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The Story Vijay Anand's enjoyable 1963 romantic comedy Tere Ghar Ke Saamne showcases two bellicose neighbours for whom the axiom 'Love thy neighbour' is pure anathema. Until till the Dev Anand-Nutan amour melts their hearts. Om Prakash (who plays Jagannath, affectionately called Lalaji) and Seth Karamchand (Harindranath Chattopadhya) play he two crusty old rivals. Whether it is an auction for a plot of land or a contest for the post of president of a club, the two old men turn everything into a battleground of wits or muscle power. Fortunately, they stop at nabbing each other by the collar.
Unaware of their hostility, Jagannath's architect son Rakesh (Dev Anand) falls brick, cement and mortar for Sulekha (Nutan), the sprightly daughter of his father's rival. Like their fathers, Sulekha and Rakesh begin by exchanging glares and sharp retorts in their first encounter. He assumes she is a briny shrew while she assumes he is a reckless Romeo. Subsequently, they get better acquainted and end up professing love to each other. Both Lalaji and Karamchand appoint Rakesh as their architect. Each also forewarns Rakesh that the house he designs should be better than his rival's. To add to his woes, both Lalaji and Karamchand zero in on the same design for their respective houses. Rakesh now has to juggle frantically while keeping his crazed clients at arm's length from each other. When the cat finally leaps out of the bag, Sulekha is aghast and alienates Rakesh. He eventually wins Sulekha over but the two dotty dads would still rather claw each other's eye out than see eye to eye. In a melodramatic climax, Rakesh sends out his wedding invitations without intimating Sulekha or their parents. The two fogies refuse to cede to the fait accompli. While the guests have already arrived, Rakesh appeals to his father's paternal feelings while simultaneously reasoning with Sulekha's father that love begets love. The Message Dev-Nutan's chemistry Motherhood afterglow? * Tere Ghar Ke Saamne gives abundant evidence of the fact that Nutan, unfairly slotted as a dramatic actress, was versatile. She could play a charming gamine too and, more important, was a comedienne par excellence. Watch Nutan in the scene where we see her throwing open the balcony door after Dev has combed Simla looking for her while singing Tu kahan yeh bata. She lights up like a 1000-watt bulb and fills the screen with her radiance. Nonsensical Word Play * The nonsensical word play between Chatopadhyay and Om Prakash contributed to the film's zany tone. They called each other names like khoosat (old man), muchhad (a person with an exaggeratedly bushy moustache), aloo bukhara (a dry fruit), gootter goo (cooing pigeon) and ainakwala akhrot (bespectacled walnut). Song Pictursiations Song Singers Dil ki manzil hai kasisi yeh manzil Asha Bhosle Dil ka bhanwar kare pukar Mohammed Rafi Yeh tanhai haye re haye Lata Mangeshkar Ek ghar basaonga Lata Mangeshkar-Mohammed Rafi Tu kahan yeh bata Mohammed Rafi Dekho rootha na karo Lata Mangeshkar-Mohammed Rafi Sun le tu dil ki sada Mohammed Rafi * His talent for song picturisation is best showcased in the number where Dev Anand visualises Nutan in his glass of whiskey, when he splashes a cube of ice into the glass. Nutan, who is presumably standing inside, literally shrinks away from it. Did You Know? Sidelights: |
Thanx a lot babumoshayi.👏👏 this pic is really somethng to treasure. I hav saved it. never saw this one ever.
INTRODUCTION TO THE GOLDEN ERA
***************************************
This article deals with the evolution of Hindi film
music and some significant landmarks till 1944.
***************************************
What then was the Golden Era of popular Hindi music? Is it just a desperate longing of a bunch of misguided baby boomers who are trying hard to recede back into childhood, and cannot deal with the changes staring them in their faces? Is it anything more than lingering memories of an age of innocence? Will the current era of Hindi music be branded "golden" 25 years from today?
Or was it something objectively beautiful, the sort that will probably never occur again, not to Hindi music?
The questions are tough, and the hardest task is objective analysis. Music, like other art forms, is admittedly a matter of subjective taste. Rather than drawing lines on the sands of history, rather than throwing opinions as to the good and bad of musical personalities over time, and rather than dwelling on matters of taste, let us look at the evolution of the industry itself. The focus here is Hindi music, and there is no implication at all as to the genesis of the non-Hindi popular medium.
The questions are easy: if there ever was a golden age, is there a time in history when it began? Has it ended, or are we still enjoying it? And what was golden about it anyway?
The answers may be easy as well if one allows matters of personal opinion. Another way to deal with the Golden Era is to examine some key milestones, look at how those checkpoints impacted the course of Hindi movie music, spend some time on the movers and shakers who caused such impact, look at the content in and talent of the creations of that age, and finally, even if only in passing, look at the prevailing professional attitudes of the protagonists. If only all of history could be encapsulated within such a framework, the reader would be free to walk away with his/her own conclusions.
To answer the key questions concerning the Golden Era, we choose the scenic route - the longer way home. We hold back our opinions, and look at historical checkpoints and attendant details. You be the judge.
The art of movie-making and showing in the Indian context takes us back to the last decade of the nineteenth century, but from the standpoint of music as we know it, we must move forward to the talkie era. The year 1931 not only marked the beginning of the "talkie" age, but it also naturally became the starting point for movie composers and singers. The playing field became instantly dominated by a handful of strong production studios most of which had their legacy firmly rooted in the silent era. Ardeshir Irani and R.S. Choudhury (Mehboob Khan's mentors) carried forward the Imperial Studios banner. Himansu Rai, the consummate English nobleman leveraged his experience with British and German moviemakers, Shantaram and Master Vinayak joined forces to further foster Prabhat Films, B.N. Sarkar moved his silent movie gear to South Calcutta where New Theatres was founded, Homi Wadia instituted Wadia Movietone, Sohrab Modi joined his mentors at Minerva, and Chandulal Shah deftly moved his Ranjit Studios banner into the age of sound. There were others like Madan Theatres (also Calcutta), but the names mentioned here would provide the bedrock foundation on which the future would grow and prosper.
The attitudes of that age were interesting. Capital was tight and only a handful of privileged and monied gentry could invest in movie studios. Most of them were carryovers from the silent era anyway. Movie-watchers were still the upper echelons of society. The production studio was the feudal lord. Employees of the company would not dream of quitting or moonlighting. And girls from "good families" would not even dream of having anything to do with the performing arts, least of all the cinema.
All that changed when two daring and beautiful young ladies broke the rules.Devika Rani Choudhury married Himansu Rai and stepped firmly in to moviedom. Not far away, a charming Durga Khote joined Shantaram's Prabhat Films in AYODHYECHA RAAJA, their first sound venture.These were still the exception to a rule deeply entrenched in a male-dominated tradition. But a beachhead was now created. Others would follow. Durga Khote can be credited with another first. She could well have been the first freelance heroine of that age. As committed as she was to Prabhat, she also spent some time working with the New Theatres contingent.
Musical tastes round the country were still dominated by the Indian motif - one-dimensional melody that drew almost entirely on classical and folk structures.The performance of music was simple at best. Most of the singers were either from "singing families" with delivery styles set in the tradition of their "gharaana" OR were theatre performers trying hard to get by with simple straight-line approximations of the stated melody. Playback technology was available, but there was no implementation handy for scalable reuse. Out in Bengal, New Theatres tried their first playback experiment as early as 1933. It did not go unnoticed.
This was the state of the early to mid '30s. The alliances were interesting. The East and West were ruled by their respective Holy Trinities. Prabhat was led by Master Govindrao Tembe and his two disciples Keshavrao Bhole and Krishnarao Phulambrikar (with a young Vasant Shantaram Desai still in the pen). Bengal's New Theatres had their answer in Raichand Boral, Pankaj Mullick and later, Timirbaran Bhattacharya. Imperial Studios leaned on their Parsee patrons. Himansu Rai, with his British Production Company, was still dependent on European craftspersons for music among other things. Bombay Talkie, created in the mid-'30s would hire Khorshed Homji and Ramchandra Pal as their constant composers, but that was a few years away. Funded to a degree by Ram Daryani, Sagar and National Studios brought in maestros Pransukh Nayak and Ashok Ghosh. Chandulal Shah's Ranjit Studios flexed its musical muscle through classicists like Jhande Khan, Banne Khan and protege Rewashankar Marwari.
The somewhat negative perception of cinema's musical occupants, pervasive as it was, never quite influenced the classicists of any age, really. In the mid-'30s, grandmasters like Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam sought to use the movie medium to further the cause of literature, music, national integration, the independence movement, and on and on.
And then it happened. Ram Daryani, a visionary financier, brought a 20 year old tabla player from Calcutta to work with the Sagar Movietone orchestra. It is to the credit of composer Ashok Ghosh that he took young Anil Biswas under his tutelage, and further, gave him enough freedom to create the first real orchestra for a Hindi movie song. In parallel, the Himansu Rai-Devika Rani team launched Bombay Talkie, hired the orchestra-minded Saraswati Devi as their composer, and further strengthened the foundation of a Western outlook, however simplistic it might have been at that time. The groundwork was launched for the Hindi movie song.
The first few songs to hit the nation as a whole may well have been from ACHHUT KANYAA and some contemporary Sagar Movietone productions. The time was 1935-36, and if this is where it started, we might have a candidate here for bringing in the Golden Age.
In the meantime, just out of the blue, New Theatres hit a home run. They augmented their singing talent through Sehgal's voice. A Punjabi singer far away from his native ambience seemed well at home in Tollygunge, South Calcutta.
With all the busy ins and out, Bombay had its weather eye cocked on an already well-established studio out to the North somewhere. Dalsukh Panchholi was an astute businessman. What did this business-oriented
Lahori know of music, anyway? Some of life's happiest events hang together by threads of serendipity. Had Panchholi not created GUL-E-BAKAAVLI (1939), Baby Noorjehan may never have become known to the world at large. Had he not hired Master Ghulam Haider to do the very traditional, staid and Punjabi music for it, the songs may never have hit the headlines. And Panchholi might never have hired Master Haider to do KHAZAANCHI in 1941, but for a string of such chance events. And where would the Hindi movie song be today without the pioneering framework provided by KHAZAANCHI? We have fast-forwarded through the latter part of the '30s here, but let us get to 1941 and KHAZAANCHI. Master Haider consciously broke away from the dull and monotonous delivery of the '30s song. It was not without pain or criticism. Every generation has had its maverick. That he was, and knowingly so. KHAZAANCHI has gone down in history as the movie that defined the very structure of the modern Hindi song, much in the style of Von Neumann who, only 5 years later, defined the essence of stored program execution. Neither the structure of the Hindi song, nor the essential sequencial program execution model have changed much or at all since their inception. In that respect, Ghulam Haider hailed the age of modern Hindi music.
To summarize the '30s, the professional scene consisted of salaried employees in a handful of movie studios the vast majority of which were brought forward through profits from the silent age. Noorjehan, Ghulam Haider,and Anil Biswas were the frontline names. Looking at the content, we must examine the constituents - the melody, the orchestration, the singing style and ability, the lyrics, and in some ways also the picturization. The dominant singers of the age were KC Dey, Pankaj Mullick, Shanta Apte, Govindrao Tembe, Ashok Kumar, Devika Rani, Surendra, Wahidan Bai and sister Jyoti, Bibbo, Manju and a few more. In a category all by himself stood the theatrical and Sufiana singer Kundanlal Sehgal. Some of his most famous songs had already been created, and he was just warming up.
More coincidence. The rapid and profitable emergence of the movie during the '30s, while remaining the sole property of a few studios, engaged the entire nation. What had started as the entertainment of the upper crust had trickled down to practically all layers of society - deep enough to threaten the legacy social outing. One such example was the Natak Mandali tradition of Maharashtra. Attendance dropped to all time lows. Mass defections occurred, both in the audience and the performers. Families whose wherewithal was the Natya Sangeet medium felt the most pain. Several went bankrupt. Alcoholism, a very natural companion of the performing arts, only aggravated the suffering. None knew this better than Dinanath Mangeshkar. Five children, a young wife, and nowhere to turn to. Once the darling of the Marathi stage, he now had trouble finding familiar faces in the business. In desperation, he accepted his oldest daughter's insistence upon finding a job for herself. In this quest, 12-year old Lata Mangeshkar was introduced to Vinayakrao Karnataki. But there was something else. She also signed up for a National Level Talent contest that had recently been labelled the KHAZAANCHI competition. The Northwestern frontier shuddered as the typhoon hit home. A Marathi-speaking winner of all things! Master Haider, the man whose runaway success had contributed the name to the contest, would stop to take notice.Seven years from the day, he would fight tooth and nail to permanently change the sound of Hindi music.Some milestone this. The writer must submit here that no matter when the Golden Era is said to begin, its life must include this landmark event of Lata Dinanath Mangeshkar winning the KHAZAANCHI competition. This voice has provided even our best composers with the motivation to produce the very best of melodies.
The war in Europe seemed far enough away, and yet, the movie industry felt its impact in a rather indirect fashion.The Indian scene had its own domestic perturbations. Politically, Quit India was significant as were the down and dirty war profiteers. Not all the sinners were blue-eyed blondes as some history books would have us believe. Ashish Rajyadhyaksha speculates that many Indian businessmen profited unabashedly during the early period of the war and the Bengal famine. The movie studio was a popular front for channelling illegal money. No wonder the early '40s saw an explosion in the number of production companies on both sides of what would be the new India-Pakistan border. But Bombay remained the centre of all capital. With the increase in the number of movie productions, the traditional and feudal studio employer of the '30s could see the walls crumbling around the notion of salaried patronage. The spectre of freelance artists started to become real. The emerging studios, eager to get rid of the blood money that they were bulging with, started to outbid each other for the topmost professionals. This led to "freelancing" by composers and singers. Anil Biswas might have been a pioneer in this regard without realizing it.
A few other facts are interesting. Himansu Rai died in the early '40s leaving the fragile management of Bombay Talkie to its fate. Mehboob Khan decided to part company with his Sagar and National patrons. And playback singing gained momentum as cinema music demanded a better deal than the constriction it met at the hands of limited talents. Oddly enough, one of the first few "pioneers" of playback, Suraiyya Jamaal Sheikh, would essentially spend a career singing mainly for songs filmed on herself.
Anil Biswas, a longtime Mehboob friend, decided to part company, and left Mehboob Studios floundering for a few years in the quest of a stable musical guide and composer. Bombay Talkie stepped into an antithesis phase with a major exodus of some big names. And on a completely different front, Noorjehan, Panchholi, VM Vyas and Ghulam Haider all individually contributed to the invisible skyline connection between the souls of Bombay and Lahore. All of a sudden, the world was smaller, more talented, and utterly competitive.
The '40s witnessed some of the quickest changes in the way the industry operated. Bombay Talkie, once the "big blue" of the industry, could be seen floundering. The days of stable employment were coming to an end. Artists, young and old, high and low profile, from all walks of the industry, were now on their own. New studios emerged notable among them being the one founded by Abdul Rashid Kardar. His musical soulmate, Naushad Ali, injected a new sound into the spirit of the young Indian movie. Mehboob started his productions with a flourish. Bombay Talkie brought in Anil Biswas and brother-in-law Pannalal Ghosh.New singers, better sounding and accomplished than those of the previous decade, suddenly appeared in the recording studio. Parul Ghosh, Kanan Devi, Amirbai Karnataki, Arun Kumar, Snehprabha, Zohrabai Ambaalewaali, and to be complete, Noorjehan, were all household names already.
BASANT and KISMET were big names. The latter is probably still the biggest hit in the history of Indian cinema (normalizing for inflation, population growth etc).
Thank you Barnali di good to see you back after a long time. Yes Didi this picture is something to treasure.
Thanks a lot babumoshayi.👏👏 this pic is really something to treasure. I hav saved it. never saw this one ever.
Guru Dutt's Pyaasa (1957)
Unquestionably the gem in Dutt's filmography, Pyaasa is a dark and mesmerising classic, and one of the most romantic films ever. Vijay (Dutt) is a talented poet. But -- as is the fate of wordsmiths ahead of their time -- publishers don't want to touch him. His brothers throw him out of the house after he realises they have sold his poems to a junk dealer. While hunting for his poems, Vijay meets Gulabo (Waheeda Rehman), a streetwalker who falls in love with him. Vijay, trying to disengage himself, goes to his college reunion, where he meets his former sweetheart, Meena (Mala Sinha). Former because Meena conveniently left him for Ghosh, a flourishing publisher. Ghosh hires Vijay, but as a mere clerk, while sadistically refusing to publish his poems. After Vijay is fired, he offers his coat to a beggar. The beggar dies in a train accident, and, because of the coat, it is assumed that Vijay is dead. Gulabo convinces Ghosh to publish Vijay's work posthumously. Vijay, stunned at the publication, tries in vain to announce that he is alive. He only succeeds in getting himself confined to a mental asylum.In a compelling and touching climax, Vijay escapes and attends his own death anniversary gathering.
Qwestji we need people like you who understand music and appreciate it. Please do not leave.
Ye Hai Mohabbatein
