Here’s to the Birth or Death Anniversaries of Three Classic Hindi Film Artists Who Certainly Should Not Have Died In Poverty

Earlier this month, I thought of writing another birthday post for a certain great cabaret dancer who, though much revered among my blogging and YouTube friends, actually met a terrible decline and died poor. A few days later, I found out it was the death anniversary of a fine actress from ’40s Hindi films (and some nice ’50s Pakistani ones) who died very poor. During this time, I also was busy combining and revising a couple of old posts about the ghazal singer Zarina Begum, whose illness and poverty became the subject of several articles and documentaries a few years ago. (I worked on those posts to turn them into an article that is going to appear next month in an online film journal The World of Apu. I will put the link in place when the issue comes out. :) )* So, I became focused on this sad and familiar tale (familiar especially with regard to the Hindi film and music industries) commonly known as “riches to rags.” I thought of writing a post chronicling five or ten such examples, but I found that there are quite a few articles or posts online that have already done this. (For example, from within just the past month, I found a list on a site called Top Yaps entitled Ten Bollywood Celebrities Who Died Penniless and Forgotten. And some of this looks familiar, so the article may have appeared in other places as well.) So, I decided to keep my focus solely on the artists whom I was remembering at the moment – Cuckoo and Meena Shorey – and I’ve added one more, who is known to have died in the early part of the year (though the exact date is unknown), the great singer Rajkumari. Cuckoo tends to make it to everyone’s list (including that Top Yaps one), but the other two not so much – though they deserve to be remembered just as much as anyone.

In the past, I’ve pondered the awfulness of a social system that would allow the most unlikely people – who contributed to so many people’s joy at some time in the past – to die in isolation and poverty. The poverty part, especially, is something that does not have to be. (Isolation is another matter. Sometimes people choose it, and given my own proclivities, I can understand why.) But I will keep my social preachings out of the post this time and let these sad stories speak for themselves. Suffice to say, all three of these artists from classic Hindi and Urdu cinema should have met much better ends than they did. (And actually, just about everyone else deserves a better end as well.) And to illustrate how great they were, I am also supplying a couple of clips for each. (Though, of course, if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you may have seen their greatness illustrated here before.)

RIP…

1. Cuckoo

I’ve written Cuckoo birthday posts on February 5 (or near then) several times in the recent past. As I’ve been saying since I heard that this was her birthday (back in 2011), I’ve been happy to act on that information, even though I never was able to confirm this date widely. There are a few things about Cuckoo that are not as well known as they should have been. Maybe, partly, this is because she also seems to have spent some time in obscurity (though greatly appreciated by some of us further down the road). If there is any story of decline that is more incredible than all the others, Cuckoo owns it. And speaking of owning, how is it that someone who once owned so much ended up with nothing? When Cuckoo died of cancer in 1981, at the age of 52, she was completely broke; word has it that she could barely afford painkillers.(For one good summary of her grim ending, see the article in Cineplot, The Tragic Ending of Cuckoo More – Helen Remembers Cuckoo.)

2. Meena Shorey

Meena Shorey died on February 9, 1989 (as I was reminded via a Facebook post from Bollywood Direct). As I was saying, she still seems to have been forgotten by too many people (including those who put together lists of Hindi film actors who died forgotten and poor). How could anyone have forgotten the Lara Lappa Girl? Well, it seems that people remembered the song (and certainly the singer, Lata Mangeshkar) but not the actress, especially not after she moved to Pakistan and made an ultimately failed attempt to revive her film career there. (Though she actually did some very nice performances in Pakistani films too – as you will see in one of the clips below.) Fortunately, a few of the people whom I know through blogs and YouTube know all about her and are very fond of her, as am I. But she may not have thought that she would be remembered by anyone when she left this world 30 years ago.

Per an article by Karan Bali in Upperstall from a few years ago:

Meena lived the last few years of her life in abject poverty in Pakistan. She had no savings and was reduced to living in a couple of rooms in Lahore’s Mohni Road. There was no one to look after her and she subsisted on a small stipend paid to her by the Pakistan Arts Council and sometimes the Rotary Club. It is said she compared herself to a dried up tree in a grove full of green young saplings that everyone was out to destroy and burn.

Meena Shorey died lonely and forgotten in 1989. Her burial was arranged with charity money and few came to attend her funeral.

3. Rajkumari Dubey

When I pondered this general subject, my mind and heart turned to Rajkumari, who, according to a few sources, died toward the beginning of the year 2000. Since nobody seems to know the exact date, let’s consider the middle of February as a time that fits into that description well enough – because I wanted an excuse to commemorate Rajkumari anyway. I love Rajkumari’s playback singing in quite a few films made during the 1940s and early ’50s. Ironically, I think her best songs might be the ones that she sang in Mahal, one of the films in 1949 that made a superstar out of Lata Mangeshkar, the singer whose overwhelming takeover of playback singing in the Hindi film industry was probably a major contributor to Rajkumari’s decline. (Curiously, also, Rajkumari did playback in one fine song for the same actress whom Lata sang for exclusively – that is, Madhubala – though she sang two in that film for Vijayalaxmi and one for Neelam, too.)

Rajkumari dropped out as a featured singer in Hindi films for almost 20 years, from the early 1950s until Naushad found her doing obscure chorus singing at the beginning of the ’70s and asked her to sing background thumris in Pakeezah. In that film, her performance of the song “Najariya Ki Mari” was simply breathtaking. Rajkumari did some more singing in the industry after that up until the late ’70s, but this was far from enough to guarantee her any financial well-being, and so she died in poverty.

By the way, the aforementioned Top Yaps article included Meena Kumari in the list of stars who died “penniless and forgotten.” But I don’t think Meena Kumari really belongs there. She may have reached a condition of unexpected poverty (not to mention misery) and she did not have the chance to see how much her legend would grow after Pakeezah came out. But I can’t imagine that she was ever all that forgotten, and if she did, indeed, reach a state of poverty, it certainly wouldn’t have lasted if only she’d survived. (If anyone feels very differently about that, let me know!) But the woman who sang such beautiful music in that same movie – that is, Rajkumari – had undoubtedly been poor for a long time and had been much more forgotten, and she deserved so much more than what she had at the end! Let the moral of this story be that this is not a just world (a thought that I may have suggested in this blog at some time or other before).
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*Note (about a month later): The article on Zarina Begum in The World of Apu (which I had combined and revised from two blog posts) can be found here.

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Shehnai (1947) and a Sad Video About the River in the “Chhuk Chhuk Chhaiya Chhaiya” Scene

Over the past several months, I have been returning a lot to a CD that I made some years ago of a downloaded copy of the soundtrack to Shehnai (1947). I do not remember exactly where I downloaded this from – I might actually have brought in songs from different sources and put them together. But I am glad I downloaded this, because it has become one of my all-time favorite soundtracks as well as one of the CDs/MP3s that I listen to the most.

The Shehnai soundtrack has a lot of great songs that caught my attention when I first listened to it. These include “Hame Kya Pata Tha, Maar Katari Mar Jaana,” which contains one of my favorite vocal performances by Amirbai Karnataki, and the very famous “Aana Meri Jaan Meri Jaan Sunday Ke Sunday,” which is known for its then-pioneering fusion of Indian music with western music (and the jazzy parts in this one are fantastic).

The song in this film that actually hooked me in most during my more recent listens is “Chhuk Chhuk Chhaiya Chhaiya, Sone Ki Machhariya.” The parts in which “Chhuk Chhuk Chhaiya” are repeated over and over completely got stuck in my head (yes, it became an ear worm!). The singers in this number include two whom I have not heard so much about, Mohan Tara and Binapani Mukherjee, as well as the more recognizable Meena Kapoor. Together, they are quite charming, and the picturization is at least as charming. In fact, it stands out in my mind because, as some people out there know, I have been something of a Rehana fan for a few years, and here, as in a few other scenes from Shehnai, she looks positively adorable.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to find good-quality clips from Shehnai, which is too bad, because several of these classic song sequences are very memorable visually as well. (In addition to containing some of the best appearances of Rehana, they also contain great scenes with Dulari and some very special appearances of Mumtaz Ali. And by the way, the director was P.L. Santoshi.) I also have never been able to find a truly watchable version of the entire film. I have seen one version posted to YouTube, but the video quality isn’t very good and, anyway, to be truly watchable as a film for me, it would need English subtitles – and I will be very surprised if I ever find this film with English subtitles! Nonetheless, I continue to search around now and then to see if I can find better Shehnai videos, and that is how I found this very interesting video about the Poisar River, in the Kandivali neighborhood (or Kandivli, as it is spelled in the video), in Bombay/Mumbai.

The main message that I got from this video is that, no matter how badly preserved some of these old films might be, some of the environments in which they were made have deteriorated even more. At the end, we are given ample visual evidence (of pollution and decline) to support the caption on the screen that declares:

Filmed in 1947, the film Shehnai mirrors a handsome past of a river that once was. The clean, fragrant, and sweet waters have long since lost their spirit. Today, the Kandivli ‘nullah’ bears an ominous look.

And perhaps this can also be taken as an ominous message about what has happened to the environment in general.

This video was unique among the ones that I usually find centered around old film songs. I did not expect it to bear that message at the end. And I confess, after watching this video, I am going to be more conscious about the environment in my favorite vintage film scenes, wondering more not only about what river or forest or street I’m looking at, but what might have happened to it in the 60, 70, etc., years since.

The video credits Amrit Gangar for “concept and realization,” but it also grants “Grateful Acknowledgment” to a few other people, including Maxie Rodrigues and Joe Fernandes, who are also mentioned and quoted in the description below it. (The video was posted by an apparent relation to one of those people, Elton Rodrigues.) I am unclear about what all of those mentioned people did, but I would like to thank them all for contributing to this moving and interesting little documentary – which, by the way, also contains a clip of the song sequence that is as good as any on YouTube (meaning, of course, that I am still looking to find one that is in better shape).

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P.S. I should note that this video is not completely current. It was posted in 2012, and according to a caption in the video, the latest scenes of the Poisar River (the ones in which it looked “ominous”) were filmed in 2007. So, I looked for a more current document showing this river and I found one from within the past six months. Unfortunately, as I suspected, this article from the Hindustan Times reveals that it now looks even worse.

Returning to My Fascination with Kerala (After the Deluge)

Close to eleven years ago, I wrote a post on this blog (before the blog even completely became what it has been for the past decade) about my Fascination with Kerala. Here, I elaborated on a preoccupation with one Indian state that even preceded my deep interest in all the films made in Bombay/Mumbai. In other words, even before I was a fan of classic “Bollywood,” I was a fan of Kerala. There are a few reasons for that and I spelled them out way-back-when. And people have been seeing this post (with those reasons given) ever since, mainly via searches. I am glad that people are still reading it, because all the feelings that I expressed in that post still apply today. But the post could use a few minor revisions and maybe a few amendments, coming from the perspective of what I know now, a decade later. I have therefore decided that I am going to revise it. I won’t change the content much, but I’ll add and edit a few things. This is going to happen within a number of days of the post that you’re reading now (as time permits).

I thought of holding the present post up until I had finished everything I wanted to do with the old one, but I am feeling a little impatient to get something new up on this blog. I also am feeling a little impatient in my desire to inform people about some interesting sites and links related to the event that brought Kerala back to the front of my mind – and to lots of people’s minds, actually – within the past couple of months. And that subject is the floods – the biggest ones that Kerala experienced in a century. Of course, this disaster caused much destruction and hardship. But it also led to some great stories showing the resilience, creativity, and general social goodness of the people who have coped with it.

I have seen quite a few fascinating posts on blogs and Facebook documenting the floods and their aftermath through writings and photos. But there is one site that I especially wanted to mention here, not only because it contains excellent writing and photos about the floods in Kerala, but because it is a marvelous site in general, one that everyone who is interested in the people and culture of India should know about. And that site is the People’s Archive of Rural India.

The article in this site related to the floods in Kerala that grabbed my attention most was Kerala’s Women Farmers Rise Above the Flood. As I originally said in Fascination with Kerala, one of the first things that caused me to have a strong interest in this state was the “social systems.” As I put it, I found out that Kerala had “developed a kind of decentralized, democratic socialism that didn’t exist in much of the world.” And as I look back on that statement now, I feel it is definitely an understatement. The movements in Kerala gave rise to a number of fascinating and highly progressive groups, a trend that continues to this day (which is impressive, considering many other, quite regressive, trends that have taken place throughout India in recent memory). This article is about one such group, Kudumbashree, a “massive women’s community network,” which, as the article’s author, P. Sainath (who is also the editor of PARI) points out, “could well be the greatest gender justice and poverty reduction programme in the world.” And here, I am tempted to elaborate much more on Mr. Sainath’s discussion of the details of Kudumbashree’s work, but such elaboration should probably be saved for a separate, longer post sometime in the future. Let’s just say that it is very interesting to see how – and how much – such a group deals with the aftermath of the floods. As Mr. Sainath says, “Restoring cultivation in this situation could dishearten the most determined… But not the women farmers of Kudumbashree.”

And there are a couple of other pieces about the Kerala floods – also written by P. Sainaith – that are definitely worth a vist: Saving Photos and Memories of a Flood – a good, short article about a woman’s efforts to do exactly that – and The Bank that Went Under – Almost, which is not simply about the bank of a river but a bank on the bank of a river – specifically, The Kuttamangalam Service Cooperative Bank, and its great efforts to recover records, etc. (This post, by the way, includes some very nice pictures, too.)

Before PARI published all these excellent articles on the aftermath of the floods, this site actually introduced us to a new song about the subject, “Song for Kerala: Rhythm of the calamity.” As the article’s author, Chittoor Gopi, explains, “A popular song in Malayalam, once sung by Usha Uthup to celebrate the riches of Kerala, has now been reworked to honour the lives lost and to mark the destruction caused by the massive floods last month.” The article contains a good video for the song, with a lot of fantastic pictures of Kerala – both with and without floods.

Of course, it was nice to know that a number of people who were in Kerala at the time of the floods made it out safely as well. That list includes two bloggers who have commented here a number of times, Madhulika Liddle and Anuradha Warrier. Anu visited Kerala, as she does periodically, because that is her home state (though she presently lives in Massachusetts), and Madhu (who lives in Delhi) “tagged along” with Anu for a visit to Kerala, right before the floods.

Curiously, this is something I once at least vaguely considered doing as well. If you go back to comments on my original post about my Fascination with Kerala, you’ll see an amusing conversation between Anu and me that occurred in 2012. To sum it up, here are the key lines in that exchange:

Anu: And if you ever want to visit Kerala, I offer you my parents’ or my husband’s home as your base. My husband and I visit every year if possible, so you’re welcome to tag along if you so desire.

Me: That is very nice of you and this is very intriguing… What time of year do you usually go? :)

Anu: Usually during the summer, Richard. This year, it’ll be August.

Me: Hmm, August in Kerala… That’s OK, I don’t mind a little rain. :)

Actually, as it turned out, when Madhu tagged along with Anu, she really did encounter only a little rain, getting out before the floods. During this time, she apparently had a pleasant tourist’s adventure with Anu, who was on her way to celebrate a large birthday celebration being planned for her father. In Blogland, this resulted in two very pleasant posts about the same trip (with a lot of focus on temples and food). Madhu wrote this part up in her post From Kumbhakarna to Baahubali In A Day, and Anu’s perspective appears in My Indian Adventures – Kerala. Both are good writers, so these are nice posts to read if you want to enjoy some very pleasant travelogues. But in Anu’s next post, More Adventures…and Some Misadventures, she tells a different kind of story, about seeing something she had not at all expected and unlike anything she’d seen before. And she gets pretty descriptive about that; for example:

The road (yes, that was a road) was now a river and they were struggling to evacuate over 750 families from the farmlands behind.

My initial reaction was astonishment. In all my years living and visiting, I’d never seen the roads flooded. When I went downstairs, I realised that our backyard was under water almost two-thirds of the way…

And then she had the hair-raising experience of having to get from the floods to one airport and then another (how many airports were there?) until finally, much later, settling back down in the U.S.

After reading all this, I had to ask myself, would I be willing to go through all that craziness in order to, finally, spend some time in Kerala? Maybe I would! But I doubt that if and when I do make my trip, I will face such an ordeal, given that this was the first time that Kerala had experienced a flood of that magnitude in 100 years. Though, on the other hand, this sort of thing might actually become more commonplace now that we’re going through climate change. And by the time I ever get the money together to make such a journey, we probably will have experienced a lot more climate change.

But in the meantime… If you can’t visit a place, the next best thing, I think, is to continue reading about it. The things that you read might turn out to be more interesting than any experiences that you’ll actually have if and when you ever make it over there.

Happy 92nd Birthday, Noor Jehan!

Noor Jehan was born on September 21, 1926. As many people know, in this blog, though I may mention birthdays now and then, the one birthday I really try never to miss is Madam Noor Jehan’s.

For this year’s Noor Jehan birthday post, here’s a nice new playlist. Once again, I am referring to one of Tom Daniel’s channels, because he just recently put this one together, basing the list mainly on the Noor Jehan songs that have earned the most views. Curiously, they come from just a few films that came out in Pakistan in the 1950s and early ’60s, but they are wonderful songs in which her voice sounds as beautiful as it does anywhere else. And in these films, Noor Jehan was still singing for herself, so the videos are beautiful to watch, too.

At the end of his list, Tom added a half-hour clip of a live Noor Jehan performance broadcast by the BBC in the early ’80s, which is actually from my mostly neglected YouTube channel (though the video was originally prepared by Tom as well, just like most of the clips over there).

And here I am going to embed the whole list, so if you like, you can keep watching the videos, one after another, without leaving this post.

By the way, as I have just remembered, the performance at the end of Tom’s playlist was also the subject of my Noor Jehan birthday post of 2016. There, in addition to the half-hour clip, I posted two separate songs from the same show, which the main clip had omitted.

If you look at my Noor Jehan post of 2015, you’ll see a list of links to my Noor Jehan posts from prior years, going back to 2009. Obviously, I have devoted a lot of time and energy to celebrating Noor Jehan, whom I can still call my favorite among singers in the history of films from both India and Pakistan.

(Actually, last year was a little different, because that post was about people covering songs that had been made famous by Noor Jehan. But I wanted to show that I am positively delighted even when other singers cover material that makes me think of Noor Jehan.)

Once again, happy birthday to the Malika-e-Tarannum, Madam Noor Jehan!
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P.S. Unfortunately, as usual, my posts from past years contain quite a few missing clips. But I intend to replace most of those very soon!

Uday Shankar’s Kalpana (1948) – Restored, with English Subtitles

1. In Search of Uday Shankar’s Kalpana (Now You See It, Now You Don’t)

[Note: As of September 29, the first part of this post has been revised from the one that went up earlier this month – out of necessity, not just for stylistic improvement, as you’ll see a few paragraphs down.]

At the end of my last post (a little over a month ago), I talked about how Pritha2000 found a link to the restored version of Uday Shankar’s Kalpana at Indiancine.ma. She informed us of this recently at the end of a long string of comments under a post about being In Search of Uday Shankar’s Kalpana that I had put up almost ten years ago. For a long time, no copy of the film could be found anywhere. Then some apparently not-so-restored versions started to show up.Minai aka Cassidy informed us of one at Pad.ma in 2013. It was good to know that there was a version somewhere, but it was not very watchable (at least I didn’t think it was) and it had no English subtitles. (It did have some nice annotations, again mainly thanks to Minai.)

There was so much talk about a newly restored version coming out (thanks to various entities) and it did come out, but it ran into some mishaps, and it still hasn’t even been granted public showings (except at a random film festival, I think). So the Inidancine.ma link was the first time I – and a few other people, at least – were able to see the restored Kalpana anywhere.

In another fairly recent comment under my old post (this one dated June 18), a commenter named Sreekanth said, “We just hope to find it on YouTube soon…waiting for that day.” And then for a couple of weeks at the beginning of September, we actually did see an excellent copy of the restored version, with English subtitles that were more complete than in the Indiancine.ma version. This post was thanks to Tom Daniel (who else?) and also Anuradha Warrier (of the blog Conversations Over Chai), who filled in some subtitles that had been missing from the Indiancine.ma version. This made some of us very happy, and it inspired me to write the original version of this blog post.

Unfortunately, within the past ten or so days, Tom’s version of Kalpana was taken down. This happened because of objections from someone who had fought for rights to the film a while back and has been very protective of them. But according to at least a few sources, this film is no longer protected under copyright and should be considered as being in the public domain. Also, curiously, there are a couple of other versions of the restored film available on YouTube (though without subtitles). We’re hoping that some day Tom will win this film back, but given the nature of the other person in the dispute, we’re not feeling too optimistic about that. Thankfully, as of now, the songs that Tom selected to post are still up, and I included a couple of them in the last part of this post. For those who want to watch the entire restored version of Kalpana with English subtitles, Indiancine.ma is the place you’ll have to go.

THE MOVIE IS HERE.

2. Some Good Things to Know Before Watching Kalpana

Uday Shankar’s Kalpana was in many ways a breakthrough film, with unprecedented qualities. One such quality was a new innovation in cinema choreography. Below the copy that he put on YouTube, Tom quoted a section from the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, which points out that “The choreography was specifically designed for the camera, with semi-expressionist angles and chiaroscuro effects…” This fact is further elaborated on – and without any art school terms – in an interesting video that was part of the Indiavideodotorg series 100 Years of Bollywood.

As the narrator Pali Chandra (who is herself an acclaimed kathak dancer and choreographer) explains:

For the first time, numbers were created to suit the camera. If it was abhinaya or the expression of the eyes, the focus was on the eyes. If it was the hands, so was the focus on the hands. So as we see, the entire concept of choreography has changed here for this particular film. Now why would that happen? Simply because Uday Shankar – the great Uday Shankar – was the artistic director of this film.

A few minutes later in this video, the film historian Vijay Kumar Balakrishna talks about seeing the film three decades ago and being extremely impressed by the diversity of Indian dances. As he points out, in addition to seeing most of the major classical dances, he also noticed a fine range of tribal dances. But even though so many classical and folk dances are represented, few are shown strictly in their pure form, because Uday Shankar integrates all these influences into his own unique modern choreography.

By the way, when you watch the Indiavideodotorg video, you’ll notice right away that the film is being talked about as a treasure that can’t be found. As of the making of this video – just six years ago – even the narrator had no idea where to find it. That shows how remarkable it is that we now can have access to this restored version.

3. Notes About Watching Kalpana

When I started to watch Kalpana, myself, at first I found it to be a bit slow, arty, and grim. I thought to myself, I can understand why this was not a blockbuster movie (as I had learned earlier that its box office returns were far from great). But the expressionist visual style, combined with the socialist messages being conveyed, did actually make me think of a favorite film that was made in 1942 by a very popular director – that is, Mehboob Khan’s Roti. But Roti also revolved around a conventionally told adventure story, and though there is a story that Kalpana revolves around, it is only one small aspect of the film, and the main story isn’t really the full story anyway. The entry in the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema sums it up pretty well:

The narrative of the surreal fantasy is embedded within a framing story of a writer telling a story to a film producer, who eventually declines to make the movie. The writer tells of Udayan (Shankar) and Kamini (Kanta) and the young man’s dream of establishing an art centre, Kalakendra (a fictional equivalent of Shankar’s India Cultural Centre at Almora) in the Himalayas.

Yet every time we think we are able to follow the core story – that is, the story within the story – this gets interrupted by surreal sequences (often introduced as dream sequences or visions of someone who is unconscious from being injured or sick), and it becomes more and more difficult to tell where the fantastic visions stop and the core story (within the story) begins again.

On the other hand, the fantasy element and the confusion regarding dreams vs. narrated “reality” help to enhance a magical quality that increasingly takes hold. It’s obvious that surrealism was a strong influence throughout the movie, and the best of these scenes are at least as good as the best dream sequences in some of our favorite (more conventional) Hindi films. (The Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema mentions that Kalpana influenced the famous dream sequence in Awara, but I can certainly think of a few more. For instance, I started to think about the fantasy scenes in Nagin (1954), starring Vyjayanthimala. But the scenes in Uday Shankar’s Kalpana are more gracefully put together, and though they are sometimes amusing, they’re less inevitably comical.)

4. A Couple of Great Clips

Although Kalpana is highly original, not everything within the film is unique. In fact, if you have already watched a lot of old Indian cinema, you should be able to recognize some familiar themes. And with this in mind, I decided to provide two particular videos (from several that Tom posted on his song channel) which show Kalpana exploring themes that I’ve actually discussed in this blog before.

The first theme that I noticed here was the puppet/kathputli theme. Within this song, “Sadion Ki Behoshi Mein,”  I also heard a message that I’d found in song sequences from a couple of Golden Age Hindi films: the people of India have been in a slumber and need to be woken up. Although it is less than two minutes long, this song and dance combine both themes in a truly fantastic way!

And the other song I had to bring up here is “Hindustan Ka Bal Hai Hal,” which would have fit very well in my list of sickle songs. (In fact, I’m thinking of writing a new, revised list, just to include this song.) It also contains a strong socialist message about the farmers of India and the “fruits of labor,” so there should be no doubt that Uday Shankar was as intentional with his use of the sickle as a political symbol as Mehboob Khan ever was.

And these are just tiny slices of the film. The quality and quantity of the dances and spectacles here are almost overwhelming. While I would not say that this film is exactly gripping in its linear narrative (nor was it meant to be), it certainly is mesmerizing, and watching it was an experience that made the long wait seem totally worthwhile.
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P.S. I mentioned that aspects of Kalpana reminded me of the earlier film, Roti. In the quote from the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, there is a reference to Kalpana strongly influencing Chandralekha (also from 1948), which was a very popular film. Unfortunately, I can recall only a few songs from Chandralekha and I don’t even remember if I ever watched the entire film. So for now, I will have to leave it to other people to notice the similarities (and differences). Of course, I may return to this subject at another time.

P.P.S. When I posted about my search for this film 10 years ago, I was very interested in the fact that it was the first film that featured Padmini. (Actually, I think there was at least one Tamil film featuring Padmini that was released earlier, but this was the first film in which she was asked to act.) A point was made about this in the Indiavideodotorg video also (where there is some attention paid to the inclusion of both Padmini and Lalitha), and it is a generally well valued piece of trivia. However, though I recognized Padmini and Lalitha in one of the first dances in the film, I wasn’t able to pick Padmini out of the crowd so easily elsewhere.

There is a series of pictures of actors from this film that can be found on Surjit Singh’s Hindi Movies… site. An actor is shown and labeled in each of several screen caps from Kalpana, and I did not recognize Padmini in the scene that appears here. I had, however, spotted Usha Kiran correctly, and she actually has a pretty good role.

The real stars of the film are Uday Shankar (of course), Amala Shankar, and Lakshmi Kanta, and they are all excellent here.

Some thoughts upon the death of Zarina Begum (and a few other notes updating past posts)

I almost typed a little about Zarina Begum in the P.S. to my last post – the one on the Dalrymple books. I had said that a few references from songs and films had made me think about Zafar, and this was why I grabbed Dalrymple’s book The Last Mughal. I had thought a lot about Zafar, actually, after writing my post about the ghazal (and thumri) singer Zarina Begum and her performance of the song Nazar Lagi Raja Tore Bangle Par. Zarina Begum (and a few others) had attributed this song to Zafar, though most people attribute it to the people given the credit in the 1958 film Kala Pani. Given what I have learned about Zarina Begum, I strongly suspect that her claim was correct.

As I said in that post from last December, there were a few articles and documentaries about Zarina floating around in 2015 and 2016 but, unfortunately, they all focused more than anything on the facts that she had fallen into obscurity and poverty, that her family was living in poverty, and that she was very ill but could not afford all the healthcare that she needed. I found out that a little after all this news came out, she did get some help from arts organizations and some money from the government as well, but I could not find anything in terms of updates on her condition, and I said in my post, “Now that a couple of years have passed since all this information came out, I hope that she is still alive.” And that was where everything stood at the end of 2017.

As it turned out, she did last longer than we might have expected, but she passed on May 12, 2018. Per a report in the blogs section of the Times of India dated May 16:

Zarina Begum, the last disciple of ‘Mallika-e-ghazal’ Begum Akhtar, and the only torch-bearer of Baithak Gana, died of a chronic kidney disease at a private city hospital at around 8 am on Saturday.

This is sad, but I’m glad she had a little more time than people expected and lived to the age of 88 (which seems pretty good, considering what she went through).

I have to stress here that I was really impressed with her singing in the clips that I shared in my post last December. I actually enjoyed her performance much more than Asha Bhosle’s playback performance for Nalini Jaywant in Kala Pani. According to a documentary that I viewed, Zarina was 82 when she sang the version of “Nazar Lagi Tore Bangle Par” that I posted. I think some people insist that she had to be a little younger, but in any event, even if she was in her 70s, that was still very impressive.

While looking for more information on Zarina Begum, I found a great tribute to her from 2007 at Last.fm. This short tribute is actually a preface to contents that are linked to at MySpace which I cannot access (I don’t know whether it’s because they’re outdated, because I’m not a member of MySpace or because of other, technical problems). Nonetheless, the preface, all by itself, made the visit to Last.fm more than worthwhile.

Nusrat Durrani wrote:

Bessie Smith is eternal. I am a big fan of Odetta and Nina Simone. For many months in 2003-2005 all I heard was Mazzy Star because Hope Sandoval is a cure for pain. But there is a singer from my hometown of Lucknow, India that is right up there with all of them. Her name is Zarina Begum and you will never hear her songs or her story. She is a master of the “ghazal,” the traditional love song sung in Urdu, a north Indian language. It might be an unfamiliar sound to you but anyone even casually conversant with the technicalities of singing can tell she is a gifted, poetic, songstress. Once a star in the 60s and 70s, a series of misfortunes and the callousness of an unappreciative bourgeois citizenry have forced this enchanting woman to a life of obscure poverty.

As someone else who comes from a western environment in which people are not aware of ghazal singers and the like, I enjoyed that this writer drew comparisons to contemporary western singers that many of us are more familiar with – including Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star, who were generally considered an “alternative rock” group in the 1990s. I like Mazzy Star, too, and Hope Sandoval. I would not say that Hope Sandoval is one of my absolute favorites from ‘90s “alternative rock,” but this is a respectable opinion, and Nusrat Durrani drew the seemingly strange kind of comparison that I might very well draw, myself. Yet I would go further and say that you do not necessarily need to know “technicalities” to appreciate a singer like Zarina Begum – or her mentor Begum Akhtar. I did not come from India and I had no classical Indian music influences in my childhood (well, outside of records and TV clips of Ravi Shankar and George Harrison and an occasional live classical performance at an Indian restaurant that my parents took me to), yet I ended up taking to different kinds of Indian music quite a bit several decades into my life. Maybe I could name a number of pertinent influences that I encountered during my adulthood, but the point I’d like to make here is that the love of great singing and music from any place is not dependent on learning technicalities or learning anything complex, for that matter. When people are encouraged to open their minds, they do learn to appreciate music from different places and different traditional cultures. I think that if anything has prevented people from doing so (especially during an age when everyone can have access to music all over the globe), it is the limits of the marketplace, in which sellers of culture have, for a long time, categorized everything, separating different kinds of music or other entertainment into different little boxes for the sake of niche marketing. That sort of fragmentation of taste is finally breaking down somewhat exactly because people have access to music all around the world with just a click on YouTube or some other streaming forum (and that has helped me to greatly expand my knowledge of Indian music as well). But the obstacles from niche marketing and the like certainly still do exist, as do the prejudices drummed into people’s heads that they should not or cannot enjoy – or work with – music or art coming from cultures that are supposedly not “their own.”

And with regard to damage done by the marketplace, I love a point at the end of the paragraph, where Nusrat Durrani says, “a series of misfortunes and the callousness of an unappreciative bourgeois citizenry have forced this enchanting woman to a life of obscure poverty.” But is it really that a particular “bourgeois citizenry” was unappreciative, or isn’t this just the natural consequence of a certain system that is always run by the bourgeoisie? As long as we live under a system through which everyone’s ability to live decently and stay healthy is greatly determined by money, we’re always going to see stories about artists who had at one time brought great joy to people falling into terrible states of poverty and ruin. From my perspective, the stories seem particularly, jarringly frequent in the history of film stars and musicians from India and Pakistan (ironically, as best illustrated in the lives of some people who had their peak at a time when India was supposed to be socialist and many of the popular films preached against the evils of capitalism), but they are not unheard of in the U.S., either. I think that here in the U.S., the system somehow established greater economic safeguards for people who became successful in the entertainment world (though many are obviously subjected to terrible social pressures until they end up killing themselves in one way or another – also not an unusual story in India). But the U.S. is also a place where people who have slipped a few times for one reason or another might end up homeless and often can’t pay their medical bills.

I was glad to see that Zarina Begum survived a few years beyond the dire messages that were circulating in 2015 and she did live until a decent old age. But since being exposed to the story that was circulated a few years ago, I so much wish that she could have lived a better life.

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Part II: Regarding Some Other (Lighter) Matters:

I wanted to add a few short notes as follow-up to some other, older posts that have come back into focus for me. The reason these older posts have come back into focus is because of extremely helpful comments, especially by a fairly new commenter to this blog identified as Pritha2000. (By the way, I always tell everyone to look at the new comment links on the right side of the blog – sometimes they will lead you to new information that is at least as interesting as anything that I’ve posted on the front page.)

First Pritha revived the conversation about the magnificent Sitara Devi “snake dance” in the film Anjali (1957). In a comment on June 14, she identified this film as an adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Chandalika. This inspired me to look for (and post) a good description of the whole plot line of Chandalika as well as guess where in the plot the dance had to have fit, and Pritha confirmed my guess and elaborated upon it. And so, thanks to this exchange that occurred in June of 2018, we greatly improved upon a post that originally went up in April of 2010.

Pritha also sent an invaluable comment to my nearly ten-year-old post on Uday Shankar’s Kalpana (1948). Apparently, over at Indiancine.ma, they have posted the Scorcese-restored version of the film, with English subtitles. This isn’t the copy that I saw there – or on YouTube – before. All prior copies that I could find online (after a long time of not being able to find any) were far less easy to look at and didn’t have subtitles. And I have now watched pieces of the restored version (here and there), and the dances look beautiful, indeed. Maybe I’ll find a way to write this film up soon. Thank you again, Pritha!

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P.S. The fantastic picture of Zarina above appeared in several places, including an article announcing a concert in 2014. Because it’s been used a few times, I am assuming nobody is going to get very possessive about it if they see it here. (There were other pictures that I saw that were more specific to particular articles which I decided not to use for that reason – and also because I like this one more.)

Delving Into Dalrymple (The Last Mughal and, especially, White Mughals)

During the past month, I’ve had the very interesting experience of delving into two works by the man from the UK who is probably the best-known writer of Indian history in the English language today (and for good reason), William Dalrymple.

The first Dalrymple book that I delved into was The Last Mughal, which anyone familiar with the subject will recognize from its title as being about Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II. I had become very curious about this subject because of references to Zafar (as he is fondly known to many) and his poetry in Hindi films and related song performances. So, when I picked up this large book (445-plus pages in pretty small print, not including notes and other chapters outside of the main body), I looked forward to reading a whole lot about Zafar and his poetry. Actually, though, I found that most of the book was not really specifically devoted to either.

I think the book is better described by its subtitle, “The fall of a dynasty: Delhi, 1857.” The bulk of this book is devoted to the details of war and the fall of Delhi. In the earlier part of the book, there are some interesting descriptions of a Mughal court that tries for some time to ignore its impending doom, with great amounts of time and energy being spent on art, poetry, music, dancing, and assorted decadent indulgences that the aristocracy actually can no longer afford, considering the peril that it’s in. That part is the most interesting to me. Much more of the book, though, is devoted to the details of battle. This includes some interesting information about strategic successes and failures on both sides, but ultimately, we end up reading much more about atrocities. (Originally, there are some atrocities committed by the mutineering Sepoys, but those, of course, are far outweighed by the ones dealt out by the British at the end.)

I have to admit that I was not looking so much for a long war story, but, on the other hand, I must commend Dalrymple for the obviously voluminous research that he did, sometimes extending into incredibly minute details, and for his skill at conveying all these details so clearly that his writing seems very close to flawless. Most importantly, after reading The Last Mughal, I felt far more educated about historical circumstances that I have seen so often referred to in classic Indian films.

The Dalrymple book that I really enjoyed was the second one I read, but the earlier-written of the two, White Mughals. In The Last Mughal, Dalrymple often refers back to the era that White Mughals covers (that is, the late 18th century and early 19th) because it included a time when many British occupants of India were much more receptive to Indian culture, and the self-superior racist attitudes often associated with the British colonization of India were not as prevalent. In the Introduction to White Mughals, Dalrymple also points out that this is a fact of history that needs to be more widely revealed:

The Kirkpatricks inhabited a world that was far more hybrid, and with far less clearly defined ethnic, national, and religious borders, than we have been conditioned to expect, either by the conventional Imperial history books written in Britain before 1947, or by the nationalist historiography of post-Independence India, or for that matter by the post-colonial work coming from new generations of scholars, many of whom tend to follow the path opened by Edward Said in 1978 with his pioneering Orientalism. It was as if this early promiscuous mingling of races and ideas, modes of dress and ways of living, was something that was on no one’s agenda and suited nobody’s version of events. All sides seemed, for different reasons, to be slightly embarrassed by this moment of crossover, which they preferred to pretend had never happened. It is, after all, always easier to see things in black and white.

(By the way, that passage also reminded me a lot of a passage from another book by a different writer, which I discussed somewhat a year and a half ago. Interestingly, in both cases, the writers found fault with popular writings by Edward Said. I will add more about that in a P.S. below.)

Broadly speaking, especially in the first few chapters, White Mughals is devoted to men who moved to India in service to the British East India Company but who ended up eagerly adopting Mughal styles of dress and living because they admired the culture.

There also is a point frequently made that some of these British men were attracted to such a lifestyle because they could indulge their more sensual cravings in ways that they would have missed out on completely if they’d stayed at home. These sensual pleasures included great indulgent dining, leisurely enjoyment of sublime poetry and music, and the ability to keep several or a dozen Indian women in a harem. (Of course, for the most part, these were men who found a place among the aristocracy.)

But the heart of White Mughals is the romance between two people, an officer in the army of the British East India Company named James Kirkpatrick and an Indian Muslim noblewoman (or noblegirl, really) named Khair-un-Nissa. With great skill, Dalrymple relates all the joy and sorrows, victory and (most of all) heartbreaks involved before, during, and after this affair (and marriage). That is why White Mughals also is better described by its subtitle: “Love and betrayal in 18th century India.”

James Kirkpatrick evidently had had some indulgences with women before he met his great love in this tale and he even had some kind of harem (though not a large one). But these experiences were insignificant compared to his one-to-one romance with Khair. The girl whom he fell in love with was only 14 when he met her, which would certainly raise some questions in the present day, but Dalrymple spends very little time discussing the notion that Kirkpatrick might have in some way taken advantage of her. In fact, he stresses the evidence showing that Khair was the one who started the relationship. Actually, if anyone conducted any manipulation here, it was her mother, grandmother, and other female members of her family, who helped to engineer the meeting and encouraged the romance in part to find a way to get Khair out of an undesired arranged marriage. (Obviously, in 18th century India, 14 was a perfectly marriageable age, at least for a girl.) James does end up marrying her, himself, after a short while, and in the process, he causes great scandal to himself and risks a lot of hardship. Part of the reason for this is that the White Mughal era is actually beginning to wind down as the more typically colonialist and racist attitudes are starting to take over with the increase of British power in India. In James’ own immediate situation, certain officials enter the picture who cause him greater trouble and he is left to do one thing or another to negotiate around these hurdles although, for a while, he manages to maintain and even increase his professional status. Unfortunately, he does not do as well at maintaining his personal health, and Dalrymple strongly suggests that this deterioration in health was directly related to the social stress. Later in the book, we are also provided with information about how the deteriorating social relationships of the era harmed Khair-un-Nissa, who actually had to face a lot more heartbreak in her life years after James was out of the picture. (By the way, I hope that I have not just written too much of a spoiler, but there are plenty of hints from the beginning that life for these two lovers will not end up happily-ever-after.)

The connections that Dalrymple makes between the affairs of his main subjects and the social changes that he is eager to write about are very intriguing and quite ambitious. But by the end of White Mughals, I felt that the writing shone most in the conveyance of emotional drama, and I found the drama here to be more moving than many that I’ve read in fiction.

I would like to find some passages to show how well Dalrymple builds up this drama, but this is a little difficult because he is not the kind of writer who seeks to dazzle a reader with one or another showy paragraph. The effect of the good writing in this book is cumulative. Certainly, Dalrymple is not averse to dropping a little sentence at the end of a chapter to create a cliffhanger that will keep you turning pages (an obvious trick but fun nonetheless), e.g.: “Yet even here the story does not quite end. For after a gap of more than thirty years there is one, final, extraordinary coda.” But the real reason I kept turning the pages was that I enjoyed the way the facts and circumstances slowly built up and progressed, with one good layer of information following the other, all related in a crafty and skillful way. I think it also became clear in this book that William Dalrymple absolutely loves writing detailed histories centered on solidly fleshed out individual subjects and I believe I caught some of that relish too. For me, this turned out to be a highly enjoyable reading experience in addition to being very educational.
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P.S. The passage that I thought about after reading the one that I quoted from Dalrymple was from Wendy Buonaventura’s Serpent of the Nile, which I reviewed as part of a more wandering post back on December 23, 2016. I typed out the passage back then, too, but here it is again, for comparison with Dalrymple’s:

The current, widely held view of Orientalism derives from Edward Said’s thesis that the West has exploited, misunderstood and even invented the East for its own sinister purposes. From the wealth of material available, it is easy to select examples to suit this theory and ignore those which do not. However, Orientalist attitudes to the Middle East are as varied as human beings. An obsession with European colonialism has unfortunately blinded many critics to the complex interrelationship which has existed between Europe and the Arab-Islamic world for hundreds of years. This obsession has merely served to prolong the misunderstanding which exists between them. Many Europeans who went to the Arab world compared the life they found there favorably with that of Europe.