prabhat talkies

The story of how Prabhat Studios made India's biggest hits of the 1930s

Set up by five partners, the production banner made some of early Indian cinema's films, including 'Sant Tukaram'.

Karan Bali
Nov 27, 2014 · 06:00 am

Photo Credit: Film Heritage Foundation

From the late 1920s to the mid-1950s, Indian movie studios proved the impossible: that social commitment, artistic creativity and commercial viability could coexist.

This was a time when large filmmaking companies controlled every department of the process, including the theatres that screened the movies. The Indian studios functioned in a manner similar to Hollywood: the bosses ran the show, while actors were retained on a payroll. Besides honing the talents of early stars (KL Saigal, Devika Rani, Ashok Kumar) and filmmakers (Debaki Bose, V Shantaram, Bimal Roy), the studios served as launch pads for the careers of such actors and directors as Dev Anand and Guru Dutt. One such formidable studio where Anand and Dutt kick-started their careers was the Prabhat Film Company.

Photo credit: Film Heritage Foundation

Prabhat was launched in 1929 in Kolhapur by VG Damle, S Fathelal, KR Dhaiber, SB Kulkarni and V Shantaram. The studio was later relocated to Pune. Starting with silent films, Prabhat entered the sound era in 1932 and made films in Marathi and Hindi. Though their productions explored mostly mythological and devotional subjects, the studio also looked at hard-hitting social themes. A common thread binding diverse titles was the production quality. Their art department, which had a reputation for set construction and the use of plaster and draperies, was regarded as the finest in the country. Films like Ayodhyache Raja/Ayodhya ka Raja (Marathi/Hindi 1932) on the truth-loving King Harishchandra, Amrit Manthan (1934) with human and animal sacrifices as a backdrop, and Amar Jyoti, the proto-feminist tale of a woman turning into a pirate and declaring war on the state when she is denied legal custody of her son, made Prabhat one of the finest producers in the country.

Photo credit: Film Heritage Foundation

Prabhat’s greatest cinematic achievement was Damle-Fathelal’s Sant Tukaram (1936), a biopic of the seventeenth-century Maharashtrian saint. The film holds up surprisingly well, is a triumph in all departments of filmmaking, and boasts of two remarkable central performances by Vishnupant Pagnis as Tukaram and Gauri as his earthy and practical wife Jijai. A huge success at the box-office (it ran for 57 weeks in Mumbai alone), Sant Tukaram also won critical acclaim at the Venice Film Festival in 1937, where it was judged as one of the three best movies of the year alongside Maria Nover of Hungary and Flying Doctor from Australia.



V Shantaram’s trilogy of thought-provoking bilinguals in Marathi and Hindi – Kunku/Duniya Na Mane (1937), Manoos/Aadmi (1939) and Shejari/Padosi (1941) – is among Prabhat’s greatest highs. While Manoos/Aadmi sensitively explored the love story between a prostitute and a police constable and Shejari/Padosi addressed the need for communal harmony, Kunku/Duniya Na Mane showed a strong female protagonist, played by Shanta Apte, who refuses to accept her marriage to a much older man.



The studio system hit its creative peak in the 1940s, but the end was near because of several factors, including the entry of freelancers and stand-alone filmmakers and financers, the creation of the star system, and severe restrictions on the import of raw stock during World War II. Freelancers could hire studios and equipment as they pleased, while stars found that they could earn more from a single movie than from what they made in an entire year as a studio employee. Actors began abandoning the studios, which then had to cough up market rates for the services of their former employees. The self-sufficiency of big studios was especially hampered since they had huge overheads. The films too began deteriorating, with little thought to their content and quality. Prabhat was as badly affected as the rest, shutting down in 1953, but not before giving us some more fine films, such as Sant Gyaneshwar (1940) and Sant Sakhu (1941).

Photo credit: Film Heritage Foundation

Today, the Film and Television Institute of India occupies the land that once belonged to the studio in Pune. It’s fitting that a filmmaking school has come up on the spot where one of the best nurseries of talent  once stood.

Photo credit: Karan Bali

bombay talkies

INDIAN FILM HISTORY

How the Bombay Talkies studio became Hindi cinema's original dream factory

Its productions were the forerunners of the escapist cinema that would come to dominate the Indian screen.

Karan Bali
Today · 03:30 am

Photo Credit: Film Heritage Foundation

In July, a fire rampaged through an office in the Mumbai suburb of Borivali, destroying significant moments of Indian film history. The office belonged to Bombay Talkies, the studio that had made some of the biggest films of the 1930s and '40s and launched the careers of stars like Ashok Kumar and Dilip Kumar. By the time the blaze was extinguished, it had consumed prints of many classic films.

Bombay Talkies, producer of such hits as Achhut Kannya (1936), Kismet (1943) and Ziddi (1948), was founded in 1934, one year after actors and filmmakers Himanshu Rai and Devika Rani arrived in Mumbai from London with the dream of building a world-class film studio. The two had met in the UK, where Rai asked Rani to design the sets for Light of Asia (1925), his ambitious film on the life of Gautam Buddha. They had subsequently gotten married.

Rai and Rani brought with them a bilingual romance drama set among royals. The English version, Fate aka Song of Serpent, had premiered in London in May 1933, and while the film drew mixed notices, critics were unanimous in their praise for Rani, the leading lady. The News Chronicle declared, “She totally eclipses the ordinary film star.” Rai and Rani also brought a Hindi version of the film Karma aka Nagan ki Ragini, which opened in Mumbai on January 27, 1934.

The same year, Bombay Talkies was formed and a studio was built in Malad, on the outskirts of Mumbai. In its quest to set up the most modern film studio in India, Bombay Talkies purchased state-of-the-art equipment from Germany and recruited German and British talent, such as cinematographer Josef Wirsching, art director Karl von Spretti and director Franz Osten.

By 1935, starting with the murder mystery Jawani ki Hawa, Bombay Talkies regularly began producing Hindi films with Devika Rani as its main star. The self-sufficient studio had a board of directors, issued shares to the public, declared dividends and bonuses, and was listed on the stock exchange. In addition, Rai and Rani even started a trainee programme. Each year, Rai interviewed scores of candidates from leading universities and assigned employees to a variety of tasks in all departments of filmmaking.

At Bombay Talkies, Devika Rani formed a hugely successful pairing with Ashok Kumar – which, ironically, was the result of her affair and subsequent elopement with Najam-ul-Hussain, her co-star from Jawani ki Hawa. Rai traced the couple to Kolkata and coaxed Rani into returning. As was to be expected, he sacked Hussain. In his place, Rai chose his laboratory assistant, Ashok Kumar, as the studio’s new face.

Rani and Kumar appeared together in several films, starting with Jeevan Naiya (1936), in which Kumar plays a rich man who disowns Rani after he finds out that she is the daughter of a lowly dancer. Of all their films, Achhut Kannya (1936) is the best-known. The tragic love story between a low-caste girl and a Brahmin boy was a critical and commercial success. The song Main Ban ki Chidiya, sung by Rani and Kumar, is still remembered. The music was composed by Khorshed Minocher-Homji, a Parsi woman who went by the name Saraswati Devi and who was India’s first female music director.



Bombay Talkies productions were the forerunners of the escapist cinema that would come to dominate the Indian screen. Its movies sugar-coated social issues and realities, were of high technical standards, and closely resembled the glossy movies being made by Hollywood’s MGM studio. Rani was lit up like Greta Garbo, MGM’s biggest female star of the time, especially in her close-ups.

Landmark Bombay Talkies films include the mythological Savitri (1937), the Leela Chitnis and Ashok Kumar socials Kangan (1939), Bandhan (1940) and Jhoola (1941), and Basant (1942), the marital drama with the theatre world as a backdrop.

Kismet (1943), directed by Gyan Mukherjee, was arguably Bombay Talkies’ biggest success. It ran for over three years at the Roxy cinema in Kolkata. The film was a trendsetter in that its main character, played by Ashok Kumar, was a thief and an anti-hero. Kismet also was an early example of the much used and abused lost-and-found formula, as per which the hero is separated from his parents in childhood and reunited with them in the end.

Coming at the height of the Indian freedom movement, the film cleverly included the patriotic song Door Hato Ae Duniyawalon, Hindustan Hamara Hai which asked its listeners not to bow to Germany or Japan, Britain’s enemies in World War II.



Despite Kismet’s success, Bombay Talkies was by then in deep trouble. When WWII broke out in 1939, the British government interned the studio’s German technicians, crippling operations. An overworked Rai had a nervous breakdown and died in 1940. Even as Indian technicians took over from the departed foreigners, a power struggle followed between Rani and a rebel group led by Ashok Kumar, Gyan Mukherjee and S Mukherji, who formed a new company, Filmistan, in 1943.

After Rani left the movies in 1945, Ashok Kumar and many others returned to their alma mater in 1947. But the studio was unable to clear its debts despite the success of such films as Majboor (1948), Ziddi (1948), which gave Dev Anand his first big hit and Kishore Kumar his first playback singing chance, and the suspense thriller Mahal (1949).

Though the studio continued making films, Bombay Talkies died a lingering death in the fifties. Its final productions were Bimal Roy’s Maa (1952), with the studio’s one-time heroine Leela Chitnis playing the title role, the Ashok Kumar-Dev Anand-Meena Kumari starrer Tamasha (1952) and the Ashok Kumar-P Bhanumathi vehicle Shamsheer (1953). Even a last-ditch effort, the multi-starrer Baadbaan (1954), made by the Bombay Talkies Workers Industrial Co-operative Society, could not save the studio from shutting down.

A small and desolate patch of ruins in the Mumbai suburb of Malad is all that remains of the legendary studio.

The first part of this series looked at Prabhat Studios. Read it here.

on garm hava : shama zaidi

‘If Mirza’s relatives had to migrate today, it would be to Canada or Dubai’ - See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/entertainment-others/if-mirzas-relatives-had-to-migrate-today-it-would-be-to-canada-or-dubai/99/#sthash.TpgtfS6R.dpuf

‘If Mirza’s relatives had to migrate today, it would be to Canada or Dubai’ - See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/entertainment-others/if-mirzas-relatives-had-to-migrate-today-it-would-be-to-canada-or-dubai/99/#sthash.TpgtfS6R.dpuf

‘If Mirza’s relatives had to migrate today, it would be to Canada or Dubai’ - See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/entertainment-others/if-mirzas-relatives-had-to-migrate-today-it-would-be-to-canada-or-dubai/99/#sthash.TpgtfS6R.dpuf

If Mirza’s relatives had to migrate today, it would be to Canada or Dubai’ 

 Mumbai | Posted: December 7, 2014 8:00 am

Restored and re-released recently, Garm Hava is a poignant story of a Muslim family who stayed on in India after Partition. Screenplay writer Shama Zaidi recounts the making of the film and its relevance today.

After relocating to Bombay, one of the first projects I took up was the dramatisation of Rajinder Singh Bedi’s novella Ek Chadar Maili Si. Bedi saheb set aside a few hours over many days to work on the script of the play. Naturally, as he was a great raconteur, we talked of many things besides the play. One day, he said that a film should be made on the plight of Muslims who didn’t go to Pakistan. I suggested that he should write the screenplay, but he insisted that it should be written by me and directed by my husband MS Sathyu. And, perhaps, we could get some ideas from Ismat Chugtai. After the play had been staged, he reminded us of the post-Partition “migration” film. He also told us not to ask Ismat to write the screenplay, as her ideas of cinema were conditioned by the commercial “bambayya fillum”.

So Sathyu and I had a few sessions with Ismat apa, whom we both loved dearly. She put together a treatment which included ideas from a number of her short stories, and also the incident of her own mother who, rather than migrate to Pakistan, spent the last years of her life with a Hindu neighbour in Aligarh. When we went to take the script treatment from her, she couldn’t find it anywhere in her flat. So she wrote another treatment which was not quite the same. Many months later, when her flat was being painted, she discovered the first treatment in a pile of clothes.

The screenplay proceeded apace using material from both of Chugtai’s drafts and the title then was Vahaan, because most of the characters were headed “vahaan”, that is Pakistan. In that version, Salim Mirza is a railway officer from Lucknow, who sells off his house and repatriates the money through a relative going to Pakistan. The family shifts into what used to be the servant quarters of their house. But when they send instructions to the relative about the money, the latter feigns ignorance about any such sum in his possession. The story of the daughter’s marriage and son’s job were similar to the final script. While this story was reflective of a certain reality, it appeared rather bleak and didn’t seem to hold out any hope. And as Prof (Saiyid) Nurul Hasan, then a minister in Indira Gandhi’s cabinet and an old family friend, said, “Bibi, the story is all right, but the politics is all wrong!” Later, my father proffered a similar opinion, and we realised that the script needed to be reworked.

When we told Kaifi Azmi about our problem, he suggested that we leave the script with him, and he would “fix” it. Firstly, he said that Mirza should not be a railway employee, but a businessman. And since Kaifi had worked with the leather industry unions in Kanpur as a young man, he decided to use that as Mirza’s profession. Also, he thought that since Chugtai was from Aligarh, and the women in the Mirza family were pretty feisty, unlike the meek submissive women from Awadh, we should set the story in Agra, a hub of the hand-made shoe trade. Being a poet, he was keen on including some songs, but we only wanted a qawwali, and that too as a background song which would reflect Amina’s state of mind. He wrote an original qawwali, which is now presented by some qawwals as a “very old traditional piece”.

Kaifi’s version, which was a drastic re-write of Vahaan, needed a new name. Sathyu and I decided on Garm Hava from a line in Kaifi’s famous poem Makan: aaj ki raat bahut garm hava chalti hai. However, the screenplay was much too long and would have taken up more than three-and-a-half-hour of screen time. I then reworked Kaifi’s material to a reasonable length, which would make the film about two and a quarter hours.

We had already submitted a script to the Film Finance Corporation (as NFDC was then called) which was later made as Kahan Kahan se Guzar Gaya, but it was rejected. But this time, we were more successful and BK Karanjia, the chairman of FFC, seemed to really like the Garm Hava script. Sathyu then started to cast the characters and chose mostly actors from the stage in Delhi, Mumbai and Agra. Balraj Sahni assembled all the actors on the location and made them read the screenplay aloud more than once. So that by the time the shooting began, everyone knew their lines from memory. He also discussed the political significance of the play with the actors. There was not really that much to discuss as most of the actors were from the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), and were aware of the socio-political aspects of the film. The workers from one of the shoe factories we included in the film were so impressed with Balrajji that after the shoot was over they went on strike demanding better wages!

We had a camera with a one-zoom lens and six lights which were loaned to Sathyu by his friend Homi Sethna, and a very tight budget. So there was not much chance of many retakes. In a little over 40 days, the film was canned and we all went home. The only problem was that the camera was so noisy that the film was edited silent and then dubbed without a soundtrack to guide us. After the last day of dubbing, Balrajji breathed his last, as if he wanted to complete his work in the film before moving on.

The real problems with the film began after it was completed. Mrs Gandhi (Indira) was a friend of Sathyu’s from the 50s when they used to meet every evening for adda-bazi in Delhi. He took the film to show it to her and Inder Kumar Gujral, the I&B minister, and they seemed impressed. But the Censor Board banned the film from public screening. After much wrangling for almost a year, the film was finally given a censor certificate. Without seeing the film, LK Advani wrote an article in The Organiser (the RSS mouthpiece) that the film had been financed by Pakistan. On the other hand, certain Muslim leaders wanted it not to be released unless the red flags in the final scene were replaced by Congress flags. And a senior ex-Muslim League member, now a Congress minister, insisted that the character of Salim Mirza’s brother-in-law had been created to malign him. Kaifi had to put in a line at the beginning and end of the film, stating that the trauma of Partition affected both India and Pakistan. Ultimately, the film was released amidst heavy police bandobast in many places, but there were no protests.
Now that the film has been released in a restored version, people have asked whether the film is still “relevant”. The film is a historical document at a small micro-level of a joint family, falling apart due to a unique historical situation. As for its relevance today, there is still alienation and marginalisation, as increasingly Muslims do not get houses on rent, or jobs very easily. But it is also a fact that after the creation of Bangladesh, the idea of a “Muslim” homeland seems rather ridiculous. And if Mirza’s relatives had to migrate today, it would be to Canada or Dubai!

Shama Zaidi is a screenplay writer, documentary filmmaker and theatre person. Her works include Garm Hava, Shatranj ke Khiladi, Umrao Jaan and Sooraj ka Satvan Ghoda