अमीरी

Amiree — the title means wealth, or the condition of being rich — is a 1945 Hindi social drama directed by P. C. Barua, who also took the male lead opposite his wife Jamuna. It was made in the freelance phase of Barua's career, six years after he had left New Theatres, the Calcutta studio where he had made Devdas (1935) and become the most admired director-actor in Indian cinema. No detailed plot summary of Amiree survives in the standard reference literature; contemporary listings classify it only as a 'social', the industry's label for a present-day drama of family, money and moral choice, and the title itself points at the wealth-and-poverty theme that ran through most Bengali-made socials of the decade. The film failed at the box office and disappeared almost immediately from circulation. What survived it was the record catalogue: nine songs issued on the Columbia label, composed by Dakshina Mohan Tagore.

Nine songs are recorded for Amiree, all composed by Dakshina Mohan Tagore. The lyricist is not named for a single one of them — an unusually complete gap even by the standards of a 1945 flop, and one confirmed on every side: the Hindi Film Geet Kosh names no lyricist, and Wikipedia's list of 1945 Hindi films leaves the film's Lyrics field blank. HFGK does not name the singers either, as Sadanand Kamath notes explicitly; the six singer credits that do exist come from the Saregama-derived MySwar/BollySwar catalogue, which is also the only consulted source that attributes a record label to the film — Columbia. Those credits are Neelima Banerjee on three songs, Ranjit Roy on two, and Jagmohan Sursagar, catalogued under his birth name Jaganmay Mitra, on one. HindiGeetMala carries the same nine-track list but names the female singer Nirmala Banerjee and attaches her to one song only. The two songs that have resurfaced in the collectors' circuit show a composer working in a recognisably eastern-Indian idiom: light, melodically transparent writing with what listeners have described as a distinctly Bengali flavour in both tune and orchestration, closer to the Calcutta adhunik song than to the Lucknow-Punjab synthesis that Naushad was making dominant in Bombay in the same years.

By 1945 P. C. Barua was working far from the position he had held ten years earlier. He had left New Theatres in 1939 and freelanced thereafter; of the films that followed, only Shesh Uttar / Jawab (1942) drew real attention. He was drinking heavily, his health was failing, and he would die in 1951 at forty-eight. Amiree was his single release of 1945. The production company is recorded inconsistently — song-catalogue sources give Asiatic Pictures while film-blog and census sources give Associate (or Associated) Pictures Ltd., Calcutta — and the discrepancy has not been resolved here. One detail of the casting is worth noting: Ranjit Roy appears both in the cast list and as the credited singer of two songs, which in a Calcutta production of this date usually means an actor-singer performing his own numbers on screen rather than a playback voice.

The importance of Amiree today is almost entirely musical and archival. Dakshina Mohan Tagore (1916-1986) was one of the most unusual instrumentalists in twentieth-century Indian music: born into the Tagore family of Calcutta, he is credited with modifying the esraj by fitting it with a gramophone-horn amplifier to make the taar shehnai, an instrument with a more piercing, grief-carrying tone than the shehnai itself. He went on to play it for S. D. Burman, O. P. Nayyar and R. D. Burman, in the background scores of Bimal Roy's films, and — most famously — in Ravi Shankar's score for Pather Panchali (1955). But he worked as a film music director on exactly one released Hindi picture, and this is it. Amiree is therefore the only surviving document of a major instrumental voice of Indian cinema functioning as a composer. It is also a late chapter in the Barua-Jamuna screen partnership that had defined New Theatres' most celebrated decade.

Amiree left no critical or commercial footprint; it is remembered only by discographers and by the small community of listeners who track down 1940s Hindi film records. Of its nine songs, just two have resurfaced publicly in the last two decades, both through the archival blog Atul's Song A Day — 'Aayi Suhani Ritu Aayi' in 2016 and 'Aao Mann Bahlayen Saajan' in 2021 — and for the earlier of the two, 'Aayi Suhani Ritu Aayi', the singer's identity is still argued over: the Saregama/HMV listing names Neelima Banerjee, while a voice-identification specialist (Jayraman, reported by Sadanand Kamath) proposes Suprabha Sarkar instead. Dakshina Mohan Tagore never composed for a released Hindi film again; he was offered Ramdoot Hanuman years later, but that picture went unreleased and only its records appeared. He returned to the instrument that made his name, joined All India Radio in Calcutta, became a disciple of Annapurna Devi in Bombay, and was known among Bombay's studio musicians as 'Dukhida' — the sorrowful one — for the mourning tone he could draw out of the taar shehnai.