDA

1939 c.175’ b&w Telugu

d/s Gudavalli Ramabrahmam pc Sarathi Films dial T. Gopichand lyr Kosaraju, Tapi Dharma Rao, Basavaraju Apparao, Nellore Venkatrama Naidu, Tummala Seetarama Murthy Choudhury c Sailen Bose m B. Narasimha Rao lp Bellari Raghava, G.V. Sitapathy, B. Narasimha Rao, Suribabu, Padmavati, T. Suryakumari, Nellore Nagaraja Rao, Sundaramma, S. Varalakshmi, M.C. Raghavan

Ramabrahmam’s best-known work is a seminal reformist melodrama critiquing the zamindari system from the viewpoint of the Kisan Sabha agitations in rural AP. Small-time landowner Narsi Reddy (Raghavan) borrows money from a shavukar [money-lender (Raghavan)] who represents the major zamindar (Sitapathy) of the village. When Narsi Reddy votes for a peasant candidate (Kosaraju) rather than for the political party supported by the landlord, his son is attacked and he is publicly humiliated. Divine intervention in the form of a flood comes to the aid of the peasant. The film highlighted the mling nexus of absentee landlords, the police and revenue authorities, and deployed several militant songs written by Kisan Sabha activist N. Venkatrama Naidu. Although it received a censor certificate, the film’s release led to numerous protests by powerful zamindar groups; it was first banned in Nellore, then in Madras. The Bobbili and Venkatagiri royals threatened to sue the producer, who was also a member of the landed elite, while copies of the print were publicly burnt.

RAJAT JAYANTI

1939 141’ b&w Bengali

d/s P.C. Barua pc New Theatres lyr Ajoy Bhattacharya c Sudhin Majumdar m Rai Chand Boral

lp P.C. Barua, Pahadi Sanyal, Bhanu Bannerjee, Sailen Choudhury, Dinesh Ranjan Das, Indu Mukherjee, Shore, Satya Mukherjee, Biren Das, Molina Devi, Menaka Devi

Barua’s successful elaboration of a short comedy into a feature about intrigue and internecine warfare within families. The simple-minded Rajat (Barua) loves neighbour Jayanti (Menaka Devi). He is advised on how to court her by his streetsmart cousin Bishwanath (Sanyal) and Bishwanath’s friend Samir (Bannerjee). Bishwanath and Samir try to get Rajat’s miserly guardian Bagalcharan (Choudhury) to loan them money so that Samir can make a ‘European-style art film’. The guardian is admitted to the clinic of a doctor Gajanan where he falls into the clutches of two professional crooks Natoraj (Indu Mukherjee) and Supta (Molina Devi). Supta wants Rajat and they try to kidnap her but they are outsmarted. One of the best-known comedies of pre-war Indian film, this one reveals Barua’s flair for comedy, most notably in the way he sends up his own established screen persona, introducing himself via a glamourously back-lit close-up, evoking his romantic Devdas (1935) and Mukti (1937) roles, but then revealing his character to be ridiculously inept and nervous in what is often considered the star’s most accomplished performance, ably supported by Sanyal, Molina Devi, Indu Mukherjee and Sailen Choudhury.

SACH HAI

aka It’s True

1939 157 b&w Hindi

d/s R.S. Choudhury pc Saraswati Cinetone dial Niranjan Sharma Ajit c M.M. Purohit, S.P. Shinde m Suresh Babu

lp Motilal, Rose, Shakir, Sethi, Ramakrishna Choube, Chandani, Usha

A melodrama set in the holy city of Benares exploring issues of caste status. Chandan (Motilal) is the son of Kashipati, the head of an influential brahminical sect. His hedonistic brother Shripati (Sethi) wants to get his hands on the sect’s assets while the evil Guru (Choube) - who publicly opposes Chandan’s rebellions against traditional casteism - wants to abduct the poor Mangala (Chandani), daughter of a blind traveller. Chandan’s declared love for Roopa (Rose), an Untouchable woman, causes major consternation. Adding to the drama is a scene of the flooding river, perceived as a kind of divine judgement for all the misdeeds in the name of religion. Remake of Choudhury’s earlier silent Khuda Ki Shaan (1931).

SANT TULSIDAS

1939 154’ b&w Hindi/Marathi

d Jayant Desai pc Ranjit Movietone
s/co-dial[M] Shivram Vashikar dial/lyr[H] Pandit Indra, P.L. Santoshi lyr[M] S.A. Shukla c Krishna Gopal m Vishnupant Pagnis, Gyan Dutt lp Vishnupant Pagnis, Leela Chitnis, Keshavrao Date, Vasanti, Ram Marathe, Bandopant Sohoni, Dixit, Kantilal

Ranjit Studio’s big-budget miracle-laden saint film on Tulsidas (16th C.) who rewrote Valmiki’s Ramayana in Hindi. To the despair of his teacher Narahari Guru (Sohoni), who hopes that Tulsidas (Pagnis) will make the classic text accessible to the people, the poet spends time with his beloved wife Ratnavali (Chitnis). The dramatic pivot of the story comes when Tulsidas discovers his life’s vocation amid howling wind and a river in spate. He becomes an ascetic and settles down in Benares where his translation threatens the brahminical clergy, until then sole proprietors of the wisdom of the Sanskrit text. Their representative, Batteshwar Shastri (Date), persecutes Tulsidas who is rescued through divine intervention. Ranjit hired both the actor Pagnis and the writer Vashikar of Prabhat’s classic Sant Tukaram (1936). Pagnis also scores the songs.

SAPUREY/SAPERA

aka The Snake-charmer

1939 123’[B]/128’[H] b&w Bengali/Hindi

d/sc Debaki Bose pc New Theatres st/co-lyr[B] Kazi Nazrul Islam dial[H] Lalchand Bismil co-lyr Ajoy Bhattacharya[B], Kidar Sharma[H] c Yusuf Mulji m Rai Chand Boral lp Pahadi Sanyal, Kanan Devi, K.C. Dey, Menaka Devi, Shyam Laha, Satya Mukherjee, Manoranjan Bhattacharya[B]/Nawab[H], Rathin Bannerjee[B], Ahi Sanyal[B], Prafulla Mukherjee[B], Prithviraj Kapoor[H], Bikram Kapoor[H]

Primitivist love story and popular musical set among the Shaivite clan of snake-charmers. Renowned snake-charmer Jahar (Bhattacharya/Nawab), the survivor of 99 snakebites thanks to rigorous self-discipline including sexual abstinence, rescues a young girl from snakebite and raises her as a boy called Chandan (Kanan Devi). As he starts feeling sexually attracted to ‘him’, the clan discovers that Jahar is sheltering a young woman and so they seek to depose him as chief. Meanwhile, the young Jhumro (Sanyal) elopes with Chandan and in a fit of fury Jahar sends a deadly snake in pursuit of the couple. The snake bites Jhumro and only Jahar’s powers can save the boy, which poses a major dilemma for the patriarch.

SEVA SAMAJ

aka Service Limited

1939 145’ b&w Hindi

d Chimanlal Luhar pc Sagar Film co-dial P. Razdan co-dial/co-lyr Zia Sarhadi co-lyr Pandit Indra c Keki Mistry m Anupam Ghatak

lp Maya Bannerjee, Surendranath, Bibbo, Yakub, Bhudo Advani, Sankatha Prasad

Heiress Shobhana Devi (Bannerjee) starts a campaign, with the help of the three trustees of her fortune, to capture the crook Jagmohandas (Yakub). They start a detective agency, Service Ltd, and take clients who have all been victims of Jagmohandas’ criminal endeavours. Eventually, when Jagmohandas gets hold of an international trade treaty, Shobhana Devi dons a disguise, infiltrates the gang and captures the villain.

SHRI VENKATESWARA MAHATYAM

aka Balaji

1939 171’ b&w Telugu

d P. Pullaiah pc Famous Films dial D. Ramireddy lyr Buchanna Sastry, Vishwanathan c K.V. Machwe m Akula Narasimha Rao, B. Kumaraswamy

lp C.S.R. Anjaneyulu, Shantakumari, Rajeshwari Devi, Buchanna Sastry, T. Venkateshwarulu, Sanjiva Kumari, Nagmani, Nagamma

Pullaiah’s original version of N.T. Rama Rao’s legendary 1960 film of the same title is a mythological about the life of the deity at Tirupati, notorious as India’s richest temple shrine. Made at the Mahalakshmi Studio, Bombay, the film featured Pullaiah’s wife and Telugu star Shantakumari as the consort of the ‘Lord of the Seven Hills’, Venkateshwara (Anjaneyulu).

SITARA

1939 169’ b&w Hindi

d Ezra Mir pc Everest Pics dial/lyr Munshi Dil c P.G. Kukde m Rafiq Ghaznavi

lp Rattan Bai, Khursheed, Nazir, Mubarak, Jamshedji, Ashok Hussain, K.N. Singh, Sunalini

Romantic drama set in a fantasy version of a gypsy camp telling of an amorous rivalry spanning two generations. Azurie (Rattan Bai) marries Zamorra (Jamshedji) rather than his rival Eureka (Mubarak). Later, Zamorra accuses his wife of adultery with his rival and she dies in the ‘dance of death’ inflicted on her as punishment. Her infant daughter Sitara (Khursheed), abandoned in the forest, grows up as the adopted daughter of Suresh but is unable to reconcile her gypsy habits with bourgeois society: she paints canvasses with titles like ‘Gypsy Blood’. She unknowingly gets embroiled in the ancestral rivalry when Eureka’s wild son Tanzi (Nazir) falls in love with her and kidnaps her. The brutal tactic works and she marries him, which also leads her to discover her own ancestry.

THOKAR

aka The Kick

1939 161’ b&w Hindi

d A.R. Kardar pc Ranjit Movietone s M. Sadiq lyr P.L. Santoshi c Gordhanbhai Patel m Gyan Dutt

lp Madhuri, Kumar, Charlie, Yakub, Ishwarlal, Wahidan, Dikshit, Ram Marathe, Suresh, K.N. Singh, Wasti

A cautionary tale about wealth not bringing happiness. The blind Mohan (Kumar) lives in a village with his ward Radha (Madhuri). He wins a fortune with a sweepstake ticket sold to him by the tramp Ramesh (Charlie), who claims his due and begins to take over Mohan’s life, making him move to the city and getting him married to Chinta, a prostitute. When Mohan’s eyesight is restored, he finds that his wife is having an affair with Ramesh. Mohan takes revenge and eventually lands up in his old village, a poor man, but with Radha still unchanged, waiting for him.

THYAGABHOOMI

aka The Land of Sacrifice

1939 194’ b&w Tamil

d/p/sc K. Suhramanyam pc Madras United Artists st R. Krishnamurthy [Kalki] c Sailen Bose m Papanasam Sivan, Moti Babu lp S.D. Subbulakshmi, Papanasam Sivan, Baby Saroja, A.K. Kamalam, K.J. Mahadevan

Subramanyam’s best-known film and Tamil cinema’s biggest 30s hit is a spirited contribution to the Independence movement, deploying Gandhian themes. Sambhu Sastry (Sivan) is portrayed as the Gandhi of Tamil Nadu, sitting on a dais spinning with a charkha. The film includes inserts from documentary footage of Gandhi. The story, published in the journal Ananda Vikatan and illustrated with stills from the film, tells of Sastry the Brahmin priest and his daughter Savithri (Subbulakshmi). It opens with Harijans waiting in front of a closed temple during a cyclone. Sastry is punished for sheltering them and he goes to Madras. The main plot focuses on daughter Savithri, married to the evil Sridharan (Mahadevan) who prefers to live in ‘Western’ luxury in Calcutta and mistreats his wife. Sastry, who sells his property to pay for the dowry, finds himself on the streets while his abandoned daughter, who returns to find her ancestral home gone, gives birth to a daughter Charu (Saroja) in a free hospital. She abandons her child at the feet of her father. He thereafter, together with the Harijan Nallan, embarks on Gandhian social uplift programmes including picketing liquor shops. Savithri becomes the wealthy Uma Rani, devoting herself to charity. In her new guise she rejects her husband who sues for the restoration of his ‘marital rights’. She loses the case, but her husband sees the light and becomes a nationalist. In the end, Savithri and her husband are imprisoned for disregarding the court’s verdict. In the slum, the Congress Party’s flag is raised. Pioneering the integration of melodrama with a symbol-laden political idiom later adopted by the DMK film, it has many scenes that resonate with local political meanings: the shot of Harijans standing outside the temple relates to the Temple Entry movement in the state; and footage of the Congress volunteers’s march (which briefly caused the film to be banned) is presented as the will of the goddess Ambikai, repeatedly invoked in the film by the religious Sastry. The precocious child Saroja, playing Sastry’s granddaughter, had been launched in Balayogini (1936).

Papanasam Sivan (left), Baby Saroja (centre) and S.D. Subbulakshmi in Thyagabhoomi

VANDE MATARAM

aka Mangalsutram

1939 222’ b&w Telugu

d/st B.N. Reddi from his short story Mangalsutram pc Vauhini Pics sc/c K. Ramnoth dial/lyr Samudrala Raghavacharya m Chittor V. Nagaiah lp Chittor V. Nagaiah, Kanchanmala, Lingamurthy, Kalyani, Sheshamamba, Usha, Rani

Vauhini’s debut production is also that of the pioneering Telugu film-maker Reddi. The elaborate melodrama, based on Reddi’s own unpublished short story, presented problems of uneven development in terms of an emotional conflict between an innocent feudal rural female and a worldly-wise capitalist urban male. Hero Raghu (Nagaiah), an unemployed graduate, insists on marrying the village girl Janaki (Kanchanmala) despite the opposition of his scheming mother who wants a dowry. Raghu’s unemployment problems continue despite his migration to the city, leaving his wife in the clutches of her mother-in-law. When Raghu wins a lottery for Rs 5 lakhs and returns home, he finds his wife and infant son have left. Although his mother insists he marry again, Raghu goes to the city and dedicates himself to social work, including building factories in order to create employment opportunities. In this he is assisted by his rich female college friend, provoking gossip about their relationship. Raghu’s wife, now a poor flower seller, sees her husband with his new friend and believes he has remarried. Eventually the misunderstanding is resolved. A major commercial hit, the film engages the agenda of the reform and nationalist movements: Raghu names a lottery-ticket seller Vande Mataram, meaning ‘Hail to the mother’ and one of India’s national anthems, and tramples underfoot his ‘foreign’ degree in a scene that caused censorship problems. The film also introduces numerous stereotypes e.g. the suave urban crook and the stage-struck villager (who marries the hero’s sister).

VARAVIKRAYAM

1939 194’ b&w Telugu

d C. Pullaiah pc East India Film st Kallakuri Narayana Rao’s play dial/lyr Balijepalli Lakshmikanta Kavi c Biren De m Durga Sen lp Balijepalli Lakshmikanta Kavi, Daita Gopalam, K. Satyanarayana, M. Ramchandramurthy, T. Chalapathi Rao, A.V. Subba Rao, Relangi Venkatramaiah, Sriranjani Sr, Dasari Kotiratnam, Pushpavalli, P. Bhanumathi, Subhadra

Pullaiah, making Telugu films in Calcutta, abandons his usual mythologicals for this reformist social about the iniquitous dowry system. Although opposed to the dowry system, the retired government official Purshottama Rao borrows money to get his eldest daughter Kalindi (Bhanumathi) married, against her wishes, to the thrice-married Lingaraju. Kalindi commits suicide before the marriage can take place and when Lingaraju refuses to return the dowry, Purshottama’s second daughter Kamala (Pushpavalli) agrees to marry him. Eventually she takes her husband and father-in-law to court, winning her point and restoring family honour while avenging her sister’s death. Remembered mainly as the 16-year-old Telugu star Bhanumathi’s screen debut.

VIMOCHANAM

1939 160’ b&w Tamil

d A.N. Kalyanarayan pc Jaya Films, Hindustan Films c T. Marconi

Tamil reformist melodrama probably directed as well as shot by the Italian cameraman T. Marconi. The film was made as a propaganda semi-documentary in support of C. Rajagopalachari’s prohibition programme, drawing its title from his journal Vimochanam (Est. 1929) in which several of his essays on the subject were published. Those essays were illustrated with pictures of a fiction text staged by a girls’ school from the Sangeetha Vidyalaya. The film mainly adapts that play. The plot has the male lead, Arumugham, sell his wife’s jewellery to buy alcohol until prohibition in the Salem district offers much-needed relief. The hero goes to jail for trying to brew liquor illicitly. On his release, he finds the liquor shop has become a tea-stall and his wife destitute, leading to his reform.

ABHINETRI/HAAR JEET

1940 131’ b&w Bengali/Hindi

d/sc Amar Mullick pc New Theatres st Upendranath Ganguly dial Pashupati Chatterjee[B], Parimal Ghosh, A.H. Shore[H] lyr Munshi Arzoo, Kidar Sharma[H] c Bimal Roy m Rai Chand Boral

lp Kanan Devi, Pahadi Sanyal, Meera Dutta, Chhaya Devi, Sailen Choudhury[B], Bhanu Roy[B], Indu Mukherjee[B], Santosh Sinha[B], Harimohan Bose[B], Biren Pal[B], Boken Chatto[B], Naresh Bose[B], Benoy Goswami[B]; Nawab[H], Nemo[H], Pannalal[H], Madho Shukla[H], Arvind[H]

A vehicle for the vocal talents of Sanyal and Kanan Devi set in the early 20th-C. Calcutta Theatres industry. Kamala (Kanan Devi) is the star of the Ruby Theatre owned by her guardian Maheshbabu. Narendra (Sanyal) is the equally popular star in the rival Bina Theatre, which he abandons to join the Ruby repertory when he falls in love with Kamala. In a lyrical sequence in the countryside, they marry in a poor peasant setting. Narendra then shows his true colours and forbids Kamala to continue her acting career. She returns to the stage anyway while Narendra stays among the peasants. He later returns to the Bina Theatre and its success is intercut with the bankruptcy of the Ruby Theatre. Kamala’s symbolic punishment for refusing to become a dutiful housewife ministering to her man’s needs is worked through the conduit of establishing the moral superiority of a lyrical/utopian peasantry against the corrupt city.

ACHHUT

aka The Untouchable

1940 141’ b&w Hindi/Gujarati

d/s Chandulal Shah pc Ranjit Film lyr P.L. Santoshi c Krishna Gopal m Gyan Dutt

lp Gohar, Motilal, Vasanti, Charlie, Rajkumari, Sitara Devi, Mazhar Khan, Dikshit, T. Kapur, Lala Yakub, Bhupatrai, Ibrahim

Promoted as a nationalist film addressing Gandhi’s anti-untouchability campaign, it was endorsed by Gandhi and Vallabhbhai Patel even before it was made. Denied access to a well reserved for the upper castes, Lakshmi’s (Gohar) Harijan father turns Christian while his wife prefers to remain a Hindu. Lakshmi is adopted by a rich businessman, becomes friends with his daughter Savita, completes her education and finds social acceptance in the urban upper class. When both Lakshmi and Savita fall in love with the same man, Savita’s father resolves the matter by sending Lakshmi back to her impoverished Harijan family where she meets her childhood friend Ramu (Motilal) and together they lead the Harijans’ revolt. Lakshmi is jailed, her best friend falls ill and her boyfriend dies, but eventually the village temple is opened to all castes.

APNI NAGARIYA

aka Mud

1940 144’ b&w Hindi

d/p Dada Gunjal pc Hindustan Cinetone, Gunjal Prod, st Sadat Hasan Manto dial S. Khalil lyr Safdar ‘Aah’, Pandit Indra c S. Hardip m Rafiq Ghaznavi

lp Shobhana Samarth, Nazir, Jayant, Singh, Madhavi, Shanta Dutt, Majid, Keki Bawa, Bibi, Baby Sushila

Manto’s reformist story tells of Sushila (Samarth), the daughter of the authoritarian factory owner Seth Ramdas who is in conflict with militant workers led by Keshav. Sushila is caught up in an angry confrontation and rescued by the worker Prithvi, who is victimised by the management for his action. In love with her, he nurses her during a plague epidemic when her own family deserts her, but she spurns his attentions and later becomes a tool in the exploitative hands of her fiance Shambhu, who declares a factory lock-out. The disillusioned Prithvi becomes a dangerous hoodlum. To solve her own problems, Sushila must first acknowledge the injustice of the class divide.

ARDHANGI/GHAR KI RANI

aka The Better Half

1940 152’[M]/161’[H] b&w Marathi/Hindi

d Master Vinayak pc Huns Pics s/dial/lyr[M] P.K. Atre dial/lyr[H] Pandit Indra c Pandurang Naik m Dada Chandekar

lp Master Vinayak, Meenakshi, Baburao Pendharkar, Damuanna Malvankar, Leela Chitnis

Huns Pics’ last film transferred the Mahabharata Savitri tale about marital devotion to a modern Maharashtrian middle-class setting exploiting anti-Western feelings to advocate a traditionalist misogynist ideology. Satyavan (Vinayak), a university professor, admires the beautiful, English-speaking and cigarette-smoking Arundhati (Chitnis), wife of a colleague. He hires a tutor to train his own wife Savitri (Meenakshi) in Western manners. When Satyavan succeeds in having an affair with Arundhati, she humiliates him by making him do domestic chores and then abandons him for the rich Z. Marutrao (Pendharkar). Satyavan finally comes to his senses and asks the gods to intervene, which reunites him with the faithful Savitri.

AURAT

aka Woman

1940 154’ b&w Hindi

d Mehboob Khan pc National Studios st Babubhai A. Mehta dial Wajahat Mirza lyr Safdar ‘Aah’ c Faredoon Irani m Anil Biswas lp Sardar Akhtar, Surendra, Yakub, Jyoti, Harish, Arun, Vatsala Kumthekar, Brij Rani

Started at Sagar but completed at the National studio, this is the original version of Mehboob’s classic Mother India (1957). The heroine Radha (Akhtar) works her fingers to the bone to pay off the villainous moneylender Sukhilala. She and husband Shamu (Arun) have three sons, and when she gets pregnant yet again Shamu removes himself from the scene and leaves her to battle against starvation and the advances of the villain. The two eldest sons die, leaving Radha with the diligent Ramu (Surendra) and her favourite, temperamental Birju (Yakub) who goes astray and becomes a bandit chieftain, which causes the family to be ostracised by the village. Birju murders Sukhilala and attempts to abduct his childhood sweetheart, Tulsi (Brij Rani). Radha then kills her son. The film lacks the psychoanalytic dimension and the overtones of socialist realism present in its famous remake, but Akhtar’s extraordinary performance endows it with an earthiness rooted in North Indian agrarian feudalism that was later replaced by Mother India’s attempt at nationalist allegory.

AZAD

1940 140’ b&w Hindi

d N.R. Acharya pc Bombay Talkies st Saradindu Bannerjee dial/lyr J.S. Casshyap c R.D. Pareenja m Saraswati Devi, Ramchandra Pal

lp Leela Chitnis, Ashok Kumar, Hansa Wadkar, Rama Shukul, Mumtaz Ali, Nazir Bedi, Arun, Ramchandra Pal, D.V. Surve

For his directorial debut, scripted by Osten’s regular collaborator Casshyap, Acharya orchestrates an allegory of contemporary political attitudes presented in terms of differing approaches to the institutionalisation of sexuality: marriage. There are three college friends: the liberal Vijay, the conservative Loknath and Jagdish, a careerist. Vijay rescues a damsel in distress and marries her. Later, his son Anand repeats his father’s history by rescuing Jagdish’s daughter from a bandit and marrying her, resolving the differences between the three friends. The film was overshadowed by the spectacular success of Acharya’s Bandhan that same year, but its commentative approach to contemporary politics was further elaborated in his Naya Sansar (1941).

BANDHAN

1940 154’ b&w Hindi

d N.R. Acharya pc Bombay Talkies p S. Mukherjee sc Gyan Mukherjee, Amiya Chakravarty dial J.S. Casshyap lyr Pradeep c R.D. Parineeja m Saraswati Devi, Ramchandra Pal

lp Leela Chitnis, Ashok Kumar, Suresh, P.F. Pithawala, V.H. Desai, Shah Nawaz, Purnima Desai, Jagannath, Arun Kumar

Acharya followed Azad (1940) with this tale about Beena (Chitnis), the daughter of the zamindar (Pithawala). Beena is to marry Suresh (Shah Nawaz) but loves Nirmal (Ashok Kumar), the head of a village school funded by the zamindar. Suresh and his father Gokul try to blackmail Nirmal and eventually accuse him of murdering Gauri (P. Desai), daughter of schoolteacher Bholanath (V.H. Desai), who is actually killed by Suresh. Producer S. Mukherjee adapted the by-now standard Bombay Talkies type of orientalist fiction about Indian feudalism into simplified, single-location melodramas, a virtually infallible formula both there and at Filmistan. This commercial hit is enlivened mainly by the songs performed by the actors themselves, esp. Ashok Kumar’s full-throated Chal chal re naujawan, Arun Kumar’s Chana jor garam and several Leela Chitnis numbers (e.g. Manabhavan, lo sawan aya re, Apne bhaiya ko naach nachaoongi).

BHAROSA

1940 147’ b&w Hindi

d Sohrab Modi pc Minerva Movietone s/lyr Lalchand Bismil c Y.D. Sarpotdar m G.P. Kapoor

lp Chandramohan, Sardar Akhtar, Mazhar Khan, Sheela, Maya Devi, Naval, Eruch Tarapore, Gulab, Menaka, Abu Baker

Modi’s tale of incest starts when Gyan (Khan) goes to Africa and entrusts his wife Shobha (Akhtar) to his bosom pal Rasik (Chandramohan). The two have an affair resulting in the child Indira (Sheela). On his return, Gyan assumes the child to be his and he is delighted when later she falls in love with Rasik’s son Madan (Naval), much to Rasik and Shobha’s consternation. As in his other social melodramas (e.g. Jailor, 1938 and 1958), Modi deploys a pathological sexuality to present feudal values as laws of nature.

BHUKAILASA

1940 c.185’ b&w Telugu

d Sundarrao Nadkarni pc Saraswati Cine Films st R. Nagendra Rao’s play Bhukailasa dial Balijepalli Lakshmikanta Kavi m R. Sudarshanam

lp R. Nagendra Rao, M.V. Subbaiah Naidu, Lakshmibai, Kamalabai, Master Vishwam

Second and, to some, best-known film version of the Ramayana episode staged earlier by R. Nagendra Rao. Sundarrao Nadkarni’s adaptation of his earlier Tamil film was one of the hits produced by A.V. Meiyappan before setting up the AVM Film Studio. The film, which Randor Guy describes as a unique collaboration between a Tamil producer, Marathi director, Telugu scenarist and Kannada actors, was initially a failure when released at Bezwada, but then went on to become one of the biggest commercial successes of the year. AVM remade it as a high-profile trilingual in 1958. For the plot, cf. Bhukailasa, 1958.

CHANDIKA

1940 184’ b&w Telugu

d R.S. Prakash pc Bhawani Pics st Muttaneni Venkata Chennakesavulu c Kamal Ghosh lyr/m Kopparapu Subba Rao

lp P. Kannamba, Vemuri Gaggaiah, Bellari Raghava, Lalitha Devi, Peddapuram Raju, Arani Satyanarayana, Puvvula Ratnamala

The forthright Chandika (Kannamba) plans to kill villainous womaniser Giriraju (Gaggaiah). Although she decides to do so on principle, she attempts the deed only when he tries to molest her. He is rescued by Veeramallu (Raghava) who has him jailed. Unusual melodrama loosely derived from Dumas’s The Three Musketeers and set in an undefined feudal era where royalty survives amid democratic state institutions. Although rehearsing the usual pieties about Hindu women, the film is remembered for its unorthodox heroine.

DHARMAPATNI

aka Pativrata

1940 170’ b&w Telugu/Tamil

d P. Pullaiah pc Famous Films
st V.S. Khandekar’s story dial Chakrapani lyr Daita Gopalam c S.K. Pai m Annasahed Mainkar, Timir Baran

lp Shantakumari, P. Bhanumathi, Peddappuram Raju, Lakshminarasimha, Hemalatha, Hanumantha Rao, A. Nageshwara Rao, Adinarayanaiah, Achari, Himam

Elaborate melodrama with several typical Khandekar characters: the good prostitute, the irredeemably evil man, the vacillating youth. The prostitute Sridevi, charged with looking after the orphaned Radha, arranges for Radha’s marriage to Mohan. The evil Ananda Rao, who covets Radha, reveals Sridevi’s past to Mohan’s father and the wedding is called off. Mohan marries the independent-minded Uma, and when he is framed for murder by Ananda Rao it is Uma who eventually brings the original couple together. Shot in Kolhapur for a Bombay-based film company, the film derives from e.g. Marathi cinema’s Huns Pics, adapted into Telugu by scenarist Chakrapani (making his film debut). It is also remembered as Telugu superstar A. Nageshwara Rao’s first film, as a teenage actor.

DIAMOND QUEEN

1940 155’ b&w Hindi

d Homi Wadia pc Wadia Movietone s J.B.H. Wadia dial/lyr Munshi Sham c R.P. Master m Madhavlal D. Master

lp Fearless Nadia, John Cawas, Radha Rani, Sayani, Nazira, Fatma, Sardar Mansoor, Dalpat, Kunjru, Boman Shroff, Minoo the Mystic

Nadia is Madhurika who, flanked by her horse Punjab-ka-Beta, her sidekick the reformed brigand Diler (Cawas), and her magic car Rolls-Royce-ki-Beti, cleans up Diamond Town. Like Hunterwali (1935), Miss Frontier Mail (1936) and Carnival Queen (1955), this is a stunt film featuring all Nadia’s Zorro-like swashbuckling skills, including the obligatory fight atop a speeding carriage. Its expressionist beginning, showing distorted facial close-ups, leads on to several theatrical devices e.g. the extensive use of back-projection when the house burns down, or later when Nadia and Cawas are saved by her horse from a waterfall in spate. Several indigenous symbols, like the glorified Bajrang, the Swastika (a tantric symbol) and physical exercises resembling those of Hanuman devotees are intended to contrast the obvious Western origins of the Wadias’ stunt idiom. Nadia performed her own stunts in this film combining elements from westerns, serials and sword-fighting pictures. Her difficulties with Hindi required her dialogues to be kept to a minimum.

GEETA

1940 163’[M]/164’[H] b&w Marathi/Hindi

d/sc P.Y. Altekar pc CIRCO st Minoo Katrak dial/lyr Mama Warerkar[M], S.K. Kalla[H] c Gordhanbhai Patel m Datta Koregaonkar [K. Dutta]

lp Chandramohan, Durga Khote, Anant Marathe, S. Prahlad, Keki Bawa, Ashalata, Vatsala Kumthekar, Trilok Kapoor

The Marathi stage personality and film-maker Altekar’s moral fable about the law. The naive, saintly Durga (Khote) uses the Bhagavad Gita as an ethical guidebook while her husband Shankar and later her son Mohan (Chandramohan in both roles) become professional villains. When her second son Kumar (Kapoor), an English-trained lawyer, returns he becomes a public prosecutor. He finds he must prosecute his own brother. Subplots include Sundari (Kumthekar), Mohan’s prostitute girlfriend whose pimp Keshavlal (Prahlad) killed Mohan’s father and whose sister Lata (Ashalata) is Durga’s disciple. The dialogues and songs of the Marathi version were written by major Marathi playwright Warerkar.

GNANAMBIKA

aka Jnanambika aka Raga Leela

1940 c.190’ b&w Malayalam

d S. Nottani pc Shyamala Pics s C. Madhavan Pillai from his novel lyr Puthankavu Mathan Tharakan

lp Sebastian Kunju Kunju Bhagavathar, C.K. Rajam, Aleppey Vincent, M.V. Shankar, K.K. Aroor, C. Madhavan Pillai, Chellappan Pillai, A.B. Pious, P.K. Kamalakshi, T.A. Rose, L. Ponnamma, C.A. Seetalakshmi, K. Ammini, C. Lakshmikutty, C.P. Devaki Made at the Newtone Studio, Madras, this was after Balan (1938) the director’s 2nd effort to capture the Malayalam market on behalf of his Tamil backers. The plot is similar to its predecessor with an unscrupulous second wife of a mild-mannered husband, who exploits his daughter by his first marriage. The wife and her lover want to appropriate the husband’s property. Eventually the wife is brought to justice and Gnanambika, the daughter, marries in traditional style. The film, using extensive outdoor locations from the Trivandrum zoo and museum complex, was successful. The lyrics by Puthankavu Mathan Tharakan were the first instance of a noted Malayalam poet writing verse for the cinema. Prahladan (1941) was the third in the venture of Tamil producers entering the Malayalam market.

HINDUSTAN HAMARA

aka Our India

1940 136’ b&w Hindi

d Ram Daryani pc Film Corp of India lyr Arzoo m Bhishmadev Chatterje

lp Jamuna, Padmadevi, Nandrekar, Gope, Hari Shivdasani, Badriprasad, Ram Dulari, Rajendra, Dewaskar

Feudal melodrama: Veena (Jamuna), daughter of an exploitative landlord and wife of the drunkard Chunilal (Shivdasani), defies her family and fights for the exploited peasantry. In the process she falls in love with the poor Madhu (Nandrekar). When her evil husband cannot undermine the peasants’ unity he commits suicide. The heroine is disinherited by her father, but remains committed to nationalism. The film prominently deploys Gandhian symbols (e.g. the spinning-wheel), and contrasts an idyllic notion of erstwhile India to the penury of its people today.

HOLI

1940 137’ b&w Hindi

d A.R. Kardar pc Ranjit Movietone

s/dial M. Sadiq lyr D.N. Madhok c Krishna

Gopal m Khemchand Prakash

lp Motilal, Khursheed, Ishwarlal, Sitara Devi, Keshavrao Date, Dikshit, Ghory, Lala Yakub, Tarabai, Manohar Kapoor

A Motilal star vehicle featuring him as a villain turning into a good guy. The evil Chand (Motilal) and his rich father Mangaldas (Date) persecute the nice Sunder (Ishwarlal): he kidnaps Sunder’s sister Kokila (Khursheed) and frames him for theft. Sunder is jailed. The abducted Kokila succumbs to the villain’s charms and her love reforms him. When released, Sunder, unaware of the fact that his enemy has reformed, seeks revenge on the very day that Chand and Kokila are to marry.

KUMKUM/KUMKUM THE DANCER

1940 150’[B]/142’[H] b&w Bengali/Hindi d Modhu Bose pc Sagar Film st Manmatha Ray dial[H] W.Z. Ahmed lyt[H] Sudarshan

c Jaigopal Pillai m Timir Baran lp Sadhona Bose, Dhiraj Bhattacharya, Preeti Majumdar, Padmadevi, Moni Chatterjee, Shashadhar Chatterjee, Lalit Roy, Binita Gupta, Labanya Palit, Abani Mitra, Rabi Ray[B], Bhujanga Ray[B], Kira Devi[B], Jasobant Agashi[B], Shanta Majumdar[B], Bechu Singha[B], M. Ishaq[H], Kamta Prasad[H], Bhudo Advani[H], Kayamali[H], Jamoo Patel[H], Kamal[H], Agashe[H]

Dance film idealising poverty made mainly to showcase Bose’s talents. Labour leader Suryashankar is jailed for trade union activities and, when released, finds that his friend Jagdish has stolen his property and plagiarised his play Bhookh (Hunger). To take revenge on behalf of the poor, Suryashankar’s daughter Kumkum (Bose) marries Jagdish’s son Chandan (Bhattacharya). Later she collaborates in staging a play meant to expose Jagdish’s evil past. The film’s publicity slogan was ‘She robbed her husband to feed the poor!’

LAGNA PAHAVE KARUN

1940 150’ b&w Marathi

d Master Vinayak pc Navyug Chitrapat st C.V. Joshi’s short story
sc/dial/co-lyr V. S. Khandekar co-lyr B.R. Tambe c Pandurang Naik m Dada Chandekar

lp Damuanna Malvankar, V. Jog, Shakuntala Bhome, Vasant Eric, Vatsala Kumthekar, Damayanti Joshi

Navyug Chitrapat started with Vinayak’s first adaptation of C.V. Joshi’s popular satires featuring the bumbling duo Chimanrao (Malvankar’s best-known film role) and Gundyabhau (Jog). In order to marry off his sister Chimni, Chimanrao must first get married himself but he is tricked by his prospective father-in-law. He then arranges a marriage between Chimni and a post office clerk who soon turns into a routinely selfish male. Shot mainly as a comedy about arranged marriages in early 20th-C. feudal Maharashtra, the film has a loose, episodic narrative with Gundyabhau addressing the viewer directly in the beginning and at the end. Much of it concerns ‘traditional’ attitudes evoked through e.g. technological novelties like still photography (the girl’s photograph to show to her prospective groom is taken in flat tones and a characteristic Ravi Varma-like posture), through caricatures of other communities (e.g. the Gujarati businessman from Kathiawar, the Englishman) and sometimes through the music (the sister knows one devotional song to show off her voice to elderly people and one love song if her audience is young).

LAPANDAV

1940 133’ b&w Marathi

d K. Narayan Kale pc Navyug Chitrapat s/lyr P.K. Atre c Pandurang Naik m Dada Chandekar

lp Baburao Pendharkar, Master Vinayak, Dada Salvi, Bapurao Pawar, Vanamala, Meenakshi

Comedy representing the best years of the Atre-Vinayak-Pendharkar combination at Navyug and addressing cultural modernisation problems in feudal Maharashtra. The crusty patriarch Raobahadur has two beautiful daughters. Both fall in love with men beneath their father’s social standing: one wants to marry an instructor at a driving school, the other falls for a building contractor.

NARSI BHAGAT

1940 179’ b&w Hindi

d Vijay Bhatt pc Prakash Pics st Mohanlal G. Dave sc Vishnupant Aundhkar lyr Sampatlal Srivastava ‘Anuj’, Balam c G.N. Shirodkar m Shankarrao Vyas

lp Vishnupant Pagnis, Durga Khote, Pande, V. Adikhar, Vimala Vasisth, Amirbai Karnataki, Ram Marathe, Baby Indira

Vijay Bhatt’s Saint film was built around Pagnis who had defined the genre through his performance in Sant Tukaram (1936). Narasinh Mehta (1408–75), a major Gujarati poet (Pagnis), is excluded from the community and, with his wife Manekbai, lives in extreme deprivation in Junagadh and Mangrol. His poems praising Krishna, often in the erotic and devotional Ras Lila form, also address the condition of Untouchables. Much of the film is based on his autobiographical statements which have now become part of popular legend. Key figures including his wife Manekbai (Khote), his evil sister-in-law, and her brother Sarangadhar (Pande), who persecute him. The film also features the Dewan of Warnagar, who chooses Narasinh’s son as the groom for his daughter. The plot requires Narasinh to sacrifice his son to save the prince as well as defend himself against accusations of sorcery. Bhatt’s largely descriptive camera emphasises physical movement while the elaborate set design contrasts with the sophisticated use of frontal shooting in Sant Tukaram. Apart from several Pagnis solos, other songs are by Amirbai Karnataki (esp. Jhulna jhulave nandalal) and one is by the young Ram Marathe (Ghanshyam rang ran javoon).

NARTAKI

1940 133’[B]/150’[H] b&w Bengali/Hindi d/s Debaki Bose pc New Theatres dial[H] A.H. Shore lyr Ajoy Bhattacharya[B], Munshi Arzoo[H] c Yusuf Mulji m Pankaj Mullick lp Lila Desai, Bhanu Bannerjee[B], Sailen Choudhury[B], Chhabi Biswas[B], Utpal Sen[B], Pankaj Mullick[B], Indu Mukherjee[B], Jyoti[B], Naresh Bose[B], Najam[H], Jagdish Sethi[H], R. Wasti[H], R.P. Kapoor[H], Nandkishore[H], Dhruba Kumar[H], Rajani Rani[H], Kalabati[H]

Period movie apparently set in the 16th C. The story pits the famous dancer Roopkumari (Desai), backed by the court, against a temple monastery ruled by the authoritarian ascetic priest Gyananandji. The temple forbids the entry of women and Roopkumari is determined to avenge such an insult. She seduces the priest’s son Satyasunder but she also falls in love with him. The film suggests that love transcends both political and religious authoritarianism. The Bengali version uses extensive songs by the 15th-C. Bengali saint poet Chandidas.

PAGAL

1940 142’ b&w Hindi

d/s A.R. Kardar pc Ranjit Movietone
lyr D.N. Madhok, P.L. Santoshi c Krishna Gopal m Khemchand Prakash

lp Madhuri, Prithviraj Kapoor, Charlie, Khatun, Sitara Devi, Lala Yakub

Kardar went against the studio’s usual brand of family melodrama with this story about a psychotic doctor in an asylum. Tricked into marrying Chhaya (Khatun), believing he is to marry her more beautiful sister Parvati (Madhuri), Dr Vasant (Kapoor) becomes a sexually obsessed maniac who injects Parvati with a drug that renders her insane. He then keeps her in his asylum where he continues to brutalise her. Intended as a critique of resurgent neo-traditionalism among the educated younger generation, the grotesque depiction of masculinity associated with modern medicine severely undercuts the implied critique of the methods used to arrange marriages, while women simply remain victims. In fact, the victimisation of women is portrayed with such gusto that the film ends up raising more disturbing questions about the way grotesque masculine sexuality pervades the very fabric of the film. Kardar’s Pooja (also 1940) offers a more considered treatment of the ravages wrought by feudal sexual codes.

POOJA

1940 191’ b&w Hindi-Urdu

d A.R Kardar pc National Studios st/dial M. Sadiq lyr Khan Shahir Ghaznavi c P.G. Kukde m Anil Biswas

lp Sardar Akhtar, Sitara Devi, Zahur Raja, Jyoti, Sankatha, Satish, Sunalini Devi, Bhudo Advani

In contrast to his lurid depiction of women’s suffering under feudal patriarchy in Pagal (1940), Kardar achieves a more complex treatment of sexual oppression in rural North India via Sadiq’s script. It was made the same year and by the same studio as Mehboob’s Aurat, also starring Akhtar. Pooja tells of two lonely sisters, Rama (Akhtar) and Lachhi (Sitara Devi), giving vent to their frustrations by persecuting each other. When Rama’s wedding to Darpan (Raja) falls through and she marries another, Darpan rapes Lachhi in revenge, although the rape is presented ambiguously, suggesting she might be complicit in wanting to take something from her sister. Lachhi has a child, Bina (Jyoti), and ends up living with her sister, the now widowed Rama. Bina is led to believe that Rama is her mother. Only later does Bina realise her real mother was her aunt’s servant. Kardar’s film set the tone for Mehboob’s later and better-known depictions of crumbling family relations and thwarted sexualities. It is more ambitious than Mehboob’s work of the time, with a fairly sparing use of melodramatic effects. The theme evoked radical Urdu literature’s critiques of feudal sexual mores, placed on the official literary agenda after the 1936 PWA conference whence writers like Ismat Chughtai drew their initial inspiration.

SANT DNYANESHWAR

1940 139’ b&w Marathi/Hindi
d V. Damle, S. Fattelal pc Prabhat Film
s Shivram Vashikar dial[H] Pandit Anand Kumar lyr Shantaram Athavale[M], P.L. Santoshi, Mukhram Sharma ‘Ashant’[H] c V. Avadhoot m Keshavrao Bhole

lp Shahu Modak, Datta Dharmadhikari, Pandit, Malati, Tamhankar, Shanta Majumdar, Sumati Gupte, Bhagwat

Durgadas Bannerjee in Thikadar

An effort to repeat the success of Sant Tukaram (1936) with a bigger budget and enlarged canvas. Dnyaneshwar (1275–96) was the first of the Marathi saint poets and wrote the Dnyaneshwari as a commentary of the Bhagavad Gita in the rhythm of the ovi form, using popular language for the first time in Marathi literature, the culmination of the regional literary works that emerged throughout India after the 7th C. More closely associated with the performance of miracles than Tukaram or Eknath, Dnyaneshwar’s exploits are narrated in the keertan form of religious storytelling. Crowd scenes, elaborate sets and complicated miracle scenes (shot by Pralhad Dutt and Harbans) signal the film’s spectacular ambitions. Like the directors’ last saint film, Sant Sakhu (1941), this effort at times finds an effective mise en scene using frontally shot imagery while allowing the action to expand around the fixed point of the god’s position (in this case represented by the Bhagavad Geeta) which, as the film progresses, Dnyaneshwar (Modak) gradually comes to occupy.

SUMANGALI

1940 194’ b&w Telugu

d/st B.N. Reddi pc Vauhini Pics

sc/c K. Ramnoth dial/lyr Samudrala Raghavacharya m Chittor V. Nagaiah lp Chittor V. Nagaiah, Giri, Kumari, Malathi, Lingamurthy, Sheshamamba, Doraiswamy

This typical Vauhini melodrama is made by the unit responsible for Rohini’s Grihalakshmi (1938): writer/cameraman Ramnoth, designer A.K. Sekhar, scenarist Raghavacharya and composer/lead star Nagaiah. Mobilising one of reformism’s main motifs, widow remarriage, the film tells of the progressive Sathyam (Giri) who is loved by two women: his rustic cousin Parvati (Malathi) and the educated, fashionable and rich Saraswathi (Kumari). When Saraswathi discovers that she had been married and widowed as a child, preventing her from marrying again, all three protagonists are plunged into emotional turmoil. Eventually Parvati sacrifices her life so that Sathyam and Saraswathi can marry after all. Making plentiful use of symbols (e.g. the crucifix when Saraswathi is the victim of attempted rape), the film apparently drew inspiration from the Telugu reformist writer Kandakuri Veeresalingam Panthulu (1848–1919) (Nagaiah plays a white-haired character called Panthulu). Despite innovative camerawork and several musical hits by Nagaiah (e.g. Ada brathuke madhuram, Pasupukunkumd), the film flopped when first released, almost sinking the Vauhini Studio.

THIKADAR

1940 c.145’ b&w Bengali

d Prafulla Roy pc Shri Bharatlaxmi Pics s/m Tulsi Lahiri c Bibhuti Das

lp Tulsi Lahiri, Durgadas Bannerjee, Jiban Ganguly, Satya Mukherjee, Renuka Roy, Chitra Devi, Kamala Jharia, Santosh Sinha, Rabi Ray, Sudhir Mitra, Girin Chakraborty

Melodrama featuring a thikadar (forest contractor), a somewhat remote figure like the landscape in which he operates. The villain is the plantation-owner named Abani Haldar, with a beautiful daughter, Latika. The thikadar saves Haldar in an accident, while later it is revealed that Haldar killed the thikadar’s father and left his wife and children for dead. Latika, who loves the thikadar, succeeds in preventing the forester from taking revenge for those crimes. The playwright Tulsi Lahiri, an influential figure who helped introduce realism to the post-WW2 Bengali theatre with plays like Chhenra Tar, Pathik and Dukhir Iman (the latter two were also filmed, in 1939/1953 and 1954 respectively), wrote, scored and acted in this film noted for its extensive location shooting and crowd scenes showing the lives of plantation workers.

VISHWAMOHINI

1940 195’ b&w Telugu

d/st Y.V. Rao Jagdish Pics dial/lyr Balijepalli Lakshmikanta Kavi m Ogirala Ramchandra Rao lp Y.V. Rao, Chittor V. Nagaiah, Lalitha Devi, Bezawada Rajarathnam, Rangaswamy, Kakinada Rajarathnam, Doraiswamy, Gangarathnam, Sampurna, Suryanarayana

A love triangle satirising the film industry. Purshottam (Y.V. Rao) embezzles money from a firm of brokers owned by Padmanabham in order to get his son Mohan Rao married to Hemalatha, daughter of the millionaire Vishalakshamma (B. Rajarathnam). The now impoverished Padmanabham partially gets his own revenge when his daughter Sushila (Lalitha Devi) becomes the film star Vishwamohini, introduced by the film producer Pashupati, brother of Vishalakshamma. The star Vishwamohini falls in love with Mohan Rao and her father agrees to their marriage provided Mohan can find a job. He pretends to have done so and the two get married. Hemalatha offers Vishwamohini money to go away and free Mohan, which, in an emotional scene, she refuses to do. The hit film continued director/star Y.V. Rao’s trailblazing work at Jagdish (his earlier film for them, Malli Pelli, 1939, was also a hit) and includes long comedy sequences such as the satirical depiction of a film director (Nagaiah).

ZINDAGI

1940 120’ b&w Hindi

d/c P.C. Barua pc New Theatres co-dial/co-lyr Kidar Sharma co-dial Javed Hussain co-lyr Arzoo Lucknowi m Pankaj Mullick lp K.L. Saigal, Pahadi Sanyal, Ashalata, Jamuna, Shy am Laha, Nemo, Sitara Devi, Bikram Kapoor, Rajni Rani

Following on from Mehboob’s Ek Hi Raasta (1939), Barua also shows an unmarried couple living together, one of the most sacrosanct taboos of the Indian cinema. In a park, the vagabond gambler Ratan (Saigal) encounters Shrimati (Jamuna) who has escaped from her brutal husband. They team up and collect numerous donations pretending to belong to a charitable religious trust. They buy a flat and live together until Shrimati’s father dies and she inherits his wealth. Renouncing her earlier life, she devotes herself to good works and employs Ratan to tutor an adopted orphan, Lakhia, but he discovers that he cannot live without her, while she, feeling she must pay for her guilty life, rejects him. He returns to being a tramp and she gives her fortune to Lakhia and withdraws to a lonely dwelling awaiting death. To ensure a happy ending, the two meet again as though on the threshhold of a new afterlife. The film had several Sharma songs performed by Saigal, including the famous So jaa rajkumari.

FILMS 1941–1950

AMRIT

1941 153’[M]/162’[H] b&w Marathi/Hindi
d Master Vinayak pc Navyug Chitrapat s/lyr[M] V.S. Khandekar lyr[H] Pandit Indra c Pandurang Naik m Dada Chandekar lp Dada Salvi, Baburao Pendharkar, Lalita Pawar, Master Vithal, Damuanna Malvankar, Javdekar, Meenakshi, V. Jog, Master Vinayak

A complicated plot about class differences in a coastal Konkan village. It introduces a typical Khandekar character, the idealistic but dogmatic patriarch who becomes a victim of his beliefs. Here it is Bappa (Salvi) who monopolises the village’s palm trees from which toddy is made. He believes in fairness, not in mercy. The story of his urban son Vilas (Vithal), his daughter Lata and her friend Sadanand is intercut with that of a drunken shoemaker Krishna (Pendharkar) and his wife Seeta (Pawar). Vilas, who covets the shoemaker’s wife, procures a new hut for them. The son then starts having problems with his father and all the parallel storylines converge when Vilas accidentally kills Seeta’s daughter. Bappa, using his political influence, gets her innocent husband arrested instead and Seeta, exploiting Vilas’s desire for her, retaliates by making him her virtual slave. Bappa eventually faces up to his moral responsibility in a tale that also warns against the demon drink.

ANJAAN

1941 144’ b&w Hindi d/s Amiya Chakravarty pc Bombay Talkies dial J.S. Casshyap, Shaheed Latif lyr Pradeep, P.L. Santoshi c R.D. Mathur m Pannalal Ghosh

lp Devika Rani, Ashok Kumar, V.H. Desai, Girish, Suresh, P.F Pithawala, Gulab, Fatty Prasad, Yusuf Sulehman, Syed Mukhtar, David

Bombay Talkies’ formula melodrama: villain is hero’s rival in love, frames hero with crime, hero vindicates himself (cf. Janmabhoomi, 1936; Bandban, 1940). Dowager Ranima runs the feudal household helped by the family doctor, guardian Ajit (Kumar) and villainous manager Ramnath (Pithawala). Indira (Devika Rani), the children’s governess, is wooed by both Ramnath and Ajit. Ranima dies, Ramnath accuses Ajit of having killed her but Ajit vindicates himself after a long courtroom battle. Remembered mainly as Bombay Talkies’ star director Amiya Chakravarty’s directorial debut and for the celebrated classical flautist Pannalal Ghosh’s score.

ASHOK KUMAR

1941 211’ b&w Tamil

d Raja Chandrasekhar pc Murugan Talkie Films s Elangovan lyr Papanasam Sivan, Papanasam Rajagopal Iyer, Yanai Vaidyanatha Iyer cjiten Bannerjee m Alattur V. Sivasubramanyam

lp M.K. Thyagaraja Bhagavathar, Chittor V. Nagaiah, P. Kannamba, TV. Kumudini, N.S. Krishnan, T.A. Mathuram, M.G. Ramachandran, Ranjan

Hit Tamil historical retelling of the famous and often filmed (cf. Veer Kunal, 1925) legend of the 3rd-C. BC Mauryan King Ashoka (Nagaiah). His second wife Tishyarakshithai (Kannamba) tries to seduce his son Gunalan (Bhagavathar) but he prefers Pramila (Kumudini). The queen then accuses him of having tried to seduce her and Ashoka exiles his son and has him blinded. Later the emperor repents and the Buddha (Ranjan) appears to restore the prince’s sight. The film takes many liberties with the legend as it appears in the original Ashokavadana (cf. Romila Thapar’s Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, 1961), while addressing notions of non-violence and vegetarianism. It is remembered mainly as Bhagavathar’s film, at the zenith of his career, singing songs that have become part of Tamil Nadu’s social history (e.g. Boomiyil manida genman, also sung by the Sri Lankan plantation workers in Dieterle’s Elephant Walk, 1953). Other hits included songs by Nagaiah making his Tamil debut. Besides recycling the tune of Pankaj Mullick’s Hindi song Piya milan from the film Kapal Kundala (1939), a growing practice at the time, the film also shows the influence of Busby Berkeley in the staging of a dance at court. The action sequences feature an early appearance of MGR in a minor role (as the General Mahendran). It is also an early film of stunt actor Ranjan (who became famous with Chandralekha, 1948). The known Tamil comic duo of Krishnan and Mathuram have a subplot of their own.

BAHEN

aka Sister, aka My Sister

1941 156’ b&w Hindi

d Mehboob pc National Studios st Zia Sarhadi, Babubhai A. Mehta sc/dial Wajahat Mirza lyr Safdar ‘Aah’ c Faredoon Irani m Anil Biswas

lp Sheikh Mukhtar, Nalini Jaywant, Harish, Kanhaiyalal, Husn Bano, Swaroop Rani, Shahzadi, R. Choube, Baby Meena (aka Meena Kumari), Bhudo Advani, Agashe, Iqbal Begum

Classic Mehboob incest film. Elder brother Amar (Mukhtar) saves the life of his infant sister Bina and raises her, becoming very possessive about her. When Bina grows up (Jaywant), the progressive social activist Rajendra (Harish) wants to marry her. Amar then plots to get a thief, Moti (Kanhaiyalal), to marry and immediately abandon her so that she will forever remain dependent on Amar. Eventually she does get married and the brother’s grief is alleviated only when his sister delivers a child (in a remarkable sequence featuring the nurses at the hospital). The incest motif was widely used to represent the complexities of an ‘Aryan’ agrarian-feudal patriarchy (e.g. the New Theatres’ Meri Bahen, 1944, and, classically, in Ghatak’s Subarnarekha, 1962), but Mehboob was distinctive in making it a central focus.

M.K. Thyagaraja Bhagavathar and P. Kannamba in Ashok Kumar

BHAKTIMALA

1941 186’ b&w Telugu

d/s Haribhai Desai pc Bhaskar Pics

c M.A. Rehman m Kopparapu Subba Rao

lp B.R. Panthulu, P. Bhanumathi, M. Lingamurthy, Coconada Rajarathnam, Shanta, Venkatagiri, Kutumba Sastry, Annapurna, Kondala Rao, G.V. Sitapathy

Story paying tribute to the Varkari tradition of Marathi saint poets. Radha (Bhanumathi), a devadasi (South Indian form of ritualised prostitution, in which the woman is wedded to god), converts herself into a worshipper of the saints. She is persecuted by the pimp Timmaya Sastry (Kondala Rao) and the villainous Brahmin Ramanujachari (Sitapathy). The hero Mohan (Panthulu) joins her struggle for social reform. When Ramanujachari has her framed for Mohan’s murder, she is saved through divine intervention. One of the best-known films of Haribhai Desai, a Gujarati graduate of the New York Institute of Cinematography as well as manager of Laxmi Pics and the Suvarna Studio in Poona, and the founder of the influential Bangalore-based Surya Film. This studio became a conduit for other Bombay-based directors (e.g. Sundarrao Nadkarni) to work in Tamil, Telugu and Kannada cinemas, bringing their influences of Marathi, Hindi and Gujarati cinema to the South.

CHITRALEKHA

1941 156’ b&w Hindi

d/sc/lyr Kidar Sharma pc Film Corp. of India st Bhagwati Charan Verma’s novel c G.K. Mehta m Jhande Khan, A.S. Gyani lp Mehtab, Nandrekar, A.S. Gyani, Rajendar, Monica Desai, Ram Dulari, Leela Mishra, Ganpatrai Premi

Sharma’s first major musical hit contains what is probably the first erotic bathing sequence in Indian cinema after Brahmachari (1938). Chitralekha (Mehtab), a dancer at the court of Chandragupta (founder of the 3rd-C. BC Mauryan dynasty, cf. Ashok Kumar, 1941), seduces Bijagupta (Nandrekar), a libertarian known as the ‘ultimate sinner’. Mrityunjay (Premi), a nobleman who wants his daughter Yashodhara (Desai) to marry Bijagupta, gets his guru, the mystic Kumaragiri (Gyani) to undo Chitralekha’s seductive charms but she triumphs over him, causing the guru to commit suicide. Chitralekha then leaves the palace and the lonely Bijagupta goes to the holy city of Gaya to purify himself. However, there he meets and falls in love with Yashodhara. When he loses her as well, he concludes that all women are an illusion (Maya) and becomes a saint. The reformed Chitralekha becomes his disciple. Most of the famous songs are by actress/singer Ram Dulari. Sharma remade it in garish colour with Meena Kumari (1964).

CHOODAMANI

1941 211’ b&w Telugu

d P.K. Raja Sandow pc Janaki Pics s Sadasiva Brahmam c Mama Shinde m S. Venkataraman lp Pushpavalli, C.S.R. Anjaneyulu, Narayanrao, Sundaramma, Satyavati, Pulipati

Sandow’s elaborately scripted melodrama introduced the complicated Tamil entertainment formula into Telugu cinema. Madhusudhan (Anjaneyulu) is an Oxford graduate and a Madras-based businessman. Choodamani (Pushpavalli) is a beautiful rural orphan who turns down villain Raghava Rao’s offer of marriage. The villain is joined by Madhuri, a cranky woman seduced and abandoned by the hero, and they make trouble at Madhusudhan and Choodamani’s wedding. Madhuri bears the hero’s child but strangles the baby and abandons it in a garbage can but she is caught by Raghava Rao who blackmails the hero into bankruptcy and even causes the hero to suspect his own wife of adultery. In a fit of rage he murders his own child but the infant is magically revived by a holy man. The film has a clown, Girisan, who leaves his wife to adopt a Western lifestyle, ending up as a barber.

DAKSHAYAGNAM

1941 184’ b&w Telugu

d Ch. Narayanamurthy pc Shobhanachala Pics s/lyr B.T. Narasimhacharyulu c Bhavan m Moti Babu

lp Vemuri Gaggaiah, C. Krishnaveni, Bezwada Rajarathnam, G. Varalakslimi, Kamaladevi, Gopika Devi, Samrajyam, Ramakrishna Shetty, Kumpatla, Sadasiva Rao, Ramana Rao, Kanchi Narasimham

Telugu mythological telling the story of the enmity between Shiva and Daksha, the father of Shiva’s consort Uma. When Daksha announces a yagna (ritual sacrifice), Shiva is the only god in the pantheon who is not invited, and Uma arrives alone. This crisis threatens to terminate the yagna before it can start, as Uma gives up her life and is resurrected as Parvati.

Chittor V. Nagaiah (right) in Devatha

DEVATHA

aka Divinity

1941 186’ b&w Telugu
d B.N. Reddi pc Vauhini Pics s/c K. Ramnoth dial/lyr Samudrala, Raghavacharya
m Chittor V. Nagaiah

lp Chittor V. Nagaiah, Lingamurthy, Bezwada Rajarathnam, Ch. Narayana Rao, T. Suryakumari, Subba Rao, Master Ashwathama, Kumari

A big success in spite of its controversial subject-matter and its unusually mobile camerawork breaking with the prevailing theatrical conventions adopted in South Indian cinema. The plot tells of the young Venu (Nagaiah) who returns to his family in the village after studying law in England. He has an affair with Lakshmi (Kumari), the maid, and she becomes pregnant. Due to marry the well-off and ‘modern’ Vimala (Rajarathnam), Venu tries to get rid of Lakshmi by offering her money but she refuses and leaves. As for Vimala, she lets Venu off the hook by eloping with a phony poet, Sukumar (Narayana Rao), so that Venu, who confessed his pre-marital affair to his mother, can try to make amends by marrying the lower-class Lakshmi. Mother and son, accompanied by the daughter Seeta (Suryakumari), set out in search of Lakshmi and locate her in Madras where she became a prostitute and then was jailed for assaulting the madam. All are reconciled. The film questions both the established class divisions and the sexual mores of its depicted social milieu. As with all of Nagaiah’s early films, this is a musical hit with perennial songs like Adigo andiyala ravani, Radhe chali and Evaru makinka saati (by Rajarathnam), and Vendikanchalalo and Kroorakarmammulu (by T. Suryakumari). The melodrama re-established Vauhini after the financial disaster of Sumangali (1940), although diluting the reformist commitment of earlier films by the Reddi/Ramnoth/Raghavacharya/A.K. Sekhar combination. A review in Ananda Vikatan (20.7.1941) welcomed the film, exclaiming: ‘Oh gods and goddesses! We wanted to portray you as heroes and heroines in our films. That’s what we said when we produced talkies. No god/goddess objected to that. [T]hen we came down to Puranic characters – on to bhaktas, maharajahs, zamindars, millionaires and thence to the common man. But none had thought to make the servant maid the heroine of a film.’ Realism in this context meant deploying a new symbolic lexicon (cf. the seduction scene juxtaposed with a montage of sexy covers of glossy foreign magazines, erotic sculpture and calendar art).

DOCTOR

1941 144’ b&w Hindi

d Subodh Mitra pc New Theatres
st Sailajananda Mukherjee

dial/co-lyr A.H. Shore co-lyr Munshi Arzoo
c Yusuf Mulji m Pankaj Mullick

lp Pankaj Mullick, Ahindra Choudhury, Jyoti Prakash, Master Meenu, Nemo, Amar Mullick, Buddhadeb, Indu Mukherjee, Miss Panna, Bharati

Amar Nath (P. Mullick), progressive son of an aristocratic family, becomes a doctor to address the cholera epidemic ravaging his ancestral village. He marries village girl Maya (Panna) against the wishes of his father Seeta Nath (Choudhury), causing a break with his family. Maya dies in childbirth and Amar Nath agrees to let Dayal (A. Mullick), his father’s secretary, adopt the infant son on condition that the boy’s antecedents are kept secret. The boy Somnath (Prakash) becomes a doctor and, fired by the idealist zeal of Amar Nath but unaware that he is his father, decides to start a drugs factory in the village. The son falls in love with Shibani (Bharati) but this pits him against Seeta Nath, unaware he is his grandfather. The Mukherjee story invokes the standard reformist moral conflict between ancestry and vocation often used to subordinate ideals of progress and modernity (e.g. medicine) to ‘tradition’.

GUMASTAVIN PENN

aka Clerk’s Daughter

1941 183’ b&w Tamil

d K.V. Srinivasan pc TKS Brothers, Gemini Pics. Circuit st TKS Brothers’ play sc V.S. Vyas dial T.K. Muthuswamy c Rustom Irani m Narayanan, Padmanabhan Party

lp M.V. Rajamma, P. Subbaiah Pillai, T.S. Rajalakshmi, M.S. Draupadi, T.K. Shanmugham, T. Seetalakshmi, T.K. Bhavgavathi, Friend Ramaswamy, Shakuntala Natarajan

A melodrama based on a famous play by TKS Bros, itself derived from Nirupama Devi’s Bengali novel Annapurnika Mandir. Poor but upright Brahmin clerk Ramaswamy Iyer (Pillai), employed by a wealthy zamindar, has two unmarried daughters, Sarasa (Draupadi) and Seeta (Rajamma). Seeta loves the rich Ramu (Shanmugham), a match approved by Ramu’s widowed mother (Seetalakshmi) but opposed by Ramu who arranges for Seeta to marry someone else. She refuses. Because of the ensuing scandal Seeta finds herself obliged to marry an old widower who fortunately dies directly after the wedding. Then the clerk’s evil employer Mani (Bhagavathi) goes after her. He sacks her reluctant father, causing him to die of shock. Ramu later repents and tries to help Seeta’s family but she commits suicide leaving him the responsibility of taking care of her sister. Ramu then tries to marry off the younger sister Sarasa, later marrying her himself. This was regarded as an early attempt at realism in Tamil cinema. Following its success Annadurai novelised a sequel, Gumastavin Penn or Kolaigariyin Kurripugal.

JHOOLA

1941 176’ b&w Hindi

d/co-sc Gyan Mukherjee pc Bombay Talkies p S. Mukherjee co-sc/co-dial P.L. Santoshi co-dial Shaheed Latif lyr Pradeep c R.D. Parineeja m Saraswati Devi

lp Leela Chitnis, Ashok Kumar, Shah Nawaz, Karuna Devi, V.H. Desai, Mumtaz Ali, Shahzadi, Rajkumari Shukla, Minoo Cooper, M.A. Aziz

The third consecutive S, Mukherjee-produced hit by Bombay Talkies starring Leela Chitnis and Ashok Kumar [Kangan, 1939, Bandhan, 1940). Two half-brothers, Ramesh (Kumar) and Mahesh (Shah Nawaz), love the same woman, Geeta (Chitnis). Mahesh inherits his father’s estate (half of which belongs to Ramesh) while Ramesh works as a postman. Complicating the situation is the presence of Kamala (Karuna Devi), Mahesh’s former beloved who eventually wrecks his matrimonial designs on Geeta. The film adheres to the Bombay Talkies tradition of the ruralist melodrama, with a simplified Hindustani dialect and the studio’s familiar clutch of supporting characters, such as the benevolent patriarchal Zamindar, the postmaster (Desai), the dancing courtier and postal employee (Mumtaz Ali). Gyan Mukherjee’s debut also announces the shortly to be formed Filmistan studio’s signature style of taut, dramatic editing in its complicated climax when Mahesh’s henchmen chase Geeta, who is rescued by Ramesh and by a popular revolt among the villagers. Ashok Kumar sings his best known film song Chali re meri nao. Mukherjee’s next film was the crime movie Kismet (1943).

KHAZANCHI

aka The Cashier
1941 171’b&w Hindi

d Moti B. Gidwani pc Pancholi Art Pics
st Dalsukh M. Pancholi lyr Walli c Badri Dass m Ghulam Haider

lp. M Ismail, Ramola, S.D. Narang, Manorama, Durga Mota, Jankidas, Ajmal

Musical megahit from Lahore often cited as the precursor of the commercial Hindi cinema’s editing and sound-mixing style and trend-setter of Hindi-Urdu film music, mainly through its adaptations of Punjabi folk music. Shadilal (Ismail), the trusted cashier of a bank, has to transport gold jewellery to Bombay. His son Kanwal (Narang) falls in love with the millionaire Durgadas’s (Mota) daughter Madhuri (Ramola). Kanwal finds himself pitted against the villainous Ramesh (Ajmal), Durgadas’s secretary and the nephew of Madhuri’s stepmother as well as being a rival suitor for Madhuri. The marriage is cancelled when news flashes from Bombay that Shadilal has murdered an actress and absconded with the jewellery.

NAYA SANSAR

1941 158’ b&w Hindi

d N.R. Acharya pc Bombay Talkies
p S. Mukherjee st/co-sc K.A. Abbas co-sc Gyan Mukherjee dial J.S. Casshyap, Shaheed Latif lyr Pradeep c R.D. Parineeja m Saraswati Devi, Ramchandra Pal

lp Renuka Devi, Ashok Kumar, Mubarak, Shah Nawaz, V.H. Desai, Jagannath, David, Suresh, Sushil Kumar, P.F. Pithawala, Azoorie

Although S. Mukherjee’s production team (e.g. Gyan Mukherjee, Shaheed Latif) were involved, authorship for this film is usually credited to Abbas. It was his first major film work, in which he used his experiences as a journalist to create the character of the reporter Puran (A. Kumar). Premchand (Mubarak), fearless editor of the radical newspaper Sansar, loves Asha (Renuka Devi), an orphan raised by his family. She joins the paper and falls for its ace reporter, the cynical Puran, yet she feels bound to accept her benefactor’s marriage proposal. When the editor dilutes his radicalism and starts negotiating with the corrupt Dhaniram, Puran leaves and produces a broadsheet called Naya Sansar (New World). The editor recognises his mistake, gives his blessing to the couple and even re-employs Puran, promising to stick to his radical stance. There are numerous dances composed and performed by Azoorie promoting solidarity and against Untouchability. Abbas later named his film production unit Naya Sansar Films and made all his films under that banner.

PARICHAY/LAGAN

1941 141’[B]/150’[H] b&w Bengali/Hindi

d/sc/c Nitin Bose pc New Theatres st Binoy Chatterjee lyr[H] Arzoo m Rai Chand Boral lp K.L. Saigal, Kanan Devi, Naresh Bose, Rathin Bannerjee[B], Mihir Bhattacharya[B], Shyam Laha[B]/Nawab[H], Nandita Devi[B], Harimohan Bose[B], Jagdish[H], Girdharilal Vaid[H], Nemo[H], Rehmat Bibi[H]

Student Kusum Kumari (Kanan Devi) is a hit at a college concert while her tutor, the composer and poet (Saigal), is ignored. After marrying the rich Deendayal (Laha/Nawab), she realises she loves the poet. Her husband tries to please her by publishing the poet’s work, making him famous, which leads to further complications. The film made an important contribution to Saigal’s image, helping to define the Indian version of the romantic stereotype of the artist, a figure later mobilised by e.g. Guru Dutt in Pyaasa (1957).

PAYACHI DASI/CHARNON KI DASI

1941 126’[M]/129’[H] b&w Marathi/Hindi

d Gajanan Jagirdar p/s/lyr[M] P.K. Atre
pc Atre Pics dial/lyr[H] Anand Kumar
c S. Hardip m Annasaheb Mainkar

lp Durga Khote, Vanamala, Gajanan Jagirdar, Avinash, Kusum Deshpande, Kelkar

Typical Marathi reform social written and produced by Atre. Evil mother-in-law (Khote) cruelly exploits the young bride Vidya (Vanamala). Husband Murari (Avinash) protests only feebly until finally he decides to revolt and stand by his wife. The film ends with Vidya, now in charge of the house, declaring her commitment to the very tradition that victimised her. The widowed and equally vindictive sister-in-law Champa (Deshpande) and the village flirt Nokheram (played by the director) are the other major characters of this commercial hit.

PRAHLADAN

aka Bhakta Prahlada

1941 183’ b&w Malayalam

d K. Subramanyam pc Madras United Artists Corp s N.P. Chellappan Nair lyr Kilimannoor Madhavaryar c Kamal Ghosh

lp Gopinath, Thangamani, Kumari Lakshmi, Master Sadasivam, N.P. Chellappan Nair, P.R. Rajagopala Iyer, K.R.N. Swamy, Sharada, Master Gopi, N. Krishna Pillai

Shot at the Gemini Studio by the leading Tamil director of the time, the mythological retells the familiar tale of the demon Hiranyakashapu and his devout son Prahlada who worships the god Vishnu. The film was noted mainly for its spectacular dances, featuring the famed duo of Gopinath (as Hiranyakashapu) and Thangamani (as his wife Kayadhu). The dance of Yama, god of death, was the film’s major highlight. Some of the choreography was set to classical Carnatic music. Master Sadasivam provided the mandatory comedy relief.

RAJ NARTAKI/COURT DANCER

1941 144[B]/126’[H]/86’[E] b&w Bengali/Hindi/English

d/sc Modhu Bose pc Wadia Movietone st Manmatha Ray dial[H] W.Z. Ahmed lyr Pandit Indra[H] c Jatin Das, Probodh Das m Timir Baran

lp Sadhona Bose, Jyoti Prakash[B]/Prithviraj Kapoor[H], Ahindra Choudhury, Protima Dasgupta, Binita Gupta, Preeti Majumdar

Best-known film by the Bose husband and wife team. Set in feudal Manipur, presumably to display Bose’s abilities in the famous classical dance form of the region. The story pivots around Prince Chandrakriti’s (Prakash/Kapoor) responsibilities to his kingdom requiring him to marry the princess of Tripur although he loves the court dancer Madhuchanda (Bose). The mystical head of a temple sect persuades Madhuchanda to give up her hold on the prince. She does so at the cost of her reputation and becomes a public outcast. One of the few Indian films made also in English and released in the USA.

RISHYASHRINGAR

1941 172’ b&w Tamil

d Acharya pc Tamil Nadu Talkies p S. Soundararajan lyr Papanasam Rajagopal Iyer c Jiten Bannerjee m Sharma Bros

lp Ranjan, Vasundhara Devi, S. Balachander, G. Pattu Iyer, A.K. Kamalam, K.N. Rajalakshmi, M.S. Murugesan, Kumari Rukmini, Ramani, Kumar Murali

A rare mythological celebrating the triumph of desire over religious asceticism. The celibate sage Vibhandaka (Iyer) finds an abandoned child and names him Rishyashringar (Ranjan). He teaches the child all the scriptures but keeps him isolated from all human contact. In a nearby kingdom that faces drought following the curse of a sage, the king is told that only Rishyashringar can bring rain. The king sends the seductive Maya (Vasundhara Devi) to entice him into the kingdom, which she does. Rishya arrives, brings the rain and marries the princess, much to the dismay of Vibhandaka.

SANT SAKHU

1941 128’ b&w Marathi/Hindi

d V. Damle, S. Fattelal, Raja Nene pc Prabhat Film s Shivram Vashikar dial/co-lyr[H] P.L. Santoshi co-lyr[H] Mukhram Sharma lyr[M] Shantaram Athavale c V. Avadhoot, E. Mohammed m Keshavrao Bhole

lp Hansa Wadkar, Gauri, Shankar Kulkarni, Shanta Majumdar, Sumitra

The only woman-centred Saint film at Prabhat with Wadkar in the classic role of Sakhu, a Marathi Saint poet whose existence is mainly legendary as opposed to the better-documented male ones. She is depicted as a devoutly religious woman married to a weak husband (Kulkarni) and oppressed by her cruel mother-in-law Mhalsakaku (Gauri) and sister-in-law Durga (Majumdar). Recognition comes at the end of the film through a series of miracles (including the classic scene where she is tied to a pillar, her disembodied death and reincarnation). Unlike the directors’ earlier and better-known films in the genre, this was mainly a family melodrama. The celebratory power of the genre only appears sporadically, e.g. the pilgrims walking to Pandharpur. Unusually, the mandatory miracle scenes were integrated into the plot (instead of merely illustrating saintly power), esp. at the end when the ‘real’ Sakhu confronts her divine stand-in to confuse everyone in the village and to attract charges of being a ghost. The bizarre publicity included stills showing convoys of military vehicles captioned ‘What leads an army - Faith’.

SHEJARI/PADOSI

1941 134’[M]/135’[H] b&w Marathi/Hindi

d V. Shantaram pc Prabhat Film 5 Vishram Bedekar dial/lyr[H] Sudarshan
lyr[M] Shantaram Athavale c V. Avadhoot
m Master Krishnarao

lp Gajanan Jagirdar, Balakram, Sumitra, Gopal, Keshavrao Date[M]/Mazhar Khan[H], Chandrakant[M], Jayashree[M], Gauri[M], Manajirao[M], Master Chhotu[M], Vatsala[M], Anees Khatun[H], Balwant Singh[H], Muliya[H], Casshyap[H], Radha Krishna[H], Vasant Thengadi[H], Lajwanti[H], Sarala Devi[H]

Gauri and Hansa Wadkar in Sant Sakhu

Melodrama addressing communal harmony. Mirza (Jagirdar) and Patil (Date/Khan) are close friends and the senior guardians of their village. The industrialist Omkar wants to build a bigger dam but is opposed by the duo. He has Patil sacked and his son excommunicated for allegedly burning a house. This causes a rift between the two old friends, who eventually make up as the giant dam bursts and they die in each other’s arms. Shantaram continued his relentlessly emotional and symbolic use of nature, as the stormy scene that accompanies Omkar’s decision to split the friendship between Mirza and Patil. This use of nature culminates logically in the film’s highlight: the dam bursting with a series of impressive nature-on-the-rampage shots. The Marathi version has some classic hits, including Radhika chatur bole and the nicely picturised community number Lakh lakh chanderi tejachi nyari duniya shot in torchlight with remarkably controlled deep-focus shots.

SIKANDAR

1941 146’ b&w Urdu

d Sohrab Modi pc Minerva Movietone
s/lyr Sudarshan c Y.D. Sarpotdar m Mir Saheb, Rafiq Ghaznavi

lp Sohrab Modi, Prithviraj Kapoor, Vanamala, Meena, Sheela, Sadiq Ali, Zahur Raja, Shakir, K.N. Singh, Jilloo

Modi’s military epic is set in 326BC when Alexander the Great aka Sikandar (Kapoor), having conquered Persia and the Kabul valley, descends to the Indian border at Jhelum with his Macedonian army and encounters King Porus (Modi) of the Punjab who stops the advance with his troops. The plot has Sikandar ignoring his teacher Aristotle’s (Shakir) advice and he falls for a Persian woman, Rukhsana (Vanamala). Fearing for Sikandar’s life, she goes to Porus’s court and extracts a promise that he shall not harm Sikandar. In the battle with the Macedonian army, Porus loses his son Amar (Raja) and meets Sikandar face to face. An elaborate verbal duel follows, then the two kings become friends and Sikandar withdraws. The stilted, declamatory dialogue was pure Parsee Theatre as Modi and Kapoor, well-known Shakespearean actors, give free reign to their histrionic proclivities. Highlights including the scenes of battle on horses and elephants. The film was later dubbed in Persian.

SWAMI

1941 152’ b&w Hindi

d A.R. Kardar pc CIRCO st Munshi
Premchand’s Triya Charitra sc/dial Imtiaz Ali Taj lyr Shahir Ghaznavi, Pandit Indra, Tanveer Naqvi c Jatin Das m Rafiq Ghaznavi

lp Sitara Devi, Jairaj, Yakub, Majid, Badriprasad, Gulam Rasool

Kardar’s ultra-conservative ode to patriarchy tells of Binod (Jairaj) and Indira (Sitara Devi) who were married as children and never meet as adults. Indira grows into a ‘modern’ young woman while Binod, disinherited when his stepfather has a son, works in a distant village. Indira haughtily refuses a relationship with a pauper but she eventually realises her duties to her husband and goes to meet him disguised as Shanta, a beggar woman. Binod then falls in love with her, not realising she is in fact his wife.

TALLIPREMA

1941 211’b&w Telugu

d Jyotish Sinha pc Rajarajeshwari Pics

st Lakshmi Narasimha Rao dial K.L. Narasimha Rao lyr Daita Gopalam c Kamal Ghosh m N. V Venkatraman, N.B. Dinkar Rao

lp P. Kannamba, Hemalatha Devi, Sheshamamba, C.S.R. Anjaneyulu, Kalyanam Raghuramaiah

Marital melodrama promoting the image of the ideal woman as a long-suffering and self sacrificing wife. Santha (Kannamba) is the exemplary but still childless wife of Krishna Rao (Anjaneyulu). When all rituals fail, she accepts her evil sister-in-law Durgabai’s (Sheshamba) suggestion that her husband take a second bride, Kamala (Hemalatha). Durgabai and Kamala then combine to eject Santha from the house in spite of her sudden pregnancy. She gives birth to a son but gets separated from the child, which is raised by a local zamindar. Kamala turns out to be the real villain and sends an assassin to kill the child. Eventually the husband has a change of heart and rescues the child himself; Kamala obligingly commits suicide, thus restoring the original happy couple.

TENALI RAMAKRISHNA

1941 198’ b&w Telugu

d H.M. Reddy pc Rohini Pics s/lyr Sadasiva Brahmam c P. Sridhar m Gundopant Walavalkar lp Master Raju, S.P. Lakshmanaswamy, P. Subba Rao, K.V. Subba Rao, L.V. Prasad, T. Hanumantha Rao, P. Koteshwara Rao, Baby Rohini, Kumari Sarala, Thilakam, Ansuya, Gangarathnam, Subbulu

Tenali Ramakrishna (aka Tenali Raman, the hero of many popular morality tales) was a jester in the court of Krishnadeva Raya, who ruled over the Vijayanagara empire at its pinnacle (1509–30). The rather wordy film opens with the child Ramakrishna (Master Raju) being admonished for telling unpalatable truths exposing the duplicity of the elders: when the old and twice-married widower Karanam wants to marry 9-year-old Saubhagyam, Ramakrishna masquerades as the child bride and prevents the marriage. His reputation as a principled prankster grows and as an adult (Lakshmanaswamy) he wins a seat in Krishnadeva Raya’s court as a poet by dressing up as a folk entertainer. In the court he comes up against the scheming Brahmin Tatacharya, who interprets divine signs to enhance his own wealth. When the king’s aged mother dies leaving an uneaten mango, Tatacharya foretells that her soul will never find peace unless all the Brahmins are given mangoes made of gold. Ramakrishna replies that his own mother died with an unfulfilled desire to be branded with a hot iron, and he arranges to have all the Brahmins branded instead. Ramakrishna’s ready wit also saves the king from losing his empire. L.V. Prasad played two roles in the film: the minister Timmarasu and the corrupt matchmaker who arranges the marriage of the 9-year-old girl with the aged Brahmin. Tenali Ramakrishna stories were extensively filmed (e.g. B.S. Ranga’s Telugu/Tamil/Kannada trilingual, Tenali Ramakrishna/Tenali Raman, 1956).

THORATANCHI KAMALA

1941 138’ b&w Marathi d/s/lyr Bhalji Pendharkar pc Famous-Arun Pics c Saju Naik m Kashalkar-Pyarasaheb

lp Sumati Gupte, Chandrakant, Nanasaheb Phatak, Nimbalkar, Jaishankar Danve, Kamalabai, Shanta, Chitnis, Bapurao Pawar

Famous Marathi historical made originally by Sarpotdar (1927), probably with a story credit for Pendharkar, and remade by Madhav Shinde based on Pendharkar’s script in 1963. A fictional story set in the 17th-C. Maratha empire of Shivaji (Phatak) extolling the greatness of a Maratha past teeming with beautiful maidens and men of valour. Wounded during a tiger hunt, Shivaji’s son Sambhaji (Chandrakant) is looked after by Kamala (Gupte), falls in love and eventually abducts her. When Kamala returns home, her father refuses to accept her and kills himself out of shame. Shivaji has a public trial of his own son and puts him in prison. When Kamala is abducted again, by Yeshwantrao, the man she was supposed to marry, Sambhaji escapes from prison to rescue her but she is killed in the ensuing violence. The musical hit established Chandrakant as a major Marathi star. Pendharkar made a companion work: Mohityanchi Manjula (1963).

VENUGANAM

1941 167’ b&w Tamil

d Murugadasa Jewel Pics-Coimbatore st Manjeri S. Ishwaran sc K. Ramnoth dial Ki. Rajagopal lyr Kambadasan c Sudhish C. Ghatak m Govindarajulu Naidu

lp N.C. Vasanthakokilam, A. Shakuntala, V.V Sadagopan, M.V. Mani, T.V. Krishnaswamy, Sandow Chinnappa Devar, K. Sarangapani

Regarded as a light mythological comedy, it is a rare example of a totally invented mythological. Prince Vindhan (M.V. Mani) hates the god Krishna adored by his sister Mithra (Vasanthakokilam). When Vindhan runs over a child in his chariot, he is tried and sent to prison by his own father but he escapes and stages a coup. He becomes a tyrant with the help of the villainous King Duryodhan. Duryodhan wants Mithra to marry his imbecile brother-in-law Parvatheshwara but Krishna steps in, rescues Mithra and arranges to have his friend disguised as the bride. Krishna and his accomplice are arrested but just then Vindhan’s father, the old king, reappears after having escaped from prison, and puts matters right. Vasanthakokilam’s songs in praise of Krishna were hits.

APNA GHAR/APLE GHAR

1942 167’[H]/156’[M] b&w Hindi/Marathi

d/s Debaki Bose pc CIRCO lyr Narottam Vyas[H], Shantaram Athavale, Shivram Vashikar[M] c Gordhanbhai Patel m Harishchandra Bali

lp Shanta Apte, Chandramohan, Maya Bannerjee[H], Kusum Deshpande[M], Jagdish Sethi[H], Nayampalli[M], Jeevan[H], Madhukar Gupte[M], Nimbalkar, Vimala Vasisth, Marutirao, Vimal Sardesai, Mahesh Kaul, P.R. Joshi, Bibi, Mishra[H], Angre[M] A melodrama examining the family within nationalism. Forest contractor Narendra (Chandramohan) has an arranged marriage with social reformer Meera (Apte) mainly to keep Meera’s ailing father happy. Since her work with the tribal peoples and her attempts to unionise them interferes with his business interests, Narendra demands that she devote herself solely to his comforts. An unwanted relative, Mami (Vasishta), encourages the couple’s gradual alienation. Meera leaves home vowing never to return and is believed to have drowned in a river, which prompts a change of heart for Narendra, both towards Meera and to the jungle-folk who have in fact rescued her. New Theatres’ Debaki Bose ventured into classic Prabhat territory with his only Marathi film using Prabhat’s stars (Apte and Chandramohan) and writers (Vyas, Athavale and Vashikar).

ARMAAN

1942 127’ b&w Hindi

d/s/lyr Kidar Sharma pc Ranjit Movietone c D.K. Ambre m Gyan Dutt

lp Motilal, Shamim, Nagendra, Rajendra Singh, Meera, Rajkumari, Bhagwandas, A. Shah, Bhupatrai, Nazir Bedi

Sharma’s first film at Ranjit is a science fiction romance using nature as a metaphor for inner turmoil and as the model for social morality. Set in 1910, its modern hero, Kanwal (Motilal), invents a ray that records pain and pleasure photographically. His experiments render him blind. Country lass Meera (Shamim) tends to him and they fall in love. Later Meera meets a sage (Shah) who has an expensive magic potion that cures blindness. Unable to afford it, Meera kills the sage, grabs the medicine and goes to Kanwal’s house while all nature protests her actions. There the evil Diwan (Bhagwandas) and his accomplices steal the medicine, cure Kanwal and take the credit. Kanwal, who can now see but does not recognise Meera, accuses her of murder but eventually realises the truth.

BALANAGAMMA

1942 c.220’ b&w Telugu

d C. Pullaiah p S.S. Vasan pc Gemini

s/lyr Balijepalli Lakshmikanta Kavi c Sailen Bose m Saluri Rajeshwara Rao, M.D. Parthasarathy

lp Kanchanmala, Pushpavalli, G.V. Subba Rao, Banda, Balijepalli Lakshmikanta Kavi, Bellari Lalitha, Kamaladevi, Lanka Sathyam, Relangi Venkatramaiah

Gemini’s megahit launched a very popular and uniquely Telugu genre of fantasy films derived from folk theatre (e.g. K.V. Reddy’s films, esp. Patala Bhairavi, 1951). The film adapts the Telugu folk Burra Katha to a reformist idiom to tell the story of a woman, Balanagamma (Pushpavalli), who is abducted by an evil magician, Mayala Marathi (Subba Rao). She keeps his amorous advances at bay for twelve years, claiming to be engaged in a ritual act of penance, after which her son rescues her. Known for its spectacular costumes and sets, its music and elaborate special effects. Kanchanmala played the role of the wicked stepmother. A lawsuit with Vasan following on from the film halted her career for almost a decade.

BASANT

1942 146’ b&w Hindi

d/s/c Amiya Chakravarty pc Bombay Talkies dial J.S. Casshyap lyr P.L. Santoshi c R.D. Mathur m Pannalal Ghosh

lp Mumtaz Shanti, Ulhas, Mumtaz Ali, P.F. Pithawala, Suresh, Jagannath, Kamala, Kanu Roy, Pramila

Establishing both Chakravarty as director and Mumtaz Shanti (she went on to star with Ashok Kumar in Kismet, 1943), the film tells of Uma (Shanti) and her brother Babul, two downtrodden servants who dream of becoming singing and dancing stars on the stage. They attract the attention of the impresario Janaki Prasad and Uma marries his spoilt and envious younger brother, Nirmal (Ulhas) who sets out to make his own fortune leaving Uma and their baby to starve. When he returns to find his wife is working on the stage, he abducts the baby and disappears again. After a further 10 years of unhappy stage stardom for Uma, the family is reunited and the happy ending sees her return to being a housewife in accordance with her husband’s wishes. The film belonged to the studio’s more orthodox production wing run by Devika Rani who tried to continue the Osten tradition. However, the cameraman R.D. Mathur (who later shot K. Asif’s historicals) hadn’t mastered Wirsching’s use of spotlights: shadows and source reflections interfere constantly with the action. Mumtaz Shanti’s dancing and Mumtaz Ali’s’ minimal gestures belongs to a different actorial generation from the 30s Bombay Talkies, as did the songs, esp. the leitmotif Aya basant ritu. Although celebrated flautist Pannalal Ghosh is credited as composer, the music was scored uncredited by Anil Biswas while Ghosh played in the orchestra recording.

BHAKTA POTANA

1942 186’ b&w Telugu

d K.V. Reddy pc Vauhini Pics dial/lyr
Samudrala Raghavacharya sc/c K. Ramnoth m Chittor V. Nagaiah

lp Chittor V. Nagaiah, Malati, C. Hemlatha, Vanaja, Samrajyam, Gaurinatha Sastry, Lingamurthy

Nagaiah’s debut in the saint film genre sees him as Bammera Potanamatya, aka Bhakta Potana, a farmer who, allegedly on orders from Rama, adapted the Sanskrit Bhagvata into Telugu. The king insists that Potana should dedicate his translations from Sanskrit to him. The king’s efforts to appropriate Potana’s text are foiled by divine intervention, once when Hanuman protects him and his family from the king’s soldiers, and in the film’s finale when the soldiers, trying to demolish Potana’s home, find the king’s palace being magically destroyed instead. The film was a major hit and including songs like Sarvamangalanama, Nannu vidichi kadalakura and Pavanaguna nama, encouraging Nagaiah to direct a sequel, Thyagayya (1946). The former actress Bezwada Rajarathnam sang playback for the dancer Samrajyam.

BHARAT MILAP/BHARAT BHET

1942 170’ b&w Hindi/Marathi

d Vijay Bhatt pc Prakash Pics s Vishnupant Aundhkar dial/co-lyr[H] Anuj Visharad co-lyr[H] Pandit Indra, Balam co-lyr[M] Shantaram Athavale c P.G. Kukde m Shankarrao Vyas cboreo Lachchu Maharaj

lp Shahu Modak, Shobhana Samarth, Durga Khote, Prem Adib[H], Chandrakant[M], Vimala Vasisth, Umakant[H], Vinay Kale[M], Nimbalkar, P. Ratnamala, Amirbai Karnataki

Bhatt’s first of many films based on the Ramayana tried to be the biggest and the most faithful adaptation of the epic to date. Credits include dozens of literary sources and the expertise of several historians and curators. This plot tells of Bharat, the third of Dasharath’s four sons, and his unstinting devotion to Rama, his eldest brother. Kaikeyi, incited by her maid Manthara, takes advantage of a royal boon to force Dasharath to exile Rama on the eve of his coronation and to have her own son Bharat made king of Ayodhya. Bharat refuses the throne and goes to the forest to recall Rama. When Rama insists on honouring his father’s promise, Bharat spends 14 years waiting for the heir to return and assume his rightful place as king. The film omits most of the mandatory miracle sequences and looks more like a period romance with expensive sets and battle scenes, e.g. when Bharat is attacked by Nishadraj’s army. Notwithstanding the film’s textual claims to authenticity, its general effect is that of contemporary calendar art with its vaguely neo-classical decor.

DAHA WAJTA/DAS BAJE

aka 10 o’clock

1942 144’ b&w Marathi/Hindi

d Raja Nene pc Prabhat Film cos D.D. Casshyap cos/dial[M] G.K. Pawar dial/lyr[H] Mukhram Sharma lyr[M] Shantaram Athavale c E. Mohammed m Keshavrao Bhole

lp Urmila[H]/P. Ratnamala[M], Paresh Bannerjee[H]/Shankar Kulkarni[M], Manajirao, Vasant Thengadi, Baby Shakuntala

Top university student Dilip (Bannerjee/Kulkarni) falls in love with rich classmate Asha (Urmila/Ratnamala) but her father forces her to marry Dr Ramesh (Thengdi). Dilip falls ill and only Dr Ramesh’s surgical skills can save him. 10 o’clock is when the lovers first promise to remember each other and the symbol recurs at various points in the melodrama. A commercially successful film and an important rallying point at Prabhat Studio for the Nene/Dharmadhikari/Mane/Bhole unit which went independent shortly thereafter.

Daba wajta

GARIB

1942 152’ b&w Hindi

d/st Ramchandra Thakur pc National Studios p Mehboob Khan sc Zia Sarhadi lyr Safdar ‘Aah’ c Keki Mistry m Ashok Ghosh

lp Surendranath, Rose, Veena Kumari, Sankatha, Ansari, Kayamali, Pesi Patel, Keshav, Wasker

Produced by Mehboob and scripted by Sarhadi, this melodrama about poverty is one of the Sagar and National Studio films later acknowledged by Abbas as a precursor to his own political cinema. The unemployed graduate Sharad (Surendranath) finds work accompanying a blind beggar. He meets the heiress Sudha (Rose) on the street and later finds that the place where the destitutes find shelter belongs to Sudha’s industrialist father Biharilal (Sankatha). He uses his friendship with Sudha to get her father to forego the rent and to start a factory that may employ them all. The factory does well, to the chagrin of Sudha’s fiance (and the film’s villain) Satish (Ansari). Satish, who simultaneously pursues the beautiful Lata (Veena Kumari), has the factory closed and accuses Sharad of having an affair with Lata. The threat of renewed destitution is avoided only when Sudha and Lata meet and the truth comes out.

GARMIL

1942 141’b&w Bengali

d Niren Lahiri pc Chitrabani dial Nripendra Krishna Chatterjee, Jogesh Choudhury c Ajoy Kar m Kamal Dasgupta

lp Chhabi Biswas, Jogesh Choudhury, Sheila Haldar, Srilekha, Jahar Ganguly, Robin Majumdar, Nripati Chatterjee, Kami Bannerjee, Tulsi Chakraborty, Santosh Sinha, Prabhadevi, Shyam Laha Melodrama confronting the traditionalist Hindu Madhab Thakur (Choudhury) and his Westernised neighbour Mukherjee (Biswas). Mukherjee’s son Robi (Majumdar) and Thakur’s daughter Malati (Haldar) run a school of traditional disciplines which they hope to develop into a nationwide institution. Their plans to marry receive a setback when Malati’s elder sister is forced to marry a Brahmin, triggering a revolt by the younger generation of both households. Then Malati’s marriage to a wealthy zamindar is arranged but eventually a happy ending and the triumph of a kind of syncretic modernity, reconciling Brahminism with Westernisation are achieved.

GHARANA DONGA

aka Satyame Jayam aka Honest Rogue 1942 ?’ b&w Telugu

d H.M. Reddy pc Rohini Pics s/lyr Sadasiva Brahmam

lp L.V. Prasad, Thilakam, Gangarathnam

Folk-tale about a thief (L.V. Prasad) who is scapegoated to divert attention from the real enemy, the decadent minister of a kingdom. The king eventually realises the truth when he goes out in disguise and finds himself assisting the thief in robbing the royal safe, an adventure which shows the thief to be a decent fellow. The film apparently claimed to promote Gandhian ideals.

JAWANI KI PUKAR

aka Call of Youth

1942 140’ b&w Hindi

d/co-s D. Bilimoria Artists Combine co-s Harbanslal dial/lyr A.K. Sindi c R.M. Rele, V.G. Sawant m Vasant Kumar Naidu

lp D. Bilimoria, Harish, W.M. Khan, Afghan Sandow, Benjamin, Samson, Kalyani, Urmila, Alaknanda, Abdul Ghani, S. Gulab

Adventure film directed by silent star D. Bilimoria about two friends, Balu (Bilimoria) and Harish (Harish), and their faithful servant who set out to seek their fortune in Bombay. The film includes episodes in a film studio that were used to comment on the gangsterism present among the extras and their suppliers, using characters with names like Al Capone (Samson). Much of the action takes place on a ship where they try to rescue the heroine Kanwal (Kalyani) from the clutches of villain Jagat (W.M. Khan).

JEEVANA NATAKA

1942 160’ b&w Kannada

d Wahab Kashmiri p Gubbi Veeranna pc Gubbi Films s A.N. Krishnarao from his play m Rama Iyer, Harmonium Sheshgiri Rao

lp Gubbi Veeranna, Kemparaj Urs, Shanta Hublikar, B. Jayamma, D. Jaya Rao, Mohan Kumari

Melodrama in which Anand (Veeranna), proprietor of a theatre group, offers shelter to the orphan Padma (Jayamma) who eventually displaces the star of the company Kamala (Hublikar). When she falls in love with Mohan (Urs), who also lives under Anand’s patronage, the proprietor throws both of them out. Driven to alcoholism by his infatuation with Kamala, Mohan almost drives his wife Padma to suicide. She is rescued by Anand, who eventually brings everyone together again. One of the few-films scripted by noted Kannada author A.N. Krishnarao, it introduced the noted South Indian actor-director Kemparaj Urs to film and imported the former Prabhat star Shanta Hublikar for her only Kannada movie.

KANNAGl

1942 c.220’ b&w Tamil

d R.S. Mani pc Jupiter Pics s Elangovan lyr Udumalai Narayana Kavi c Marcus Bartley, W.R. Subba Rao m S.V. Venkatraman

lp P. Kannamba, P.U. Chinnappa, N.S. Krishnan, TA. Mathuram, R. Balasubramanyam, S.V Sahasranamam, T.R. Ramachandran, N.S. Saroja, U.R. Jeevarathnam

Classic Kannamba role as Kannagi, a character from the major Tamil Jain epic and morality tale Chilapathikaram (1st C. AD), written by Elango Adigal. Hero Kovalan (Chinnappa) marries Kannagi (Kannamba), both being subjects of the Chola kingdom. But Kovalan then falls in love with the dancer Madhavi (Saroja) who causes his ruin. He is rescued by his dutiful wife, who offers to sell her golden anklet to help him restart his business. The anklet, which the king of the neighbouring Pandya kingdom suspects to be stolen, leads to the hero being beheaded by royal command. Kannagi avenges herself by proving the king was mistaken, causing him and his queen to die on the spot. Then in the spectacular finale, she sets the entire Pandyan capital town of Madurai on fire with a curse. Eventually Kannagi ascends to heaven. The film followed an earlier film of an important Tamil legend, Mani Mekalai (1940), scripted by A.A. Somayajulu, exploiting the revivalist interest in Tamil literature’s Sangam period (1–5 C. AD) promoted by major political/literary figures like Ramalingaswamy (1823–74) who prefigure Periyar E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker’s Self-Respect Movement in the state. Kannagi extended this trend via Elangovan’s strident dialogues. Although Kannagi also figured in popular legends in Tamil Nadu and in Sri Lanka and was subjected to various mutations down the centuries in poetry and theatre, as an icon she came to be identified with Kannamba’s image after this successful film. Jeevarathnam played the Jain Saint poetess Gaundi Adigal. The film was also known for its hit Chandrodayam idile (sung by Chinnappa), and for its numerous special effects. Four earlier versions entitled Kovalan were made in the period 1928–34.

KHANDAAN

1942 171’ b&w Hindi

d/co-s Shaukat Hussain Rizvi pc Pancholi Art Prod, st/dial Imtiaz Ali Taj co-sc Khadeem Mohiyuddin c M.N. Malhotra m Ghulam Haider

lp Nurjehan, Ghulam Mohammed, Manorama, Ajmal, Durga Mota, Baby Akhtar

Written by Anarkali author Imtiaz Ali Taj and made in Pancholi’s Lahore studio, this was mainly a Nurjehan musical about a man seduced by a gold-digging woman, who then kills her and her lover and is jailed. When he is released, he finds employment as a gardener and becomes a father-figure to his employer’s son Anwar and to Anwar’s fiancee Zeenat (Nurjehan). This allows him to prevent Anwar from perpetuating precisely the same crime for which he had been jailed as history repeats itself because, so the film alleges, men are constantly threatened by women and only paternal wisdom can save them from the untoward desires of women. Future directors Ramesh Saigal and S.K. Ojha assisted on this film.

KUNWARA BAAP

aka Bachelor Father

1942 134’ b&w Hindi

d/co-s Kishore Sahu pc Acharya Art Prod. st D.N. Naik co-sc Saradindu Bannerjee dial/co-lyr Amritlal Nagar co-lyr Balam, Satyakam, Sharma c Rajnikant Pandya m Ramchandra Pal

lp Kishore Sahu, Protima Dasgupta, Baby Lai, Anjali Devi, Dhulia, Manohar Ghatwani, Moni Chatterjee, Jamoo Patel, Hadi, Amritlal Nagar

One of Kishore Sahu’s better-known films. The comedy concerns a bachelor who is about to marry a pretty girl when he discovers an infant child abandoned in his car. A rare screen contribution by the eminent Hindi novelist and playwright Amritlal Nagar (author of novels such as Boond Aur Samudra, 1956; Shatranj Ke Mohre, 1959, etc.) who wrote the dialogues and the lyrics as well as acting in the film.

MEENAKSHI

1942 155’[B1/146’[H] b&w Bengali/Hindi

d Modhu Bose pc New Theatres st Manmatha Ray dial[H] Amjad Hussain lyr[H] Bhushan

c Bimal Roy m Pankaj Mullick

lp Sadhona Bose, Ahindra Choudhury, Jyoti Prakash(B)/Najmul Hussain[H], K.C. Dey, Naresh Mitra, Devbala, Preeti Majumdar, Panna Devi, Rajalakshmi

This Sadhona Bose star vehicle sees her as Meenakshi, who blunders into the flat of rich playboy Amitabh (Prakash/Hussain) while escaping from a venal marriage arranged by her tyrannical uncle. Amitabh protects her and falls in love. Later, when her presence in his flat is used to blackmail him, he suspects that he has been set up and throws Meenakshi out. They meet again when, coincidentally, she finds shelter with Amitabh’s mother. But then Meenakshi starts going blind and runs away again. An operation is performed by the very man to whom she was first betrothed and from whom she had run away. He cures her and ensures the happy ending.

MUQABALA

1942 133’ b&w Hindi

d/co-s Nanabhai Bhatt co-d Babubhai Mistri pc Wadia Movietone co-s J.B.H. Wadia lyr A. Karim c Anant Kadam m Khan Mastana

lp Fearless Nadia, Yakub, Agha, Baby Madhuri, Dalpat

Nadia departed from her Zorro-like persona to make her last film for Wadia Movietone (before it it became Basant Pics), a double role of twin sisters: the good Madhuri and the bad Rita. The villain, rebuffed by the infant twins’ mother, kidnaps Rita, whom he raises to be a nightclub singer and gangster’s moll. Madhuri is brought up by the good Rai Bahadur. Madhuri impersonates her sister, after holding her up with her own gun-shaped cigarette lighter, and unmasks the villain. The climax has Madhuri’s planned assassination at the hands of the villain as part of a magic show, raising tension when Madhuri exchanges places with Rita. Nadia’s stilted Hindi and orthodox (by the 40s) performance contrasts sharply with the mobile presence of comedian Agha, playing Yakub’s sidekick. The film claims to be the first in India to use a split-screen for a double role, and included some bravura special effects by Mistri, e.g. one sister walking across the other even though the camera establishes both to be Nadia. Other highlights including the spectacular nightclub set that can be transformed into a respectable residence within minutes, using complicated pulleys, whenever cops raid the place.

NANDANAR

1942 ? b&w Tamil

d Murugadasa pc Gemini Pics st/dial Ki Ra lyr Papanasam Sivan, Kothamangalam Subbu c Sailen Bose, B.S. Ranga m M.D. Parthasarathy, Saluri Rajeshwara Rao

lp Dandapani Desigar, Serukalathur Sama, Narayana Rao, Rajam Iyengar, Angamuthu, Sundaribai, Kothamangalam Subbu

Nandanar (Desikar), an overseer in his landlord’s (Sama) fields, yearns to visit the Chidambaram temple (banned to lower castes’) and worship the icon of Shiva. As he grows into a local saint, this desire on his part discomforts both his master and his fellow slum-dwellers. The few low-caste villagers who agree to follow him are forced, much to their displeasure, to chant the god’s name and to abstain from alcohol. Eventually the landlord sets an impossible task of singlehandedly reaping all his fields within a given time before Nandanar, promising to fulfil his desire if he can perform that task. This, characteristically in the genre, Nandanar achieves with divine assistance. Later, in Chidambaram, Nandanar performs a second miracle when he ‘purifies’ himself by entering a fire. In many ways a classic saint film boasting an extraordinary performance by its lead, the major actor-singer Desikar, the film’s overtly stated brahminisation of the saint’s desires - to enter a notoriously caste-conscious temple and purify himself there - offended many Dalit viewers, forcing the film to be banned in the Kolar Gold Fields until, according to some versions, Desikar came personally and apologised to the workers for having participated in the film’s controversial climax.

PAHILA PALNA

1942 144’ b&w Marathi

d/s Vishram Bedekar pc New Huns Pics lyr G.D. Madgulkar, Bobde c Pandurang Naik m C. Balaji

lp Shanta Hublikar, Indu Natu, Balabhai, Kusum Deshpande, Baburao Pendharkar, Dinkar Kamanna, G.D. Madgulkar, Vishnupant Aundhkar

A prime example of the growing popularity in the 40s of a formulaic comedy genre satirising Maharashtrian middle-class aspirations towards modernity. Inspired by the Vinayak-Atre style of comedy, Bedekar’s film tells the story of Dhananjay (Pendharkar), who belongs to a conventional family, and his modern wife Chitra (Hublikar, in a screen image continued from Mazba Mulga, 1938). Chitra’s sister Banu (Natu) and her husband are birth-control zealots. When Chitra and Dhananjay settle down in his ancestral home in the village, a series of vignettes on the theme of married life show Chitra’s efforts to change things greatly resisted by the family. This reaches crisis point when she presides over a public meeting on birth control. She leaves to become a schoolteacher. Dhananjay joins her and she gets pregnant, in spite of her sister’s admonitions. When the child is born, the proud Dhananjay goes to show it to his dying father. In the end, Chitra is shown accepting the traditionalist strictures imposed on her modernity by Dhananjay’s parents. The noted scenarist Madgulkar debuted here as a lyricist (e.g. Lagle mitaya dole).

PAHILI MANGALAGAUR

1942 122’ b&w Marathi

d R.S. Junnarkar pc Navyug Chitrapat

st/dial V.V. Bokil sc Achyut Govind Ranade

lyr Baburao Gokhale c Pandurang Naik

m Dada Chandekar

lp Snehprabha Pradhan, Sudha Apte, Lata Mangeshkar, Shobha Kumari, Shahu Modak, Dada Salvi, Vishnupant Jog, Damuanna Malvankar, Gopinath Sawkar

This comedy about arranged marriages started as a Vinayak production, completed by Junnarkar when Vinayak left Navyug. When the handsome doctor Sadashiv (Modak) sets up a new clinic in Pune, he finds himself with no patients but is beseiged with marriage offers. Chintu (Jog), son of the crusty patriarch, tricks him into coming home to examine his supposedly ill sister Sarala (Pradhan). One of the major scenes in the film is a cross-talk as Sadashiv asks medical questions while her father examines him as a prospective son-inlaw. Sarala and Sadashiv get married, when suddenly Lily, Sadashiv’s old girlfriend who is related to the local village gossip, surfaces. As with all of Huns-Navyug films, the snappy dialogue was crucial to the film, which includes kissing scenes. It is also remembered for Lata Mangeshkar’s film debut as actress and singer.

PATNI

1942 194’ b&w Telugu

d Gudavalli Ramabrahmam pc Sarathi Films s/lyr Tapi Dharma Rao c Sudhish Ghatak m Kopparapu Subba Rao

lp K.S. Prakash Rao, Surabhi Kamalabai, Rushyendramani, Hemavathi, Vangara, Kocherlakota Satyanarayana

Ramabrahmam (Malapilla, 1938; Raitu Bid da 1939) departs radically from his earlier style, adapting the Kannagi legend (cf. Kannagi, 1942) of Silapathikaram with Rushyendramani in the title role and future director Prakash Rao as her husband Kovalan. Given Ramabrahmam’s political inclinations, this version may have addressed the colonial present more directly than Jupiter Pics’ version.

RAJA RANI

1942 136’ b&w Hindi

d Najam Naqvi pc Atre Pics p/s P.K. Atre
dial Anand Kumar c Surendra Pai m Khan Mastana

lp Vanamala, Trilok Kapoor, Sunalini Devi, Maya Devi, Baby Vimal, Mazhar Khan, Navin Yagnik

Atre produced and scripted this melodrama about the fragmentation of a joint family. Raja (Kapoor) and Rani (Vanamala) marry and are welcomed with much ceremony by the family. Gradually dissensions caused mainly through envy lead the couple to set up their own separate home. Their ambition to live beyond their means brings creditors and a financial crisis. An early instance of a predominantly Marathi film unit branching into Hindi cinema.

ROTI

1942 153’ b&w Hindi

d Mehboob Khan pc National Studio
st R.S. Choudhury sc/co-lyr Wajahat Mirza
lyr Safdar ‘Aah’, Munshi Arzoo Lucknowi, Wajahad Lucknowi c Faredoon Irani m Anil Biswas

lp Chandramohan, Sheikh Mukhtar, Sitara Devi, Akhtari Faizabadi, Ashraf Khan, Kayamali, Jamshedji, Mirza, Wasker, Choubeji, Nawab, Agha

Mehboob’s classic, didactic film counterposing capitalism and primitive tribal communism. The film’s crooked commentator (A. Khan) persuades the starving hero (Chandramohan), to impersonate Seth Laxmidas, the long-lost heir of a rich family. In the process, the hero reveals himself as a ruthless entrepreneur and acquires the Laxmidas business empire. He and his girlfriend Darling (Faizabadi, a legendary ghazal singer) happen to crash their private plane and wind up in a tribal, sexually liberated community which ignores notions of private property and believes in the basic goodness of all humankind. The tribals Balam (Mukhtar) and Kinari (Sitara Devi) look after the injured capitalist and help him get back to the city by lending him a pair of buffaloes, Changu and Mangu, who are friends rather than beasts of burden. When the animals are not returned, the tribals go to the city to retrieve them. They are astounded by the way capitalism functions; they have no concept of money and get arrested for eating food they cannot pay for. Their gradual descent into bonded labour is intercut with the machinations of Laxmidas, who has his future father-in-law murdered. Eventually, with the help of Darling (who falls in love with Balam), the tribal couple manages to leave, even as Laxmidas, facing disaster, escapes from his outraged shareholders in a car full of gold bricks. He encounters the tribals again in the desert where his car has broken down. In an echo of Stroheim’s Greed (1925), he refuses their offer of water, preferring to die of thirst. The film’s dominant character is the fat, cynical commentator (echoing a Brechtian device) who manipulates the story, laughs every time disaster strikes and ridicules compassion (Garibon ki day a karke bada ahsaan karte ho) in a kind of prose chant. Begum Akhtar aka Akhtari Faizabadi gives a fine performance as Darling, the woman who accepts her role as a sex object and the property of the capitalist while hating him inwardly for the murder of her father.

SARKARI PAHUNE

aka State Guests

1942 164’ b&w Marathi

d Master Vinayak pc Navyug Chitrapat
st C.V. Joshi’s short story V.S. Khandekar
lyr Rajkavi Yeshwant c Vasudev Karnataki
m Datta Davjekar

lp Damuanna Malvankar, Vishnupant Jog, Nandu Khote, Saroj Borkar, Vatsala Kumthekar, Shakuntala Bhome

Vinayak claimed this, his best-known of the Gundyabhau-Chimanrao films and the first one without Atre, to be his only truly political film. His earlier satires (Brahmachari, 1938; Brandichi Batli/Brandy Ki Botal, 1939) primarily reflected Atre’s literary and political attitudes. This film spoofs the still-influential feudal nobility in pre-WW2 Maharashtra. Kautai (Bhome), recently married to Chimanrao (Malvankar) (cf. Lagna Pahave Karun, 1940), claims to be a distant relative of the king of a small state and takes her husband and his bachelor-cousin Gundyabhau (Jog) for a family visit to the ‘palace’. The fancy Ford sent to collect them from the railway station is pulled by two oxen (the origin of the classic joke about the ‘Ox-Ford’). They find their lodgings have no electricity and the servants are less than honest. Gundyabhau, the convinced misogynist, experiences a crisis when faced by a seductive dancer (Kumthekar). Like its prequel, Lagna Pahave Karun, the film has an episodic narrative, deploys dialogues with a strong period flavour and has extended comic set pieces like the musical contest between Gundyabhau and the dancer.

SATYABHAMA

1942 183’ b&w Telugu

d V.V. Rao pc Jagdish Films dial Sivasankara Sastry, S.G. Acharya lyr Daita Gopalam m Gotu Narayana Iyer

lp Y.V. Rao, Addanki, Pushpavalli, Sthanam, Purnima, Kasturi

Y.V. Rao also plays the lead, Krishna, in this mythological derived from the Mahabharata. Krishna restores the Syamantak gem from the bear-king Jambavanta to Shatrujit, receiving in return the hand of Shatrujit’s daughter in marriage. The film is sometimes presented as an early example of the introduction of low Tamil comedy into Telugu cinema.

SHESH UTTAR/JAWAB

1942 144’[B]/157’[H3 b&w Bengali/Hindi

d P.C Barua pc MP Prod. st Shashadhar Dutt
lyr Buddhichandra Agarwal ‘Madhur’, Bekal[H]
m Kamal Dasgupta

lp Kanan Devi, Jamuna, PC. Barua, Ahindra Choudhury, Devbala, Jahar Ganguly, Tulsi Chakraborty

Barua’s last major film continues his concern with the fortunes of an aimless feudal upper class (Devdas, 1935; Mukti, 1937). The rich, self-absorbed and, to his family, deranged Manoj (Barua) is sent to his future father-in-law for a rest cure. However, he loses his way and is offered shelter by a railway station-master with whose daughter he falls in love. The poor, earthy and worldly-wise Meena (Kanan Devi) is contrasted with the hero’s rich fiancee and strident feminist Reba (Jamuna) and the eventual confrontation between the two women provides the justification for Manoj’s decision to marry the former. The original story was written as a rejoinder to Saratchandra’s Shesh Prashna, attacking his alleged feminism. The film established Murlidhar Chatterjee’s new company as one of the foremost producers of socials in Bengali cinema. The Hindi version included classic Kanan Devi numbers such as Toofan mail and Kuch yaad rahe to sun kar jaa. The famous song in Bengali was Ami bonophool go.

STATION MASTER

1942 157 b&w Hindi

d Chimanlal Luhar pc Prakash Pics cos/co-dial/co-lyr P.L. Santoshi cos Vishnupant Aundhkar co-dial/co-lyr Chaturvedi co-lyr Pandit Indra, VR. Sharma c G.N. Shirodkar m Naushad

lp Jagdish Sethi, Prem Adib, P. Ratnamala, Jeevan, Umakant, Kaushalya, Shakir, Amirbai Karnataki, Suraiya, Gulab, Pratima Devi

Melodrama by a stunt-film director. The story features various characters employed in a small railway station. Arun, a new guard, loves Uma, daughter of the old station-master. Through the machinations of a clerk to the district traffic superintendent, their marriage cannot take place. The clerk wants his own daughter to marry Arun and he persuades the superintendent, a widower, to marry Uma. Uma’s tragic life is woven into a railway accident for which the station-master is held responsible until an investigation acquits him. Arun’s injury sustained in the event brings all the subterranean intrigues into the open.

VASANTSENA

1942 167’[M]/166’[H] b&w Marathi/Hindi

d Gajanan Jagirdar pc Atre Pics
p/S/lyr[M] P.K. Atre lyr Neelkanth Tiwari, D.N. Madhok, P.L. Santoshi c S. Haridas
m Master Krishnarao

lp Vanamala, Chintamanrao Kolhatkar[M]/Gajanan Jagirdar[H], Shahu Modak, Baby Devi, Sunalini Devi, Vimala Tripathi, Rajvishwas, Vijaya, Sudhir Gore, Raja Pandit, Gokhale, Balwant Parchure[M], Vinay Kale[M], Dange[M], Eruch Tarapore[H], Navin Yagnik[H], Nazir Bedi[H]

Based on Shudraka’s classic 3rd-C. Sanskrit play Mrichakatika, the main plot of the Brahmin Charudatta’s (Modak) love for the courtesan Vasantsena (Vanamala) is interwoven with a parallel plot concerning the popular revolt in Ujjain against the despotic King Palaka, whose state is effectively run by his tyrannical brother-in-law Shakar (Jagirdar/Kolhatkar). The rebels want to replace him with the Gopalaputra Aryaka. The film belongs mainly to Atre and is one of his occasional departures from comedy to update a classic text into a contemporary idiom.

ZAMINDAR

1942 166’ b&w Hindi

d Moti B. Gidwani pc Pancholi Art Pics S Imtiaz Ali Taj lyr Qamar Jalalabadi, Behzad Lucknowi, Nazim Panipatti, D.N. Madhok c M.N. Malhotra m Ghulam Haider

lp Shanta Apte, Manorama, Ghulam Mohammed, M. Ismail, S.D. Narang, M. Ajmal, Baby Akhtar, Durga Mota, Khairati, M. Manzoor, G.N. Butt

Pancholi’s sequel to their big hit Khazanchi (1941) is a murder mystery indicting feudal patriarchy. The tyrannical village zamindar Ganesh (Mohammed) sacks his trusty manager Raghubir (Ismail) with whose daughter Rupa (Apte) the zamindar’s son Karan (Narang) is in love. Karan is disinherited when he sides with the tenants. Unable to live with the tyranny, the tenants draw lots to kill Ganesh just when he is starting to repent his actions. Ganesh is killed with Karan’s gun and the son is arrested. Rupa then finds a clue identifying the real killer but cannot reveal it to the police inspector (Butt). Only Rambha (Akhtar), a blind woman, knows the ancestral truth that will solve the mystery.

BHAGYA LAKSHMI

1943 192’ b&w Telugu

d P. Pullaiah pc Renuka Films p/s Chittor V. Nagaiah dial/lyr Samudrala, Raghavacharya c M.A. Rehman
m B. Narasimha Rao

lp Chittor V. Nagaiah, Doraiswamy, Umamaheshwara Rao, Giri, Raghavan, Gauripathy Sastry, N.S. Krishnan, T.A. Mathuram, Malathi, T. Suryakumari, Kamala Kotnis

Melodrama about unrequited love. The music teacher Srinivasa Rao (Nagaiah) loves Bhagya Lakshmi (Malati) but her parents arrange for her to marry another man, Vishwanatha Rao (Giri). When the lovesick hero spurns the vamp Kamakshi, she starts a rumour suggesting Srinivasa Rao is having a sexual affair with Bhagya Lakshmi, causing the heroine to be thrown out of her home. Eventually the hero patches up the marriage between Bhagya Lakshmi and Vishwanatha Rao. Nagaiah hired Pullaiah to direct his first independent production designed to refurbish the star’s heroic screen image after playing second leads and Saint films at Vauhini. The film had one classic Nagaiah song hit, Asha nirasha. According to V.A.K. Ranga Rao, this was the first time in Telugu cinema that a playback singer, R. Balasaraswathi, received an explicit credit for her Kamala Kotnis songs, acknowledging that actors did not always sing their songs.

CHENCHULAKSMI

1943 ?’ b&w Telugu

d S. Soundararajan pc Tamil Nadu Talkies
s/lyr Samudrala Raghavacharya c Jiten Bannerjee m C.R. Subburaman, R.N. Chinnaiah

lp Kamala Kotnis, Chittor V. Nagaiah, Narayana Rao, Rushyendramani, Lanka Sathyam

Mythological continuing the often-filmed Vishnu Purana legend of Prahlada and Hiranyakashapu. After the demon Hiranyakashapu is destroyed, Vishnu’s (Narayana Rao) consort Lakshmi (Kotnis) takes the earthly form of a chenchu (tribal) to soothe and entice Vishnu out of his rage. Her success, marriage and eventual recognition as the goddess forms the major part of the film. Mainly known for Subburaman’s innovative score. For his debut film, he drew on Latin American music for the credit sequence and to accompany a tribal dance. Nagaiah plays the tribal woman’s father. A 1958 remake starring A. Nageshwara Rao and Anjali Devi was a major hit (made by B.A. Subba Rao).

DUHAI

1943 120’ b&w Hindi

d/s V. M. Vyas pc Sunrise Pics s Mohanlal G. Dave dial Zia Sarhadi lyr Bharat Vyas c Dwarka Divecha m Rafiq Ghaznavi, Pannalal Ghosh, Shanti Kumar

lp Shanta Apte, Nurjehan, Kumar, Zarina, Mirza Musharraf, Ansari, Butt Kaser, Kesarbai

Vyas’s romantic thriller pivots mainly around the unusual co-presence of the singing stars Apte and Nurjehan. Rural beauty Neela (Apte) loves the urbane Rajendra (Kumar) and they decide to get married against the wishes of her father Jugal Babu (Ansari). Jugal, it turns out, knows the family secret: Rajendra’s father had years ago tried to seduce Neela’s mother and had been killed by Neela’s brother Basant (Kaser), who has been in hiding ever since. The plot gets more complicated when the singer and dancer Urvashi (Nurjehan) falls for Rajendra and, one evening in a nightclub, unable to perform in front of him, is replaced on stage by Neela. The dramatic highlight is when Jugal Babu, telling Neela the terrible past history of her brother, gets her to promise never to reveal the truth to her husband.

GARUDA GARVABHANGAM

1943 178’ b&w Telugu

d Ghantasala Balaramaiah pc Pratibha Pics
s/lyr Balijepalli Lakshmikanta Kavi c P. Sridhara Rao m Ogirala Ramachandra Rao

lp Vemuri Gaggaiah, P. Bhanumathi, Ramakrishna Sastry, Mandavalli Sandow, Vedantam Raghavaiah

Mythological featuring a contest between Garuda (the eagle) and Hanuman (the monkey god), regarded as Vishnu’s two most trusted followers. Although Garuda can see the original Vishnu avatar underneath Vishnu’s current incarnation as Rama, Hanuman has greater access to Rama, his temporal master. The film, adapted from a stage play, was noted mainly for Bhanumathi’s singing, re-released in HMV’s series Alanati Andaalu.

JOGAJOG/HOSPITAL

1943 120’ b&w Bengali/Hindi

d/cos Sushil Majumdar pc MP Prod. st Manmatha Ray co-sc Premendra Mitra dial/co-lyr[H] Bhushan co-lyr Buddhichandra Agarwal ‘Madhur’ c Ajit Sen m Kamal Dasgupta

lp Kanan Devi, Ahindra Choudhury, Robin Majumdar, Tulsi Chakraborty, Jahar Ganguly[B], Bhanu Bannerjee[B], Kanu Bannerjee[B], Jawahar[H], Krishna[H], Promode[H]

Pratima (Kanan Devi), a nurse, is persuaded by Jayant (Ganguly) to pretend to be his wife for a day, in order to convince his father Dr Dindayal (Choudhury) of his need for money. Dr Dindayal likes his new daughter-in-law very much and wants her to accompany him to the country where he runs a charitable hospital in the name of his late wife. There Dr Bhatt, Dindayal’s rival, finds out by hiring detectives that Pratima and Jayant are not married. He uses the information to try to oust Dindayal from the hospital. The solution eventually links with Pratima’s growing sense of responsibility towards Dr Dindayal’s medical endeavours.

KISMET

1943 143’ b&w Hindi

d/sc Gyan Mukherjee pc Bombay Talkies p S. Mukherjee st/dial P.L. Santoshi, Shaheed Latif lyr Pradeep c R.D. Pareenja m Anil Biswas

lp Ashok Kumar, Mumtaz Shanti, Shah Nawaz, Moti, P.F. Pithawala, Chandraprabha, V.H. Desai, Kanu Roy, Jagannath Aurora, Prahlad, Harun, Mubarak, David, Kumari Kamala

The supreme hit, the fifth success in a row for producer Mukherjee (Kangan, 1939, Bandban, 1940; Jhoola and Naya Sansar, 1941), made by the people who were to launch the Filmistan Studio. Pickpocket Shekhar (A. Kumar) befriends an old man (Pithawala) who once owned a theatre and is the father of its star singer, Rani (Shanti). In a fit of greed he made his daughter dance to exhaustion, making her a cripple. Now she is employed by, and indebted to, the theatre’s new owner, the villain Indrajit. Shekhar steals Indrajit’s wife’s valuable necklace and Rani rescues him from the cops. Shekhar and Rani fall in love and he wants to raise the money to cure her disability. The crisis is precipitated when Rani unwittingly wears the stolen necklace and is caught by the police. Shekhar owns up, is arrested, escapes from the police and raids Indrajit’s house to pay for Rani’s operation. Caught again, Shekhar is saved from a long jail sentence by the revelation that he is Indrajit’s long-lost son. Shekhar’s newly found brother Mohan is permitted to marry Rani’s sister Lila (whom he had made pregnant) and the happy ending sees all protagonists united in the family of the patriarch Indrajit. Known for its musical hits, Kumar’s ebullient performance and Shanti’s voice, the film assimilates the Warner Bros, realist style with ‘expressionist’ overtones, esp. in some of its classic, often anthologised sequences, e.g. Shekhar’s escape from the cops in a puff of cigarette smoke or the final robbery scene. A contemporary review in Filmindia (Feb. 1943) condemned the film for imitating John Cromwell’s Algiers (1938) while glorifying crime, making it a bad influence on the younger generation. It includes the patriotic song Aaj himalay ki choti sephir humne lalkara hai. The film, which ran for 3 consecutive years in the same cinema in Calcutta, is an early example of a pre-Partition ‘lost and found’ movie rehearsing the familiar pre-capitalist fairy-tale motif of members of a family who are separated by fate or villainy and eventually are ‘recognised’ and reunited.

Chandraprabha (left) in Kismet

KRISHNA PREMA

1943 184’ b&w Telugu

d H.V. Babu pc Famous/Star Combines
s/lyr Tapi Dharma Rao c P.S. Selvaraj, Jiten Bannerjee m Galipenchala Narasimha Rao

lp Shantakumari, P. Bhanumathi, T. Suryakumari, Jayagauri, Hemavathi, Parvathibai, Gali Venkateshwara Rao, Addanki, Hirannaya, Sangeetha Rao

This major musical hit, made at the Vel Pics Studio in their characteristic mythological genre, tells of Radha’s (Shantakumari) devotion for Krishna (Venkateshwara Rao), which is supposed to exemplify divine love. Her love is scorned both by Radha’s sister Chandravali (Bhanumathi) and by Krishna’s wife Satyabhama (Himavathi). Krishna wins over Chandravali by impersonating her husband Chandragopa (Addanki). He then impersonates Radha herself to prove that divine love transcends sexual difference. The film united the three best-known Telugu actress-singers: Shantakumari, Bhanumathi and T. Suryakumari (as the trouble-making Narada). Between them they had several numbers including Godumu krishna, Chiluka palkuladana Repe vastadanta gopaludu and Oogave uyyala that have become cultural legends. Addanki and Bhanumathi together sang Ekkadunnavepilla.

MAHATMA VIDUR

1943 155’ b&w Marathi/Hindi

d P.Y. Altekar pc CIRCO st Mohanlal G Dave
dial/lyr Narottam Vyas, Mahesh Kaul[H], Raja Badhe[M] c Dwarkadas Divecha, Purshottam Divecha m Harishchandra Bali

lp Vishnupant Pagnis, Durga Khote, S. Prahlad, Manohar Ghatwani, Yashodhara Katju[H], Seeta Jhaveri[M], Kalyani, Nayampalli, Baby Madhuri[H], Sudha Amonkar[M]

Pagnis’s last film is a miracle-laden Saint film chronicling a familiar episode from the Mahabharata. Vidur (Pagnis) takes a vow of non-violence and renounces his royal position, causing displeasure to the Kaurava kings. The art direction is by the prestigious Baburao Painter and V.H. Palnitkar.

MAZHE BAL

1943 122’ b&w Marathi

d Master Vinayak pc Prafulla Pics
s/co-lyr V.S. Khandekar co-lyr Madhav Julien
c Madhav Bulbule m Datta Davjekar

lp Master Vinayak, Dada Salvi, Sumati Gupte, Meenakshi, Lata Mangeshkar, Damuanna Malvankar, Bhaurao Datar, Damuanna Joshi, Saroj Borkar, Baby Nalini, Shripad Joshi, Baburao Athane, Ingavle, Renuka

Khandekar’s didactic script for Vinayak continues his preoccupation with the character of a moral man whose principles conflict with practical reality. Manohar (Salvi, who plays this character’s earlier version: Bappa in Vinayak’s Amrit, 1941) is an alcoholic but idealistic public prosecutor and calls for the death sentence for the nationalist anarchist Ravindra (Vinayak). Ravindra’s girlfriend Shashi (Meenakshi) is pregnant and gives birth in an orphanage. She then becomes a nurse and has to look after Manohar who falls for her. She agrees to marry him but keeps her child a secret. When a child is found dead in the orphanage, Manohar prosecutes its humanitarian manager for infanticide. Shashi, who appears as a witness, reveals the truth of her life in court, causing a dramatic change in her husband’s world-view.

MOHABBAT

1943 122’ b&w Hindi

d/sc Phani Majumdar pc Laxmi Prod.
st Bipradas Tagore c Jatin Das m Hariprasanna Das

lp Shanta Apte, Pahadi Sanyal, Jagdish Sethi, Sunalini Devi, Yashodhara Katju, K.C. Dey, S. Nazir

A musical advocacy of arranged marriages. Heroine Sujata (Apte) loves hero Jiban (Sanyal) and their parents are for their marrying, except that the villain Madanlal (Nazir) discovers some juicy facts about Sujata’s father’s past and tries blackmail. The problem is what Jiban’s mother (Sunalini Devi), who repudiates her eldest son for marrying outside his caste, will say. This is the only joint appearance of the singing stars Apte and Sanyal. Apte’s music included a memorable Meera bhajan, Main Giridhar ke gharjaoon.

NADAAN

1943 118’ b&w Hindi

d/s/co-lyr Zia Sarhadi pc A.B. Prod., Jyoti Studio co-lyr Tanveer Naqvi c R.M. Rele
m K. Datta (aka Datta Koregaonkar)

lp Nurjehan, Maya Devi, Jilloo, Alaknanda, Mumtaz, Masood, Aman

A romantic adventure story about Anil (Masood) and Roopa (Nurjehan) who were promised to each other as children but start off their adult acquaintance on the wrong foot when Anil hands Roopa over to the police for resembling a face on a ‘wanted’ poster. They meet again when both become journalists on the same newspaper owned by Mukesh (Aman), who also fancies Roopa. The film boasts six Nurjehan numbers, including the famous Ab to nahin duniya mein apna thikana.

NAJMA

1943 121’ b&w Hindi-Urdu

d/p Mehboob Khan pc Mehboob Prod, s Aga Jani Kashmiri lyr Anjum Pilibhiti c Faredoon Irani m Rafiq Ghaznavi

lp Ashok Kumar, Veena, Sitara Devi, Kumar, Yakub, Majid, Shantarin, Rajkumari Shukla, Murad

Muslim melodrama set in early 20th-C. Lucknow. The young doctor Yusuf (A. Kumar) loves Najma (Veena), daughter of a nawab. As Yusuf’s family is not aristocratic, they cannot marry. Their respective marriages within their own class do not solve the problem. Mukarram (Kumar), Najma’s husband, meets with an accident and is injured on his way to killing Yusuf, and Yusuf performs a miraculous operation saving Mukarram’s life. Thus peace is restored between the two families. This was Mehboob’s debut as independent producer under his own banner.

NAUKAR

1943 121’ b&w Hindi-Urdu
d/sc Shaukat Hussain Rizvi pc Sunrise Pics
st/dial Sadat Hasan Manto lyr Akhtar Sherani, Munshi Shamas, Nazim Panipatti c S. Srivastav
m Rafiq Ghaznavi, Shanti Kumar

lp Shobhana Samarth, Chandramohan, Nurjehan, Balwant Singh, Yakub, Miss Moti, Mirza Musharraf

A realist tragedy based on a story by the Urdu novelist Manto about Fazlu (Chandramohan), the lifelong servant of the Khwaja Islamuddin. Blamed for the death of Islamuddin’s infant son Salim in a railway accident, Fazlu is jailed. Escaping from prison, he finds his wife has given birth to a son whom he believes to be Salim’s reincarnation. The film chronicles Fazlu in his old age, when his son, also named Salim (Singh), befriends Nargis (Samarth), Mirza (Musharraf) and Sadiq (Yakub). When Fazlu moves to the city, he helplesly watches the destruction of his family by economic circumstances. Nargis dies in his arms, Mirza is arrested, Sadiq commits suicide and Fazlu ends up once again in prison. Much of the film works through symbols like the whistle of the railway engine evoking traumatic memories.

PAISA BOLTO AAHE/NAGAD NARAYAN

1943 122’ b&w Marathi/Hindi

d/s Vishram Bedekar pc Navhans Chitra
dial[H] Munshi Dil lyr G.V. Madgulkar[M], S.A. Shukla[M], Bekal[H], Shamim[H]
c Pandurang Naik m Shridhar Parsekar

lp Baburao Pendharkar, Kusum Deshpande, Nalini Dhere[M]/Lila Desai[H], Nayampalli, Samant, Sudha Apte[M], Kanekar[M], P.R. Joshi[M], Bapurao Pawar[M], Dhumal[M], Masood[H], Bose[H], Pratima Devi[H], Shakir[H]

Allegory about the South Asian economy during WW2. Bapuji is an agent for the Rangoon Oil Co. Although he has made his money mainly through the black market, his daughter Vidya (Dhere/Desai) believes in his honesty. She meets a young man whom she scorns as he does not seem to be from her own social class, but then he turns out to be Lalnath, a director of Rangoon Oil. When the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, Bapuji seizes the opportunity to make money but Lalnath orders an investigation into Bapuji’s accounts. However, the rest of the company’s Rangoon-based directors, chased out of the country by the Japanese, oppose Lalnath’s honesty and throw him out. Eventually Vidya falls in love with Lalnath and sees the truth for herself.

PRITHVI VALLABH

1943 121’ b&w Hindi

d Sohrab Modi pc Minerva Movietone
st K.M. Munshi s/lyr Sudarshan
c Y.D. Sarpotdar m Rafiq Ghaznavi, Saraswati Devi

lp Sohrab Modi, Durga Khote, Sankatha Prasad, Jehanara Kajjan, Meena, Sadiq Ali, K.N. Singh, Al Nasir, Navin Yagnik

Big-budget costume drama based on K.M. Munshi’s 1920 novel of the same name. Prithvi Vallabh is the good Munja, king of Avantipur (Modi), whom the evil Tailap (Prasad), rival king of Tailangan, had failed to defeat in repeated battles. Tailap finally succeeds through the machinations of his hard-headed sister Mrinalvati (Khote). The film’s major highlights are the confrontations between Munja and the haughty Mrinalvati who tries to humiliate him publicly but then falls in love with him. When Munja has a chance to escape from his prison, he holds back so that Mrinalvati may accompany him but she, apprehensive of losing him, betrays Munja, who is then condemned to be trampled to death by an elephant. Unlike Modi’s earlier ventures into big-budget territory (Pukar, 1939; Sikandar, 1941), this was not a major success.

RAMRAJYA

aka Lav Rush

1943 144’ b&w Hindi/Marathi
d Vijay Bhatt pc Prakash Pics
s/dial[M] Vishnupant Aundhkar dial[H] Sampatlal Srivastava ‘Anuj’ lyr Ramesh Gupta[H], Raja Badhe[M] c P.G. Kukde m Shankarrao Vyas

lp Shobhana Samarth, Yeshwant, Madhusudhan, V.D. Pandit, Amirbai Karnataki, Shantakumari, Ranjana, Leela Pawar, Baby Tara, Prem Adib[H]/Chandrakant[M], Umakant[H], G. Badriprasad[H], Pande[H], Bahadur[H], Vinay Kale [M], Bandopant Sohoni[M], Kelkar[M], Kumari Kamala[M]

Bhatt’s best-known and most successful Ramayana musical. Rama (Adib/Chandrakant) triumphantly returns from exile having conquered Lanka and rescued Seeta (Samarth), but a washerwoman queries whether Seeta remained chaste during her captivity. To allay suspicions, Rama sends Seeta into the forest where, under the care of Valmiki, she gives birth to twin boys. Later, Rama launches the Ashwamedha Yagna ritual: a horse is let loose as an open challenge for anyone to stop it and do battle with the king. The two adolescent boys, thanks to Valmiki’s teachings, succeed in the challenge. The big-budget art direction was a classic contribution by neo-classical kitsch artist Kanu Desai. The final battle with fire spewing magical arrows was the film’s highlight. The Marathi version contains the hit song Ladakya ranila lagale dohale.

SAMADHAN

1943 c.120’ b&w Bengali

d/s Premendra Mitra pc S.D. Prod, c Ajoy Kar m Robin Chatterjee

lp Chhabi Biswas, Rabin Majumdar, Dhiraj Bhattacharya, Sandhyarani, Purnima, Krishnadhan Mukherjee, Indu Mukherjee, Shyam Laha, Chhaya Devi

Mitra tells a story familiar from late feudal romances and 19th-C. dime novels. A working-class leader confronts a villainous factory owner, falls in love with the boss’s daughter unaware of her family origins and, after many adventures and setbacks, it is revealed that the hero is in fact the official heir to the property the villain had usurped. An influential Bengali novelist acknowledging allegiance to socialism, Mitra’s studio-bound film concentrates on showing the milieu of the rich while the dialogues make numerous references to the workers and the poor. Nitin Bose’s Didi/President (1937) and Bimal Roy’s Udayer Pathey/Hamrahi (1944) tell similar stories.

SANJOG

1943 122’ b&w Hindi

d/p A.R. Kardar pc Kardar Prod, s/co-lyr Waqif
co-lyr D.N. Madhok c Dwarka Divecha
m Naushad

lp Mehtab, Charlie, Wasti, Ulhas, Anwar Hussain, A. Shah

A romantic musical comedy of mistaken identity. Deepak Raj (Charlie) arrives at the magnificent house of the maharaja of Pahadganj (Shah) and is mistaken for Surendra (Hussain), the maharaja’s future son-in-law. Deepak’s crooked sidekick Jugal Kishore (Wasti) urges Deepak to continue the masquerade and the Princess Bina Kumari (Mehtab) falls in love with him, believing him to be her fiance. The film has many comic references to military-style discipline, including Surendra’s father who is obsessed with holding court-martials. The actress-singer Suraiya performs several songs in playback, including Mori gali more raja, Oh oh, ai ai and Kaun gali ka chhora pukare.

SHAHAR THEKE DOORAY

1943 121’ b&w Bengali

d/s Sailajananda Mukherjee pc Eastern Talkies c Ajoy Kar m Subal Dasgupta

lp Jahar Ganguly, Dhiraj Bhattacharya, Renuka Roy, Naresh Mitra, Molina Devi, Pashupti Chatterjee, Kanu Bannerjee, Phani Roy, Prabhadevi

Hit rural melodrama confirming the novelist Sailajananda Mukherjee as a film-maker. Ratan (zestfully played by Ganguly), the carefree hero of the village youth, is under pressure from his mother to remarry since his current marriage is childless. The mother chooses Jaya, although Jaya loves the doctor temporarily working in the village. The drama’s main villain (Mitra) is the evil president of the union board, and its emotional high points include a savage suicide bid by Ratan’s wife before events come to a happy ending. The wordy film (characteristic of Mukherjee’s cinema) rehearsed the familiar tensions between country/tradition and city/modernity in the form of a morality tale set in an idyllic rural landscape that becomes the value-laden terrain of the conflict. The film was remade by Tarun Majumdar in 1981, one of the main inheritors of the rural melodrama genre.

SHAKUNTALA

1943 122’b&w Hindi

d/p V. Shantaram pc Rajkamal Kalamandir
s/co-/yr Dewan Sharar st Kalidasa’s play
co-lyr Ratanpriya c V. Avadhoot m Vasant Desai

lp Jayashree, Chandramohan, Nimbalkar, Zohra, Shantarin, Vidya, Kumar Ganesh, Raja Pandit, Vilas, Amina, Nana Paliskar

Having quit the Prabhat Studio, Shantaram inaugurated his new company with this costumed adaptation of Kalidasa’s 3rd-C. play. The beautiful Shakuntala (Jayashree) gets pregnant following a romance with King Dushyanta (Chandramohan), but she is rejected when she arrives at his royal court. Abandoned, she bears a son, Bharat (Ganesh), in the forest. When a repentant Dushyanta comes to take her back she refuses, using the same language with which she had been evicted, but the two are eventually reconciled. Shantaram writes that the venture was a major gamble, made during WW2 and in a changed film-industry context. Both the future of his new studio as well as his reputation depended on its success, established when the film became a major hit running for 104 consecutive weeks. Shantaram intended the birth of Bharat to symbolise the newly independent India. The film remains one of the best-known adaptations of the literary classic, and has a quaint period flavour as an early instance of the director’s highly decorative use of neo-classical design, which later degenerated into garish calendar art. A 76’ version was released in the USA, where Life magazine saw it as having a ‘touch of William Tell’.

SHANKAR PARVATI

1943 122’ b&w Hindi

d/s Chaturbhuj Doshi pc Ranjit Movietone
dial/lyr Pandit Indra c D.K. Ambre m Gyan Dutt

lp Sadhona Bose, Arun, Kamala Chattopadhyay, Brijmala, Bhagwandas, Rajendra, Rewashankar Marwadi, Mahipal

A dance-based mythological featuring Shankar (Arun), the triad in the Hindu pantheon (sometimes equated with Dionysus), who dances the Tandava, the dance of destruction, when his wife Sati kills herself after she is humiliated by her father. He then retires into meditation from which he has to be awoken to rid the world of the demon Tarakasura. The seductive powers of Sati, reborn as Parvati (Bose), liven up Shankar but she has to pay for this by doing extensive penance, after which she can be accepted again by her husband as a real wife, partly through the divine intervention of Vishnu. The film highlights Bose’s dancing talents but its real interest for contemporary viewers is in the tale’s overtly Oedipal overtones together with its status as a blatant allegory about female sexuality as both a life-restoring force and a potential threat to be brought under control by and for men (including highlighting the function of religion in this process of repression).

TANSEN

1943 122’ b&w Hindi

d/s Jayant Desai co-dial/co-lyr D.N. Madhok co-dial Munshi Dil co-lyr Pandit Indra c Gordhanbhai Patel m Khemchand Prakash

lp K.L. Saigal, Khursheed, Mubarak, Nagendra, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Bhagwandas

One of Saigal’s best-known later films features him as Tansen, a legendary classical musician at the 16th-C. court of Mughal Emperor Akbar who composed some of the best-known ragas, including the Darbari and the Malhar. Director Desai, who appears after the credits surrounded by camera equipment, presents the story as a love fantasy between Tansen and a shepherdess, Tani (Khursheed), and rehearses several legends about Indian music, including its ability to calm animals, cause trees to flower and cure gravely ill people. Having joined Akbar’s (Mubarak) court, which separates him from his lover, Tansen has to sing the raga Deepak to cure Akbar’s daughter. Since the raga is supposed to have the power to create fire, it almost consumes the singer and he is saved by Tani’s singing of the rainmaking raga Megh Malhar. Both songs, Diya jalao and Baraso re, were big hits. One of the film’s 13 songs, Madhok’s Ho dukhia jiyara rote naina was composed, uncredited, by Bulo C. Rani. This is Khursheed’s best-known performance, holding her own as a singer alongside the legendary Saigal.

TAQDEER

aka Destiny

1943 113’ b&w Hindi

d/p Mehboob Khan pc Mehboob Prod.
st Ghulam Mohammed sc/dial Aga Jani Kashmiri lyr Mehrul Kadri c Faredoon Irani
m Rafiq Ghaznavi

lp Motilal, Chandramohan, Nargis, Charlie, Jilloo, Kayamali, Ansari

In between his more ambitious Najma (1943) and Humayun (1945), Mehboob made this lightweight comedy about Justice Gangaprasad (Chandramohan) and theatre-owner Seth Badriprasad (Charlie) who lose their daughter and son respectively in the Kumbh Mela. The children are exchanged and Gangaprasad brings up Babu (Motilal) as a rich playboy while Badriprasad raises Salma (Nargis) as a dancer in his theatre. Later, the two fall in love, which is a problem in view of the class difference between them. This is resolved when their true parentage is discovered. An interesting though unexplored aspect of the story is that Gangaprasad’s wife (played by the silent film star Jilloo), brings up Babu believing him to be a girl. The peasant song Meri mata bharat mata, with Nargis holding a sickle and a cloth bundle, intercut with shots of waving fields, foreshadows glimpses of her role in Mother India (1957).

TASVEER

1943 122’ b&w Hindi

d/dial Najmul Hussain (aka Najam) Naqvi
pc Excelsior Film Exchange sc P.K. Atre
lyr Munshi Arzoo m Ramchandra Pal

lp Durga Khote, Motilal, Swarnalata, David, Azoorie, Navin Yagnik

Romantic comedy about a philandering Dr Ambadas (David), his childless wife Vidya Devi (Khote), the beautiful Kishori (Swarnalata) who meets the couple when her dog chases Ambadas into the river, and the photographer Jayant (Motilal) who loves Kishori. After some standard plot cliches (e.g. Jayant overhears Kishori rehearsing a play but mistakes the lines for an actual conversation), Jayant, Ambadas and Vidya Devi all decide to commit suicide but Jayant’s sister Tara (Azoorie) sets things right.

Dhiraj Bhattacharya (right) in Wapas

WAPAS

1943 122’ b&w Hindi

d Hemchandra Chunder pc New Theatres
s Binoy Chatterjee dial Natwar lyr Bhushan, Zakir Hussain, Akhtar Chughtai c Sudhin Majumdar m Rai Chand Boral

lp Asit Baran, Bharati Devi, Dhiraj Bhattacharya, Latika Banner)ee, Nawab, Maya Bose, Indu Mukherjee

A city/country melodrama telling of the village boy Shyam (Baran) who loves the city girl Shobha (Bharati Devi) who arrives in the village with her retired father (Mukherjee). Their wedding plans are resisted by both families, esp. after Shyam’s miserly father (Nawab) insults Shobha’s father. Her family returns to the city where she is to marry Rajendra (Bhattacharya), the nephew of her father’s employer. Shyam follows her to the city and finds work as Rajendra’s coach-driver. The happy ending is achieved by Rajendra agreeing that Shyam should replace him as the groom while he then becomes their chauffeur.

BURMA RANI

aka Escape

1944 115’ b&w/col Tamil

d T.R. Sundaram pc Modern Theatres s Elangovan, T.V. Chari, Ki. Rajagopal

lp K.L.V. Vasantha, Honnappa Bhagavathar, N.S. Krishnan, T.A. Mathuram, T.R. Sundaram, T.S. Balaiah

Along with K. Subramanyam’s Manasamrakshanam (also 1944), one of the better-known Tamil war-effort films. Three Indian airmen are forced to land in Burma and eventually free the country from Japanese occupation with the help of an Indian resistance movement in the state. The plot revolves around Rani, an Indian girl in Burma who helps the airmen. T.R. Sundaram played the part of a Japanese commander made-up to look like Hitler. The director of War Publicity in Madras, G.T.B. Havey, presided over the film’s premiere.

CHAL CHAL RE NAUJAWAN

1944 122’ b&w Hindi

d/s Gyan Mukherjee pc Filmistan dial Sadat Hasan Manto lyr Pradeep c Hardip
m Ghulam Haider

lp Ashok Kumar, Naseem Banu, Jagdish Sethi, V.H. Desai, Motibai, Rafiq Ghaznavi, Navin Yagnik

Filmistan’s much-awaited debut film from the makers of the hit film Kismet (1943). The title of this story of friendship and betrayal over two generations evokes Ashok Kumar’s hit song from Bandhan (1940). The friends Thakur Jaipal Singh (Sethi) and Jamuna Prasad (Ghaznavi) fall out when Jaipal Singh’s wife Savitri (Motibai) finds she shares a common musical interest with Jamuna Prasad. Her husband accuses her of infidelity and throws her out. The framing story has Jaipal Singh’s horse-riding daughter Sumitra (Banu) meet Jamuna Prasad’s son Arjun (A. Kumar). They briefly work together combating an epidemic and Sumitra meets her mother without recognising her. At the end, when the thakur himself arrives, his wife recognises him. Jamuna Prasad sings a song (Aya toofan) amid storm and thunder, and when it settles down Savitri is found dead beneath an uprooted tree. The earlier history, starting the flashback, is told with a strident voice-over narrator following the example of Citizen Kane (1941), according to Filmindia. The film makes some political allusions equating the thakur’s authoritarianism with Nazi rule and includes several nationalist numbers, e.g. Jai bharat desh and the communal harmony Bolo bar bar mahadev allah-o-akbar (both Ashok Kumar). Although a minor hit, the film is considered a disappointment compared with Kismet.

GAALI

1944 122’ b&w Hindi

d/s R.S. Choudhury pc N.R. Desai Prod.
co-lyr Ram Murti Chaturvedi, Pandit Indra, Sugunapiya, D.N. Madhok m/co-lyr Hanuman Prasad m Sajjad Hussain c B.S. Jagirdar

lp Nirmala, Karan Dewan, Yakub, Kanhaiyalal, Anand Prasad, Manju, Sunalini Devi, Jilloobai, Kamta Prasad, Chandabai, Gulab, Mehdi Raza, Bibubai, Ram Murti, Khanjar, Mohan, Tuklu, Sachin Ghosh

A successful film by Mehboob’s scenarist and ex-Imperial director R.S. Choudhury. A quasiexpressionist drama about a blind young widow, Mangala (Nirmala), who lives with her father-in-law Jaggu Chakravarty and her young sister-in-law Lali (Manju). Chakravarty wants Lali to marry Tilak (Dewan), the educated modern landlord, but instead Tilak falls for the widow. The crisis is triggered by the local gossip Baldev (Yakub) and leads to Chakavarty’s death at the hands of the villagers. When Tilak and Mangala make love in a temple, her eyesight is magically restored and she is astounded that Tilak is not her dead husband. Eventually Tilak marries Lali while Mangala resigns herself to a life of solitude.

JWAR BHATA

1944 120’ b&w Hindi

d/s Amiya Chakravarty pc Bombay Talkies
dial B.C. Verma lyr Narendra Sharma
c R.D. Mathur m Anil Biswas

lp Mridula, Shamim, Aga Jaan, Dilip Kumar, P.F. Pithawala, K.N. Singh, Arun Kumar, Bikram Kapoor, Jagannath Arora, Naseem Lodhi, C.J. Pande, Khalil, Mumtaz Ali

A musical romance remembered mainly for Dilip Kumar’s debut. An old patriarch has two unmarried daughters Rama (Shamim) and Renu (Mridula). Narendra (Aga Jaan), the modern son of an urban millionaire, is to marry Rama. Visiting the family in disguise to sneak a look at his future bride, he mistakes Rama for Renu and they fall in love. The mix-up comes to light only after the wedding. Renu blames god and is thrown out of the house for blasphemy. On a train, she joins some travelling performers led by Jagdish (D. Kumar), and to escape getting caught she pretends to live with him. When Renu goes home again, her sister Rama is pregnant and ill and a choice must be made between the foetus and the mother. Renu makes up with god and through divine intervention Rama’s and her child’s lives are saved. The film’s ten songs include several by singer Parul Ghosh.

MAHAMAYA

1944 ?’ b&w Tamil

co-d/co-dial T.R. Raghunath
co-d/co-dial/st Elangovan co-d R.S. Mani
pc Jupiter Pics c Marcus Bartley
m Venkatramaiyer

lp P. Kannamba, N.S. Krishnan, N.S. Saroja, P.U. Chinnappa, T.R. Mathuram, Meena Lochani, R. Balasubramanyam, M.G. Chakrapani

Period tragedy in Rajput costume featuring Mahamaya, princess of Gandhara (Kannamba) and Vikram (P.U. Chinnappa), prince of a neighbouring kingdom, both students of the same teacher. Mahamaya innocently garlands Vikram’s sword unaware of the sexual/political significance of the act. Both get married to other partners, but when they meet again Vikram reminds her of the garland, insists that she give herself to him and abducts her. Although she escapes, she is disowned by her husband, whereupon she kills her child and then herself to prove her chastity. The film is dominated by Kannamba and by its large sets. The Krishnan-Mathuram comedy duo provides light relief.

MERI BAHEN

aka My Sister

1944 122’ b&w Hindi

d Hemchandra Chunder pc New Theatres
s Binoy Chatterjee lyr Bhushan c Sudhin Majumdar m Pankaj Mullick

lp K.L. Saigal, Sumitra Devi, Nawab, Akhtar Jehan, Chandrabati Devi, Hiralal, Tulsi Chakraborty, Tandon, A.H. Shore, Rajalakshmi

Poor but upright schoolteacher Ramesh (Saigal) adores his adolescent sister Bimala (Akhtar Jehan). He falls in love with Krishna (Sumitra Devi), the village zamindar’s daughter, but he declines to marry her when the zamindar insists that they live in the village. Ramesh moves to Calcutta which is under attack by the Japanese (the time is WW2). There he becomes a singer in the Great Metropolitan Theatre company and its female star Miss Rekha (Chandrabati Devi) falls for him. This is one of Saigal’s more technically sophisticated movies at New Theatres and includes some quasi-documentary scenes (e.g. about a blood donation programme) showing life under the bombardment, and the shots showing the theatre devastated by an air raid. Ramesh is injured during the attack and is hospitalised. His beloved sister leaves him. The film intercuts his angst-ridden condition while Rekha dies in the same hospital, unbeknown to Ramesh. The film passes an unusually harsh judgement on Rekha, notwithstanding the convention of damning ‘liberated’ women in the Indian cinema of the time. Like all Saigal films, it relies heavily on his songs, e.g. Do naina matware, Chupo na, opyari sajaniya (when Saigal serenades Krishna’s father, thinking him to be Krishna) and Ai qatib-etaqdeer mujhe Una bata de. Composer Mullick later re-recorded these songs in his own voice for an independent album.

PARAKH

1944 122’ b&w Hindi

d Sohrab Modi pc Central Studios
s/co-lyr Sudarshan co-lyr Munshi Arzoo Lucknowi, Ghafil Harnalvi c Y.D. Sarpotdar, Keki Mistry m Khurshid Anwar, Saraswati Devi

lp Mehtab, Kaushalya, Balwant Singh, Shah Nawaz, Yakub, Sadiq Ali, Pratima Devi, Latika

A class division melodrama centred on Mehtab’s histrionics. Kiran (Mehtab) is the daughter of a courtesan. Her lowly origins first destroy her marriage and then threaten to jeopardise her son Prakash’s (Singh) ambitions. She is blackmailed for keeping her son’s parentage a secret from him, forcing her to return to her ancestral profession. The film was a commercial success.

PHOOL

1944 122’ b&w Hindi-Urdu

d K. Asif pc Famous Films s Kamal Amrohi c Kumar Jaywant m Ghulam Haider

lp Veena, Sitara Devi, Suraiya, Prithviraj Kapoor, Durga Khote, Yakub, Wasti, Mazhar Khan

The directorial debut of K. Asif, best known for his Mughal-e-Azam (1960), is a big-budget Amrohi drama set in a Muslim joint family. Safdar loses his inheritance through his sister-in-law’s machinations but he still has to honour his promise to complete the building of a mosque started by his father. His future son-in-law Salim goes to Turkey to fight in the Balkan wars, where a dancer corrupts him, so the responsibility of building the mosque falls on Safdar’s orphaned daughter who has to choose between that responsibility and her freedom.

RAMSHASTRI

1944 122’[H]/108’[M] b&w Marathi/Hindi

co-d Gajanan Jagirdar, Raja Nene
co-d/sc Vishram Bedekar pc Prabhat
st V.S. Sukhtankar lyr S.A. Shukla[M], Shantaram Athavale[M], Qamar Jalalabadi[H]
c Pandurang Naik, E. Mohammed
m Keshavrao Bhole, G. Damle

lp Gajanan Jagirdar, Anant Marathe, Baby Shakuntala, Meenakshi, Lalita Pawar, Sudha Apte, Hansa Wadkar, Bhagwat, Manajirao, Balkoba Gokhale, Madhu Apte, Ganpatrao Tambat[M], Master Vithal[M], Master Chhotu[M], Manjrekar[H], Ram Singh[H]

Prabhat’s expensively mounted historical set at a contentious period of the Maratha empire is a biographical of Ramshastri Prabhune (1720–89), chief justice at the court of Madhavrao and later of Nana Phadnavis, and a major figure in the development of an indigenous legal code. The period of the Peshwai (i.e. the council of ministers established by Shivaji, which was by the 18th C. the real power behind the ceremonial throne occupied by his descendents) follows the death of the Peshwa (Prime Minister) Madhavrao in 1772 when Raghoba seized power by killing Narayanrao, the official heir and his own nephew. The film adheres to the legendary version of this episode elaborated in K.P. Khadilkar’s Marathi play Bhaubandhaki (1902), blaming Raghoba’s ambitious and calculating wife Anandibai (Pawar) for the murder. The idealised figure of Ramshastri (Jagirdar) is presented as truth incarnate. Struggling for an education, he eventually becomes the popular chief justice at Madhavrao’s court and is the only influential figure in the realm willing to stand up to Raghoba and to denounce his usurpation of the throne. After an intricate palace intrigue, he resigns his judicial post. The studio’s last big film in its celebrated 30s style, it was to have been directed by Shantaram but others were drafted in to save the film when he left the Prabhat Studio. It carries no director credit and the Marathi version has no credits at all.

RATTAN

1944 118’ b&w Hindi

d M. Sadiq pc Jamuna Prod, cost R.S. Choudhury co-st/dial/lyr D.N. Madhok c Dwarka Divecha m Naushad

lp Swarnalata, Karan Dewan, Wasti, Manju, Gulab, Rajkumari Shukla, Badriprasad, Azoorie, Chandabai, Amirbano

Extremely successful love story establishing the careers of both its director and its composer. Two country youths Govind (Dewan) and Gauri (Swarnalata) are in love. Gauri is forcibly married to another but their love does not fade. The film was bought by the Kapurchands for distribution and cheaply resold locally because it was deemed uncommercial. Classic musical score includes the Zohrabai number Akhiyan mila ke jiya bharma ke chale nahin jaana and established Naushad’s reputation among the leading music directors from the 40s onwards.

TEHSILDAR

1944 ?’ b&w Telugu

d/st Y.Y. Rao pc Shri Jagadish Films dial/lyr Balijepalli Lakshmikanta Kavi c Purshottam m H.R. Padmanabha Sastry
lp Y.V. Rao, Ch. Narayana Rao, Balijepalli Lakshmikanta Kavi, Rangaswamy, Krishnayya, Natesayya, B.V.K. Acharya, M.S. Rama Rao, B.R. Panthulu, Kamala Kotnis, P. Bhanumathi, Hemalatha, Bezwada Rajarathnam, Krishnakumari, Tripurasundari, Soudamini

Y.V. Rao’s best-known film as actor is a satire on the mania for Westernisation among India’s lower-level bureaucrats. A minor tehsildar (revenue collector) (Y.V. Rao) marries the naive, rural Kamala (Bhanumathi) and instantly wants her to adopt Western fashions, learn English and walk in high-heeled shoes. This leads to ludicrous situations and at a tea party hosted by the collector she feels publicly humiliated. The tehsildar rejects Kamala in favour of Rajani (Kotnis), a ‘modern’ lady who first has Kamala evicted from the house and then goes on to ruin the Tehsildar financially, causing him to be arrested for embezzlement. With, e.g. Grihapravesham (1946), L.V. Prasad later continued the satires on blind Westernisation.

UDAYER PATHEY/HAMRAHI

1944 122’[B]/121’[H] b&w Bengali/Hindi

d/c/co-sc Bimal Roy pc New Theatres
st/dial Jyotirmoy Roy co-sc Nirmal Dey
lyr Zakir Hussain[H] lyr Rabindranath Tagore[B] m Rai Chand Boral

lp Radhamohan Bhattacharya, Binata Basu, Rekha Mitra, Devi Mukherjee, Tulsi Chakraborty, Devbala, Meera Dutta, Boken Chatterjee, Maya Bose, Rajalakshmi, Parul Kar, Manorama, Bishwanath Bhaduri[B], Hiren Basu[B], Tarapada Choudhury[B], Smritirekha Biswas[B], Leena Bose[B], Aditya Ghosh[B], Bhupendra Kapoor[H], Hiralal[H], Dindayal Luthra[H], Ramesh Sinha[H]

Binata Basu (second from right) and Radhamohan Bhattacharya (right) in Udayer Pathey

Bimal Roy’s directorial debut tells of an impoverished novelist Anup (Bhattacharya) who works as a speechwriter for the millionaire Rajendranath (Bhaduri), but leaves when his sister Sumitra is falsely accused of theft. Increasingly committed to the working class, Anup writes a novel, but Rajendranath’s corrupt and evil son (D. Mukherjee) plagiarises the book. Although Rajendranath’s daughter Gopa (B. Basu) falls in love with Anup, his commitment to the workers’ union starts threatening the family’s business interests. The evil son has Anup beaten up during a labour rally. The famous socialist-realist ending frames Rajendranath on his balcony as he sees Anup and Gopa leave the house and walk towards the rising sun. (In contrast, Pramod Chakravarty’s remake, Naya Zamana, 1971, had Dharmendra and Hema Malini exit in millionaire-father Ashok Kumar’s limousine, while S. Ray ended Mahanagar, 1963, with an ironic inversion of the scene as hero and heroine stride into the streets and merge with ‘the masses’). The title was taken from a Tagore poem, addressing Swadeshi indigenism in a changed political context, and appears on the wall of Anup’s room. It inaugurated the venerable practice of using Tagore poems for Bengali film titles. Known mainly for Radhamohan Bhattacharya’s remarkable debut as the incorruptible bhadralok hero, an image he repeated in several films (e.g. the little girl’s father in Kabuliwala, 1956) and which was quoted in Mrinal Sen’s Akaler Sandhaney (1980) in which Bhattacharya played the village teacher. The film’s enduring reputation as a popularised version of IPTA theatre was enhanced by IPTA writer Jyotirmoy Roy’s lively story and dialogue. The film is a fine example of the type of melodrama that addresses indigenous capitalism as a contradiction between inherited and earned wealth.

BADI MAA

1945 122’ b&w Hindi

d Master Vinayak pc Prafulla Pics
st V.S. Khandekar lyr Zia Sarhadi, Anjum Pilibhiti, Raja Badhe, Dinkar D. Patil
c Madhav Bulbule m K. Datta

lp Nurjehan, Meenakshi, Ishwarlal, Yakub, Alka, Lata Mangeshkar, Leela Mishra, Sitara Devi, Dada Salvi, Damuanna Malvankar, V. Jog, Girish, Bhaurao Datar

Vinayak was forced to make this war-effort movie to keep his company alive during WW2. Durgadas (Salvi) worries about his son Dinesh (Ishwarlal) who is in London during the Blitz. Moneylender Ghanshyam (Girish) agrees to write off a debt provided Durgadas’s daughter Usha (Meenakshi) marries his son Rajendra (Yakub), but Rajendra and the dancer Mona (Sitara Devi) are spies for the Japanese. When the Japanese attack the village of Dinapur, Rajendra becomes a patriot and fights for the Allied cause along with Dinesh.

HEMAREDDY MALLAMMA

1945 ?’ b&w Kannada
d. S. Soundararajan, GR. Rao p Gubbi Veeranna pc Gubbi Films dial Behove Narahari Sastri based on his play m Chittor V. Nagaiah

lp Gubbi Veeranna, Honnappa Bhagavathar, C.B. Mallappa, K.R. Seetarama Sastry, B. Jayamma

Veeranna’s hit sequel to his Jeevana Nataka (1942) is based on the Sastri play he had staged with his own theatre group. Told in the Saint film idiom, the story shows how the devout Mallamma (Jayamma), burdened by a mentally retarded husband and a tyrannical mother-in-law, eventually transforms everyone around her. Nagaiah made his Kannada debut as composer with several popular songs which, along with the film’s elaborate special effects, contributed to its success.

HUMAYUN

1945 118’ b&w Hindi-Urdu

d/p Mehboob Khan pc Mehboob Prod. st Waqif sc Aga Jani Kashmiri lyr Shams Lucknowi, Munshi Arzoo, Anjum Pilibhiti, Buddhichandra Agarwal ‘Madhur’, Vikaar Ambalvi c Faredoon Irani m Ghulam Haider

lp Ashok Kumar, Veena Kumari, Nargis, Shah Nawaz, Chandramohan, K.N. Singh, Himalaywala, Yusuf Effendi, Abdul Rashid, Abdul Kader, Afghan Sandow, Wasker

Classic spectacular featuring the 16th-C. Mughal emperor Humayun (Kumar). Advocating communal harmony, a policy prompted by contemporary developments, the film stresses the friendship between the victorious Babar (Nawaz) and the defeated Rajputs: he asks the Rajkumari (Veena), daughter of the slain Rajput king, to assume her father’s throne and to regard Babar as a father. In the latter part of the story, Humayun sacrifices his kingdom to save the Rajkumari. Hamida Bano (Nargis) is a commoner with whom Humayun falls in love, but who turns down his offer of marriage claiming that women, for all kings, are mere playthings. The major highlights of the film are the elaborate Mughal sets and the spectacular battle scenes with elephants and horses. Cecil B. DeMille described the film, in a letter to the film-maker, as a ‘masterpiece of lighting and composition’.

LAKHRANI

1945 122’ b&w Hindi

d/s Vishram Bedekar pc Prabhat Film
dial Sudarshan lyr Qamar Jalalabadi
c Pandurang Naik m Master Krishnarao

lp Durga Khote, Monica Desai, Azoorie, Sapru, Butt Kaiser, Ganpatrao, Gauri, Karadkar, Guru Dutt, Baby Malan, Ramsingh, Urmila

Bichwa (Khote) is the queen of a devout Untouchable community not permitted to enter the temple. Her daughter Lakha, the best dancer in the community, marries the prince of a rival community of atheists and is excommunicated by her own people. The devout group has their devotion tested by economic setbacks and a major conflict erupts between them and the atheists but god materialises on earth, thus solving the problems of belief and its attendant conflicts. Untouchability is abolished and they can all join together to worship in the temple. This transparent piece of religious propaganda saw Guru Dutt’s acting debut in the minor role of Lachman, Lakha’s brother.

MANE NA MANA

1945 121’ b&w Bengali

d/s Sailajananda Mukherjee pc New Century Prod, c Sudhir Basu m Sailen Dasgupta

lp Ahindra Choudhury, Jahar Ganguly, Phani Roy, Dhiraj Bhattacharya, Tulsi Chakraborty, Santosh Sinha, Renuka Roy, Molina Devi, Sandhyarani, Prabhadevi, Nibhanani Devi

Mukherjee followed his Shahar Theke Dooray (1943) with this rural joint family melodrama about a woolly-headed but saintly Debnath (a stereotype in Saratchandra’s novels) who loves his stepbrother the idle hedonist Bhoothnath, and his stepsister. Debnath’s wife would like her sister to marry the step-brother. Debnath finds a job for Bhootnath with a miserly zamindar but this leads to Bhootnath becoming implicated in a theft and he is jailed. The problems threaten the cohesion of the joint family but the happy end reasserts the permanence of blood ties. A major hit, the film produced fashion spin-offs including Mane Na Mana saris. The fashion trend had earlier been introduced into Bengali film mainly around the figure of Kanan Devi (e.g. ‘Kanbala’ earrings), followed by ‘Anuradha bindis’ (forehead dots) after Bidyapati (1937).

MEERA

1945 136’[T]/120’[H] b&w Tamil/Hindi

d Ellis R. Duncan pc Chandraprabha Cinetone p T. Sadasivam dial/lyr[T] Kalki sc/dial[H] Amritlal Nagar lyr Narendra Sharma[H] m S.V. Venkatraman, Ramnath, Naresh Bhattacharya

lp M.S. Subbulakshmi, T.V. Rajasundaribai, S. Santhanam, Chittor V. Nagaiah, Radha, Kumari Kamala, T.S. Balaiah, M.G. Ramachandran

A Saint film about the life of Meera aka Meerabai (1498–1565). In the film, she is forced to marry the King of Mewar (Nagaiah), and is persecuted by her brother-in-law Jayaman (Baliah). The king accedes to her request to have a Krishna temple to be built in Chittoor. When she refuses to accompany the king at a court durbar, and places the necklace gifted to her by Akbar’s envoy Tansen on the Krishna idol, the king orders the temple demolished. She eventually moves to Dwarka where she becomes an itinerant singer before her soul merges into that of Krishna. One of India’s most famous saint poets, her 1400 or so poems, handed down completely in the oral tradition, often address a demystified ideal of Krishna (played in the film by Kumari Kamala). The film features the famous classical singer M.S. Subbulakshmi known for her Carnatic-style music but also for several other, including North Indian styles (her daughter Radha played the young Meera). Her rendition of 18 Meera bhajans in Hindi remained for several years the definitive musical version of the lyrics. They have remained an important part of her live concerts ever since. Originally a Tamil hit, the film’s very successful Hindi version had the poetess-politician Sarojini Naidu introduce Subbulakshmi to a North Indian audience. The Tamil version has novelist Kalki’s best-known work as a lyric writer, esp. Katrinile varum geetham.

SAMRAT CHANDRAGUPTA

1945 122’ b&w Hindi

d/p Jayant Desai pc Jayant Desai Prod.
st Mohanlal G. Dave dial Shaheed Latif, Sagar Hussain lyr Buddhichandra Agarwal ‘Madhur’
c Dronacharya m C. Ramchandra

lp Renuka Devi, Ishwarlal, Nayampalli, Suraiya, Anil Kumar, Ibrahim, Sulochana Chatterjee, Rewashankar Marwadi, Kantilal, Bhagwandas

Big-budget historical about the founder of the Maurya empire in 321BC The film uses the legend about the Indian emperor who was close to Alexander’s Macedonian army but fell out with the Greek and eventually defeated him in battle, establishing his own empire and capital at Pataliputra. The film shows Chandragupta’s friendship with the Greek general Seleucus Nicator, whose daughter the Mauryan king is believed to have married. He saves Nicator’s life and also his daughter Helen from the evil Antigonus, in return for which he marries Helen. The subsequent political history, e.g. Chandragupta’s conquest of the Nandas, is presented as a consequence of the love story. Happiness reigns only after several attempts to overthrow the king are foiled. A key figure is the wily politician Chanakya. The film also had the nationalist number Mata ki jai, janani kijai ho.

SWARGASEEMA

1945 114’ b&w Telugu

d/sc B.N. Reddi pc Vauhini st Chakrapani dial/co-lyr S.V.R. Acharya co-lyr Nalinkantha c Marcus Bartley m Chittor V. Nagaiah

lp. Bhanumathi, Chittor V. Nagaiah, B. Jayamma, Lingamurthy, K. Siva Rao, Ch. Narayana Rao

Reddi’s best-known film is a remarkable melodrama chronicling the metamorphosis of rural street entertainer Subbi (Bhanumathi) into the urban seductress Sujata Devi. Murthi (Nagaiah), a married man, helps her to become a stage star while the heroine breaks up Murthi’s marriage to the affectionate Kalyani (B. Jayamma). The film can be read as a comment on the star-manufacturing process in Telugu cinema, with Bhanumathi, supported by Bartley’s constantly moving camera, expertly modulating the gradual shifts in gesture, speech accent and make-up as the village beauty is transformed into a ‘sexy’ star. Allegedly inspired by Mamoulian’s Blood and Sand (1941) starring Rita Hayworth. The film’s generic innovativeness is sometimes ascribed to the new unit assembled by the studio after designer A.K. Sekhar and writer/cameraman K. Ramnoth left to join Gemini. Major new presences include writer Chakrapani (later co-producer with B.N. Reddi at Vauhini), lyricist-composer B. Rajanikanta Rao and singer Ghantasala, who makes his singing debut here with the number Gazulapilla. According to V.A.K. Ranga Rao, lyricist Rajanikanta Rao introduces Arabic music and Bhanumathi adopts Hayworth’s humming from Blood and Sand for the classic hit song Oob pavurama (in the seduction number) as a contrast to the Carnatic number Manchidinamu nede.

TADBIR

1945 121’ b&w Hindi

d/p Jayant Desai Jayant Desai Prod. st Mohanlal G. Dave dial Munshi Sagar Hussain lyr Swami Ramanand c Dronacharya m Lai Mahomed

lp K.L. Saigal, Suraiya, Mubarak, Jilloo, Rehana, Rewashankar Marwadi, Raja Rani, Shashi Kapoor, Amina, Shalini, Gharpure, Raja Joshi

When Kanhaiyalal (Saigal) is born, an astrologer predicts that upon growing up he shall follow a prostitute, learn to wield a knife and be sentenced to the gallows. The predictions come true but not in the imagined forms: he and his mother find shelter in the house of Saguna (Suraiya), a prostitute who eventually sacrifices her life to save the hero’s. The knife-wielding prediction comes true when he becomes a surgeon. Kanhaiyalal and his mother fight poverty and crime, and his evil stepbrother Jwala Prasad. A well-known Saigal and Suraiya musical that claimed to address the phenomenon of destiny.

ANMOL GHADI

aka Precious Time
1946 122’ b&w Hindi

d/p Mehboob Khan pc Mehboob Prod. st Anwar Batalvi sc/dial Aga Jani Kashmiri lyr Tanveer Naqvi, Anjum Pilibhiti c Faredoon Irani m Naushad

lp Nurjehan, Surendra, Suraiya, Zahur Raja, Leela Mishra, Anwari Begum, Bhudo Advani, Murad, Bibubai, Amirbano, Noor Mahal, Wasker

A love-triangle romance with reformist overtones set partly in Bombay. Impoverished hero Chander (Surendra) and rich heroine Lata (Nurjehan) are childhood sweethearts separated when Lata’s parents move to Bombay. Later, Chander moves there when his rich friend Prakash (Zahur Raja) finds him work in a musical instruments shop. By then, Lata has become a famous poetess going by the name of Renu and is engaged to Prakash. Lata’s friend Basanti (Suraiya) falls in love with Chander but he remains true to his childhood girl and walks away into the sunset (with Basanti running after him). Although Mehboob made other triangular romances (Hum Turn Aur Woh, 1938; Najma, 1943 etc.), this film started his investigation of patriarchy, shown as masquerading under ‘eternal’ values (cf. Anokhi Ada, 1948; Andaz, 1949). The film deploys a strident rhetoric about class divisions, opposing poverty to eternal human(ist) values such as friendship and love. Languorous gesture and a romantically lit neo-classical decor are used to suggest femininity. Musical hits including Nurjehan’s best-known songs, e.g. Awaaz de kahan hai (with Surendra) and the solos Mere bachpan ke saatbi, Jaivan bai mobabbat.

Suraiya in Anmol Ghadi

DHARTI KE LAL

aka Children of the Earth

1946 125’ b&w Hindi

d/sc/co-p K.A. Abbas co-p VP. Sathe pc IPTA st Bijon Bhattacharya’s plays Nabanna and Jabanbandi; Krishen Chander’s short story Annadata lyr Ali Sardar Jafri, Nemichand Jain, Wamiq, Prem Dhawan cjamnadas Kapadia m Ravi Shankar

lp Sombhu Mitra, Balraj Sahni, Usha Dutta, Damayanti Sahni, Anwar Mirza, Tripti Bhaduri, Hamid Butt, Pratap Ojha, Rashid Ahmed, Randhir, Zohra Saigal, Mahendranath, Snehaprabha, David, K.N. Singh

Abbas’s directorial debut launched a major trend of ‘realist’ cinema. The film is set during WW2 and the 1943 Bengal famine (a traumatic event often used as source material by left cultural movements) and a growing ‘nation-building’ ideology. Made during the war, the novice cast and crew were accorded a special licence for a war-effort contribution. The only film actually produced by the IPTA (although it later informally supported several other films), the film is based partly on Sombhu Mitra’s landmark production of Bhattacharya’s play Nabanna for the IPTA. It narrates the story of a family of sharecroppers in Bengal: the patriarch Samaddar, his elder son Niranjan and his wife Binodini, and the younger son Ramu with his wife Radhika. Despite a good harvest and rising grain prices during the war, Samaddar loses his property to a crooked grain-dealing zamindar. Ramu, his wife and their newborn baby go to Calcutta followed soon after by the rest of the family along with thousands of similarly dispossessed peasants. The film intercuts Ramu’s frantic search for work with his wife’s descent into prostitution. Before dying, the patriarch enjoins his family to return to their native soil where the farmers get together and, in a stridently celebratory socialist-realist ending, opt for Soviet-style collective farming. Ramu is excluded from their world. The film’s highly stylised and symbol-laden realism proved extremely influential. It appears to have found a way of narrativising the 1943 famine which set the pattern for many films moving from depictions of deprivation in the country to suffering in the city, e.g. Nemai Ghosh’s Chinnamul (1950) and Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen (1953). It also initiated a new type of melodrama able to many actuality to psychoanalytic and political anxieties and desires, as in Abbas’s scripts for Raj Kapoor.

DR KOTNIS KI AMAR KAHANI

aka The Journey of Dr Kotnis aka Immortal Journey of Dr Kotnis aka And One Did Not Come Back

1946 127’[H]/100’[E] b&w Hindi

d/p V. Shantaram pc Rajkamal Kalamandir st/co-s K.A. Abbas from his story And One Did Not Come Back co-s V.P. Sathe lyr Dewan Sharar c V. Avadhoot m Vasant Desai

lp V. Shantaram, Jayashree, Dewan Sharar, Baburao Pendharkar, Master Vinayak, Ulhas, Keshavrao Date, Rajashree, Pratima Devi, Salvi, Jankidass, Hublikar

A chronicle of the real-life story of Dwarkanath Kotnis (V. Shantaram), a member of a medical team sent by India during WW2, an intensely nationalist period, to fight alongside the Chinese during the Japanese invasion. Kotnis goes to China, works almost singlehandedly to provide medical relief to the wounded, meets and marries a Chinese girl, Ching Lan (Jayashree), is captured by the Japanese and eventually dies in battle while developing a cure against an epidemic. Ching Lan and their infant son return to India, symbolising the solidarity of their nationalist struggles. Made along with the IPTA-backed Dharti Ke Lal and Neecha Nagar (both 1946) under a special WW2 licence as a war-effort film, Dr Kotnis is remarkable for its absolute abandonment of any pretence at cinematic realism and its powerful nationalist rhetoric, culminating in the hero’s dying speech describing what his wife will see when she goes ‘home’. This is intercut with documentary footage of Nehru at a mass meeting. The film succeeded in simultaneously pleasing the Communists, the Congress and the colonial occupation force. Shantaram re-edited a shorter version in English in 1948 in which, according to S. Bannerjee and A. Srivastava (1988), the ‘clothing of the Indian characters’ was made ‘more ethnic to please a Western audience’.

EIGHT DAYS

aka Aath Din
1946 141’ b&w Hindi

d Dattaram Pai pc Filmistan s Sadat Hasan Manto lyr Gopal Singh Nepali c S. Hardip m S.D. Burman

lp Ashok Kumar, Veera, S.L. Puri, Rama Shukul, Mohsin, Sadat Hasan Manto, Upendranath Ashok, Mehdi Ali Khan, B.M. Dikshit, Ram Nath, Aga Jan, Master Bhagwan, Victor Pinto, Leela Mishra, H. Desai

Manto wrote in Meena Bazar (1962) that his script was specifically designed as an Ashok Kumar comedy. Effectively directed by the star himself, this early Filmistan production tells of Shamsher Singh (Kumar), a discharged military officer who wants to settle down as a farmer. His marriage is arranged with the educated Neela (Veera) who ditches him at the last minute and goes to the city where she learns that she stands to inherit a fortune if she gets married within 8 days. After rejecting several suitors, she finally falls in love with Shamsher Singh, whom she meets in the city unaware that he is the person to whom she was earlier betrothed. Singh treats her badly and she sues him but in the end the two realise that they love each other. Manto acts in the film as an air force officer.

GRIHAPRAVESHAM

1946 122’ b&w Telugu

d L.V. Prasad pc Sarathi Films s Tripuraneni Gopichand cjiten Bannerjee lyr/m Nalinikanta Rao (aka Balanthrapu Rajanikanta Rao)

lp P. Bhanumathi, Hemalatha, C.S.R. Anjaneyulu, L.V. Prasad, Rangaswamy, K. Siva Rao, Sriranjani Jr.

The studio associated with Ramabrahmam’s work commissioned the new director Prasad to film a reformist story simultaneously critiquing Westernisation and the feudal practice of arranged marriages (representing the views of scenarist Gopichand). Prasad turned it into a satire of the reformist social itself. The film was supposed to contrast the misogynist bachelor Somalingam (Prasad) with the ‘modern’ Janaki (Bhanumathi) who insists on her equal rights. Instead, it opens with the culturally loaded scene of Janaki playing badminton and her feminism is presented as strident and disruptive. Janaki’s stepmother (Hemalatha) tries to force a marriage between her brother the anglophile Ramana Rao (Anjaneyulu) and Janaki, even though Ramana Rao has a girlfriend, Lalita (Sriranjani). Eventually Janaki and Somalingam devise a plot, embroiling them in many hypocrises, to get Lalita and Ramana Rao married. Middle-class anglophilia is also ridiculed through Anjaneyulu’s character, dressed in a three-piece suit and singing a couple of English songs. Bhanumathi’s sentimental Amma nee nayanammulla ashajyothula ninduga velugenamma was a hit song.

HUM EK HAIN

1946 121’ b&w Hindi

d/co-sc/lyr P.L. Santoshi pc Prabhat Film
st Saleh Mohammed Qureshi co-sc Tony Lazarus c Surendra Pai m Husnlal-Bhagatram

lp Durga Khote, Kamala Kotnis, Dev Anand, Alka Achrekar, Rehana, Rehman, Ranjit Kumari, Rane, Ram Singh, Gokhale, Ganpatrao, Manajirao Karadkar, Bhagwat, Baby Usha

A national unity parable choreographed by Guru Dutt but more significant as Dev Anand’s debut. The old landlady of a village supports its people during a famine and raises three orphaned children of differing religions. The children, although encouraged to practice their separate religions, are taught to remain united at all times. The villain Chhote Babu, who wants to marry the girl who is engaged to the eldest of the three boys, sows discord and hatred, causing great enmity between the trio until reason prevails and they reunite.

JEEVAN YATRA

1946 134’ b&w Hindi

d Master Vinayak pc Rajkamal Kalamandir
p V. Shantaram st N.S. Phadke’s novel
sc/lyr Dewan Sharar c Madhav Bulbule
m Vasant Desai

lp Nayantara, Pratima Devi, Lata Mangeshkar, Shantarin, Sunalini Devi, Meher Sultana, Sundarabai, Vijaya, Yakub, Baburao Pendharkar, Dikshit, Chandrakant, Damuanna Malvankar

Shantaram, who had given him his first break, also produced Vinayak’s last film. It features a large number of characters travelling on a bus to Benares. A storm forces the passengers to take shelter in an abandoned temple where a prostitute tries to seduce Raja (Yakub) and he is left behind. The bus later breaks down and when Raja rejoins the group a local bandit, Vishwas (Pendharkar), attacks it. Eventually the bandit turns out to be Raja’s father and the husband of an old woman, Kalindi (Protima Devi), another passenger on the bus. Vinayak’s only film in the mainstream Hindi cinema, it included the collective number Ao azadi ke geet gate chalein and Lata Mangeshkar’s Chidiya bole choo choo. Mangeshkar plays a village girl.

NAUKA DUBI/MILAN

1946 147’[B]/144’[H] b&w Bengali/Hindi

d Nitin Bose pc Bombay Talkies p Hiten Choudhury st Rabindranath Tagore’s novel Nauka Dubi (1916) sc Sajanikanta Das lyr Arzoo, P.L. Santoshi[H] c Radhu Karmakar
m Anil Biswas

lp Dilip Kumar[H]/Abhi Bhattacharya[B], Ranjana[H]/Meera Sarkar[B], Meera Mishra, Pahadi Sanyal, Moni Chatterjee, Shyam Laha

The hero Ramesh (Kumar/Bhattacharya) agrees to marry a woman he’s never met, unknown to his real lover Hemnalini (Ranjana/Sarkar). The wedding party is hit by a storm when travelling across a river; the hero’s father and the bride are drowned while the hero survives. He later meets Kamala (Meera Mishra), whose husband (like Ramesh’s wife) had died shortly after their marriage. Their respective bereavements bring the two closer until Kamala’s husband is discovered to be still alive. Eventually Ramesh marries Hemnalini. The famous Tagore novel was Nitin Bose’s debut at Bombay Talkies, and his most ambitious Hindi film to date. Reviews attacked it for its slow pace, but generally commended its extensive night shooting.

NEECHA NAGAR

1946 122’ b&w Hindi

d Chetan Anand pc India Pics s Hyatullah Ansari st M. Gorky’s The Lower Depths lyr Vishwamitter Adil, Manmohan Anand c Bidyapati Ghosh m Ravi Shankar

lp Rafiq Anwar, Uma Anand, Rafi Peer, Kamini Kaushal, Hamid Butt, S.P. Bhatia, Mohan Segal, Zohra Segal, Prem Kumar

Chetan Anand’s IPTA-supported film loosely adapted from Gorky’s classic forms a trio with Abbas’s Dharti Ke Lal and Shantaram’s Dr Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani (both 1946). Class division is signified by a rich landowner (Rafi Peer) who lives on a mountain while the poor starve in the ‘Neecha Nagar’, a village in the valley below. The landowner’s sewage flows around the poor people’s huts, spreading disease. Eventually the rich man dies in a long-drawn-out heart attack. Anand’s debut featured several judgemental high- and low-angled shots, sacrificing realism for quasi-expressionist emotional intensity. This film and Dharti Ke Lal mark Ravi Shankar’s debut as film composer.

RANAKDEVI

1946 123’ b&w Gujarati

d/sc V.M. Vyas pc Sunrise Pics st Mohanlal G. Dave dial Karsandas Manek lyr Manasvai Prantijwalla c R.M. Rele m Chanalal Thakur

lp Anjana, Motibai, Dulari, Nirupa Roy, Lilavati, Lila Jayawant, Mallika, Damayanti, Chandrabala, Amubai, Sumati, Daksha, Kavita, Bhagwandas, Pande, Chanalal Thakur, Natwarlal Chohan, Master Dhulia, Shyam, Gangaram, Gautam

Nirupa Roy’s first film. The Solanki King Siddharaj Jaisinh (12th C.) wants to marry Ranak, a daughter of the Parmar king of Sind but raised by a potter. However, she marries King Ra’Khengar of Junagadh, triggering a war as Ranak, confined for 12 years, bears two children while refusing to succumb to Siddharaj. When he kills her husband, she commits sati (ritual suicide on her husband’s funeral pyre). Based on historical events, the story had become a folk legend. It was the only Gujarat film made that year, but launched a tradition of film adaptations of quasi-historical legends, many of them dealing with Rajput royalty (cf. Raskapur’s films Mulu Manek, 1955; Kadu Makrani, 1960).

SHAHJEHAN

1946 121’ b&w Hindi-Urdu

d/p A.R. Kardar Kardar Prod. lyr Majrooh Sultanpuri, Kumar Barabankavi m Naushad

lp K.L. Saigal, Kanwar, Ragini, Nasreen, Jairaj, Himalaywala, Nazir Bedi, Azoorie, Kesarbai, Anwari, Munir Sultana, Rehman, Peerjaan

Kardar’s costume drama set in Mughal Emperor Shah Jehan’s court is Saigal’s last film and the debut of new-generation set designer M.R. Achrekar (later associated mainly with Raj Kapoor) and lyricist Sultanpuri. The melodrama stresses the two motifs usually associated with Shah Jehan: his commitment to justice and the Taj Mahal, which he built as a monument of love for his wife Mumtaz. The poet Sohail (Saigal) writes a love song (Mere sapnon ki rant) in praise of the beauteous Ruhi, daughter of Rajput general Jwala Singh. The song becomes so popular that it seriously inconveniences its subject: some lovelorn youths disrupt her wedding procession and five of her brothers are killed. Shah Jehan adopts Ruhi into the royal court and offers her in marriage to the one who can create a work of art that ‘replicates heaven on earth’. Sohail wins the contest with the song Kar lijiye chal kar merijannat ke nazare but she is in love with the Persian sculptor Shiraz (Jairaj). The dilemma causes a split between Shah Jehan and his wife, only resolved when Mumtaz, on her deathbed, asks the emperor to build a monument reflecting their love. Shiraz is to build the monument, but he must first experience a loss analogous to Shah Jehan’s loss of Mumtaz. And so, Ruhi’s father kills Ruhi: the distraught Shiraz then builds the Taj Mahal. Later, it is revealed that Ruhi is still alive as Sohail sacrificed his life to save her. Although Mughal historicals generally fetishise legends about royal masculinity (Tansen, 1943; Anarkali, 1928, 1935, 1953) this one goes further, gendering the segregation between personal and political spaces while contrasting declamatory dialogues and large-scale sets with a staccato, documentary narrative. The film includes Saigal’s famous song Jab dil hi tut gaya.

SUBHADRA

1946 122’ b&w Hindi

d Master Vinayak pc Prafulla Pics
s V.S. Khandekar lyr Pandit Indra, Moti B.A. c Madhav Bulbule m Vasant Desai

lp Shanta Apte, Ishwarlal, Yakub, Prem Adib, Dada Salvi, V. Jog, Lata Mangeshkar

Vinayak’s only full-scale mythological tells of the argument between Krishna (Prem Adib) and his stepbrother Balaram (Salvi) as to who their sister Subhadra (Apte) should marry. Eventually Krishna has his way and Arjun (Ishwarlal) marries her. Shanta Apte sings a rare duet with Lata Mangeshkar (Main khili khili phulwart) for this film.

THYAGAYYA

1946 186’ b&w Telugu

d/p/s/m Chittor V. Nagaiah pc Sri Renuka
Films dial/co-lyr Samudrala Raghavacharya
c Mohammad A. Rehman

lp Chittor V. Nagaiah, Lingamurthy, B. Jayamma, Hemalatha Devi, Saritha Devi, Nyapathi Narayana Murthy, Rayapralu Subramanyam, K. Doraiswamy, M.C. Raghavan, Natesan, Soundaralakshmi

The actor, singer and composer Nagaiah’s directorial debut is a classic Saint film about the Telugu saint poet Thyagaraja (1767–1847), author of c.2400 kritis (verses) and the founder of the Carnatic system of classical music. Thyagaraja (Nagaiah) is shown as a villager composing devotional music to Rama while rejecting the court of Serfoji, maharaj of Tanjore (Narayana Murthy), the dominant cultural centre of the region. Turning down invitations and gifts from the maharaj, Thyagaraja provokes the jealous wrath of his brother Japesen (Lingamurthy). The film’s climax comes when Japesen destroys Rama’s idols, Thyagaraja resurrects them and eventually sacrifices his life to his god. Nagaiah’s performance in the title role dominated the hit film together with the music, including 28 of Thyagaraja’s kritis culminating in the number Nidhi chala sukhama, sung when he rejects the royal gifts. The director-composer also introduced lyrics from Kannada (the Purandaradasa devara nama in the film’s opening), Tamil (by Papanasam Sivan and sung by D.K. Pattamal) and Hindi (sung by J.A. Rehman). Among the main female roles, Jayamma played Dharmamba, Saritha Devi played Chapala while Hemalatha Devi played Kamalamba.

ELAAN

1947 133’ b&w Urdu

d/p Mehboob Khan pc Mehboob Prod.
s/lyr Zia Sarhadi c Faredoon Irani m Naushad

lp Surendra, Munawar Sultana, Himalaywala, Rehana, Leela Mishra, Zebunissa, Wazir Mohammed Khan, Reeta, Shahida, Shabnam, Gazi

Story of two half-brothers, the evil Sajjad (Himalaywala) and the good Javed (Surendra). Exploited since his childhood by the richer and crueller branch of the family, represented by Sajjad and his mother (Zebunissa), Javed loses his beloved (Munawar Sultana), bought by Sajjad’s family wealth. The fortunes of the two brothers change: Sajjad gambles away his wealth while Javed becomes a noted lawyer. In a fit of desperation, Sajjad wants to kill his son but is himself killed by his mother. His widow turns down Javed’s offer of marriage and instead starts a school in her family palace, partly to make amends for the family’s vile behaviour. This was Mehboob’s most stylised Muslim social with quasi-expressionist acting enhanced by an ornate decor and Irani’s heavily shaded camerawork. The final song, Insaan ki tarkeeb, carried the film’s anti-feudal message, addressed to the camera by a purdahclad Munawar Sultana.

KANJAN

aka Miser
1947 170’ b&w Tamil

co-d/s/lyr Kovai Ayyamuthu co-d T.R. Gopu
pc Jupiter Pics c P. Ramaswamy
m S.M. Subbaiah Naidu

lp T.G. Kamaladevi, S.V. Subbaiah, M.N. Nambiar, P.V Narasimhabharati, M.S.S. Bhagyam, T.R. Malathi, C.K. Saraswati, K.S. Angamuthu, M.K. Mustafa

A Tamil chauvinist/revivalist contribution to social reform and the Independence struggle. The womanising widower Kandasamy (Subbaiah) is the miserly zamindar of Amaravathipudur with his crock of gold buried in the house. He covets the actress Maragatham (Kamaladevi), who is his son Kumarasamy’s girlfriend, as a 2nd wife and plans to sell his daughter Amaravarthi to a rich old man. The sale of women, miserliness and black marketeering having been duly criticised, the film has a happy ending. The playwright Ayyamuthu (his Inbasagaram had been staged by the Nawab Rajamanikkam Co) was a pro-Congress nationalist associated with the controversial chief minister C.Rajagopalachari. He wrote the film’s popular Tamil hit Tamilar natile tamilar atchiye (‘Of all the people on this earth, the Tamils are the best’), released as a record and broadcast only by Tiruchi, Madras and Colombo radio stations. All the songs are based on classical Hindustani or Carnatic music. The film’s release in the year of India’s independence was accompanied by a two-reeler showing Gandhi visiting Palani and the Independence Day celebrations in Coimbatore.

LOKSHAHIR RAMJOSHI/MATWALA SHAYAR RAMJOSHI

1947 123’[M]/132’[H] b&w Marathi/Hindi

d Baburao Painter, V. Shantaram
pc Rajkamal Kalamandir
s/co-lyr G.D. Madgulkar co-lyr Shahir Ramjoshi c G. Balkrishna m Vasant Desai

lp Jayaram Shiledar, Hansa Wadkar, Shakuntala, Parashuram, G.D. Madgulkar, Sudha Apte, Samant, Gundopant Walavalkar, Jayaram Desai, Kanase, Sawalram, Vaidya, Abhyankar

Classic Marathi Tamasha musical telling the. life story of Ramjoshi (1758–1812) (Shiledar), a poet, keertan and lavani performer who later became extraordinarily popular notably with the lavani and the militant powada forms. The film narrates the poet’s history, his descent into alcoholism and his eventual rise to greatness. The main dramatic pivot is his love for the Tamasha dancer Baya (Wadkar). Several scenes extensively illustrate Shantaram’s symbol-laden expressionism, e.g. the scene where he drops the liquor jug to the floor, it hooks on to his clothing and thus does not ‘let go of him’. These are combined with the scenes for which the film is famous, e.g. the sawal-jawab (musical question and answer contest) sequence, and numerous other lavani song-picturisations featuring Madgulkar’s lyrics in his script debut. Shantaram had originally commissioned his mentor, Painter, to direct the film, but later sacked him and completed it himself. The film went on to become the biggest post-war success in the Marathi cinema, inaugurating the Tamasha genre in Marathi (followed by D.S. Ambapkar’s Jai Malhar the same year, and Mane’s Sangtye Aika, 1959). All three films, and indeed the genre itself, remained indelibly linked to Madgulkar’s songwriting. A sequence from the movie is reconstructed in the opening of Benegal’s Wadkar biographical Bhumika (1976).

NAM IRUVAR

aka We Two
1947 153’ b&w Tamil

d/p A. V. Meiyappan Chettiar pc AVM s P. Neelakantan from his play lyr Subramanya Bharati c T. Muthusamy m R. Sundarshanam

lp T.R. Mahalingam, B.R. Panthulu, T.R. Ramchandran, V.K. Ramaswamy, K. Sarangapani, T.A. Jayalakshmi, V.R. Chellam, Kumari Kamala, P. Kannamba

Political melodrama establishing the famed AVM Prod, and the debut of Neelakantan, its scenarist and assistant director. The original play had been a stage success produced by S.V. Sahasranamam for the comedian N.S. Krishnan’s theatre troupe. The film is replete with nationalist symbols, which proliferated in Tamil films following the installation of a popular government (1945) and the lifting of WW2 censorship. It begins with a Subramanya Bharati anniversary and ends with Gandhi’s 77th-birthday celebrations, characters greeting each other with the ‘Jai Hind’ salute. The story, adapted from the earlier film Iru Sahodarargal (1936), features a blackmarketeer and his two sons Jayakumar (Panthulu, who also played two other roles in the film) and Sukumar (Mahalingam). The latter is a wastrel who loves Kannamma (Jayalakshmi), the daughter of his father’s partner. The partner is a rapacious movie producer. The stagey, studio-bound film spoken in chaste (literary) Tamil used Bharati’s nationalist songs and love poems. The younger sister of the heroine (Kumari Kamala) dances on a decorated drum with national flags draped behind her to Bharati’s famous Kottu murase (‘Let the drum sound’), prefiguring the climactic scenes of Chandralekha (1948). Other famous songs incl. Aaduvomepallu aaduvome, Mahaan Gandhi mahaan.

NEEL KAMAL

1947 116’ b&w Hindi

d/s/lyr Kidar Sharma pc Oriental Pics
c Gordhanbhai Patel m B. Vasudev

lp Madhubala, Raj Kapoor, Begum Para, Rajinder, Shanta Kumar, Nifis Khilili, Nazira, Pesi Patel, Subhashini, Inquilab, Radha, Karan Singh, Baby Indira, Kumar Sahu, Dilip Kumar

Seminal melodrama, although a commercial flop, introducing Raj Kapoor and Madhubala. The love triangle and drama about atheism is set in the Rajput court of Janakgarh. The king and queen are killed when the king’s evil brother-in-law Mangal Singh seizes power. Both their daughters escape. The younger princess, Kamala (Madhubala), is rescued and adopted by a family of Untouchables. She meets and nurses to health a young atheist sculptor, Madhusudhan (Kapoor), who falls in love with both Kamala and her sister (Begum Para), forcing Kamala to commit suicide. In Sharma’s classic romantic idiom, a lotus flower grows where she died.

PALNATI YUDDHAM

1947 168’ b&w Telugu

d Gudavalli Ramabrahmam, L.V. Prasad
pc Sharada Prod. s/lyr Samudrala Raghavacharya c Jiten Bannerjee
m Galipenchala Narasimha Rao

lp G.V. Subba Rao, P. Kannamba, Srivastava Venkateshwara Rao, Lingamurthy, G.V. Sitapati, D.S. Sadasivarao, A. Nageshwara Rao, Vangara, S. Varalakshmi, Chandra, Narimani, Rajabala, Annapurna, Gangarathnam, P. Vishweshwaramma

Ramabrahmam died before he could complete his dream project, a historical foreshadowing India’s independence, and L.V Prasad finished it. The film tells of warfare and rivalries within the kingdom of Palnadu, causing the kingdom to split and numerous bloody caste and religious conflicts. The minister Brahmanayudu (G.V. Subba Rao), a wily political visionary, opens the doors of the Chenna Keshava temple to people of all castes, leading to a revolt from the military instigated by the royal matriarch Nagamma. The kingdom splits and early contests for dominance give way to full-scale battle among the second generation of the warring clans. The opening title directly alludes to Partition, referring to the fate of a nation ‘whose soil has been converted into a rudrabhoomi [a cremation ground] by the vengeful attitudes of warring brothers’.

RAMER SUMATI/CHHOTA BHAI

1947 131’[B]/144’[H] b&w Bengali/Hindi

d Kartick Chattopadhyay pc New Theatres st Saratchandra Chattopadhyay sc Sudhiranjan Mukherjee dial [H] Mohanlal Bajpai lyr [H] Romesh Panday c Sudhin Majumdar m Pankaj Mullick

lp Molina Devi, Master Shakoor[H]/Master Swagat[B], Rajalakshmi, Paul Mohinder[H], Sisir Batabyal[B], Asit Sen, Khursheed, Phani Roy[B], Chhabi Roy, Jahar Ganguly, Tulsi Chakraborty

Kartick Chattopadhyay’s debut adapts a Saratchandra story about a typically affectionate sister-in-law. Narayani (Molina Devi) raises her husband’s (Ganguly) young stepbrother Ramlal (Shakoor/Swagat), and is the only person who can control him when he becomes a notorious prankster. Problems develop between Ramlal and Narayani’s visiting mother, and Narayani eats the two pet fish in Ramlal’s pond. Ramlal attempts to run away before he is reconciled with Narayani.

RATNAMALA

1947 165’ b&w Telugu

d P.S. Ramakrishna Rao pc Bharani Pics s/co-lyr Samudrala Ragavacharya co-lyr Rajanikanta Rao c Jiten Bannerjee, P.S. Selvaraj m C.R. Subburaman

lp P. Bhanumathi, G.V. Subba Rao, C.S.R. Anjaneyulu, A. Nageshwara Rao, Hemalatha, Arani Satyanarayana, Suryanarayana, Seetaram, Ramanatha Sastry, Venkumamba, Koteshwara Rao, Narayana, Baby Sumitra

The first film from Bhanumathi’s independent production concern, set up with her husband, director Ramakrishna. Cast in a folk-tale idiom, the story tells of Ratnamala (Bhanumathi) who is tricked into marrying the infant Prince Chandrakantha. She raises her ‘husband’ in a forest but when he is 7 years old he is kidnapped by bandits for a ritual sacrifice. Ratnamala follows him and the robber chieftain tries to molest her. The couple are eventually rescued by the king, Ratnamala’s father. When he refuses to believe that the boy is indeed her husband, the gods Shiva and Parvathi descend to earth to sort out the confusion. The film is famous composer C.R. Subburaman’s first independent assignment and includes several hit songs: Anandadayini and, when Ratnamala goes in search of her husband, Niluva needa leka. The film also featured compositions by Saluri Rajeshwara Rao, Ghantasala and Rajanikanta Rao, all uncredited.

SAMAJ KO BADAL DALO

1947 133’ b&w Hindi

d Vijay Bhatt pc Prakash Pics s Girish lyr Roopdas, Pandit Indra, Qamar Jalalabadi c Yusuf Mulji m Khemchand Prakash

lp Aroon, Mridula, Yakub, Shantarin, Umakant, Leela Pawar, Ramesh Sinha, Bikram Kapoor, Prem Dhawan, Shabnam

Bhatt’s unusually strident marital melodrama made with the informal help of the IPTA (choreographers Santi Bardhan, Sachin Shankar, Narendra Sharma et al.), mounting an IPTA-style attack on social conventions in the context of the Independence movement’s promises of liberation. Heroine Manorama (Mridula), daughter of a clerk, cannot marry hero Kishore (Aroon) because her father can’t afford the dowry. Manorama marries the evil widower Jayant (Yakub) who tortures her. Kishore marries the rich Champa (Lila Pawar), but then magnanimously allows her to remarry the man she really loves, Naresh. Kishore’s goodness eventually clashes with Jayant’s villainy and in a frenzied sequence he kills both Jayant and Manorama. He is pronounced insane and arrested.

SHEHNAI

1947 133’ b&w Hindi

d/s/lyr P.L. Santoshi pc Filmistan
c K.H. Kapadia m C.Ramchandra

lp Rehana, Indumati, Naseer Khan, Dulari, Mumtaz Ali, Niranjan Sharma, Leela Mishra, Kumkum, Rekha, S.L. Puri, Kishore Kumar, Shobha Thakur, Radha Kishen, Srinath, V.H. Desai

Hit musical by the famous duo of lyricist Santoshi and composer Ramchandra. Marital drama featuring the four daughters of a comedian (V.H. Desai), their rival, the arrogant daughter of the zamindar (Indumati), and the various men in their lives: the zamindar’s secretary (Radha Kishen), the police inspector (Kishore Kumar) etc. The film had Ramchandra’s all-time hit Aana merijaan Sunday he Sunday (sung by Meena Kapur and Shamshad Begum with the composer) and several other songs, including the bhajan Jai Krishna hare Krishna (sung by Veenapani Mukherjee) and the railway number Jawani ki rail chale jai re (sung by Geeta Dutt, Lata Mangeshkar and the composer).

YOGI VEMANA

1947 174’ b&w Telugu

d/p/co-sc K.V. Reddy Vauhini
co-sc K. Kameshwara Rao
dial/lyr Samudrala Raghavacharya c Marcus
Bartley m Chittor V. Nagaiah, Ogirala
Ramchandra Rao

lp Chittor V. Nagaiah, M.V. Rajamma, Parvathibai, M. Lingamurthy, Kantamani, Baby Krishnaveni, Rami Reddy, Seeta, K. Doraiswamy

Nagaiah’s third Saint film made by the same unit that produced his first one, the hit Bhakta Potana (1942). Vemana, a 17th-C. poet born in the Reddy community, attacked social inequality although adhering to the conventional Hindu views on women. The film attempts to inject realism into the Telugu version of the genre, showing e.g. the relationship between Vemana (Nagaiah) and a courtesan, Mohanangi (Rajamma). Vemana, the younger brother of a local chieftain, steals his sister-in-law’s diamond necklace for Mohanangi. He next steals the money meant for the king’s tribute, causing his brother to be imprisoned. He and his friend Abhiram (Lingamurthy) successfully manufacture gold by using alchemy. His moment of revelation comes when he brings this gold home to find his niece Jyoti (Baby Krishnaveni), his only real friend, dead. The film dissolves her face on to a skeleton, adding shots of people in their daily work routine, set to the song Idena inthena (‘Is this all that life is?’). Vemana then becomes a mendicant, advocating an ideology earlier demonstrated when he takes the silk cloak covering an idol in a temple and drapes it over an old woman shivering in the cold. The film is often compared with Shantaram’s Prabhat biographical of Eknath, Dbarmatma (1935).