The Magic of Playback - Part II, 1930s Options

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1930s

The first ever playback song of Hindi cinema was "De de khuda ke naam par pyare," sung by Wazir Mohamed Khan in the film Alam Ara. The film was India's first talkie, and featured as many as seven songs. The filmmaker, Adeshir Irani, recorded the sound and visuals simultaneously. The revolutionary method of capturing music on celluloid caught on like wildfire. Filmmakers of the 1930s began to perceive the vast potential of music and began to use songs to narrative, digressive, and formulistic
purposes.

Calcutta's New Theatre studios had great singing stars like Kundan Lal Saigal, Pankaj Mullick, K C Dey, Pahadi Sanyal, Uma Shashi and Kanan Devi. Even Pune's Prabhat Studios boasted of singing stalwarts like Shanta Apte and Shanta Hublikar.

But where was the singing talent in the twin movie making meccas, Lahore and Bombay? For an inordinately long time these two cities had to rely on the brave but unprofessional singing voices of the stars who were on the rosters of the studios. Though they weren't singers as such, Bombay Talkies' stars such as Ashok Kumar, Devika Rani, Snehprabha Pradhan and Leela Chitnis delivered hits galore.

In 1931, the year of Alam Ara, Mumbai released the costume music Shirin Farhad. Unlike Alam Ara, where sound image were recorded simultaneously, the soundtrack of Shirin Farhad was separately, thereby ushering in the playback technique. The film's lead pair, Master Nissar and Jehanara Kajjan, sang themselves to success in Shirin Farhad and later Indrasabha (1932). Songs became the norm in the 1930s--Durga khote sang in the Hindi-Marathi Ayodhya Ka Raja and Vinayakrao Patwardhan, who was a trained classical singer, sang several songs in Imperial Films' Madhuri in 1932. In 1933, K C Dey and K L Saigal sang their own songs in New Theatres' Puran Bhakt. The compositions were by the legendary Rai Chand Boral.

New Theatres' Yehudi Ki Ladki in 1933 and 19 elaborately staged songs sung by K L Saigal, Pahaldi Sanyal and others. P C Barua's Devdas featured singing superstar Saigal crooning "Dukh ke din ab beetat nahin..." In 1938, Surendra made a sensational impact as the star singer of Anil Biswas' compositions in Gramophone Singer (1938).