बचपन

Bachpan is a social family drama built on a single idea — that a child's ordinary cheerfulness can undo an adult's accumulated bitterness. Bhairav (Mazhar Khan) has withdrawn to a house high on a mountainside after his son married outside their caste and the community turned on him without mercy; the villages below leave him alone because they are afraid of him. A relative (Kanta Kumari) sends her young niece Madhu (Baby Madhuri) to live with the recluse, and Madhu's untroubled good humour slowly pulls Bhairav back toward ordinary human company. The aunt then abducts the girl and sells her as a companion to Kamla (Baby Shakuntala), a wealthy invalid confined to a wheelchair, where Madhu wins over the household a second time — until Kamla's jealous governess (Gulab) carries her off again. Bhairav, who has been searching for the child, finds and rescues her, but the police detain them both on suspicion; the village schoolteacher Ramesh (B. Nandrekar) and Gouri (Chandraprabha) give evidence in their favour, and the two are released. The story, the dialogue and the song lyrics were all written by the same hand — I. C. Kapoor.

S. N. Tripathi wrote ten songs for Bachpan to lyrics by I. C. Kapoor, who had also supplied the story and dialogue — an unusually complete authorial hand for a 1945 production. The titles map the film's world rather than a romance: a bird song, a garden song, a Raksha Bandhan song, a Meera-flavoured Krishna number, a patriotic 'Hindustan Hamara', a comic tiptoe song and a story-song called 'Choti Si Kahani'. Singer credits were never systematically recorded for this soundtrack. HFGK-derived catalogues carry exactly one name — Mukesh, for 'Gokul Ki Ek Naar Chhabili' — and the researchers who have transferred the surviving shellac describe the two voices on 'Bole Re Panchhi Bole' only as an unidentified man and an unidentified woman. The records were issued on the Young India label.

I. C. Kapoor writing story, dialogue and lyrics together is the production's most distinctive credit, and it is also what the film's harshest critic attacked. Reviewing Bachpan in FilmIndia in June 1946, the editor Baburao Patel read the film as being about innocence teaching bitter experience to look at life with a smiling understanding — and then judged the story lifeless and Homi Wadia's handling of it inept. Patel praised almost nothing, so the verdict says as much about the reviewer as the film. A production still had already appeared in FilmIndia in April 1945, showing the film's child cast; the Wikimedia Commons description of that still identifies one of the children as the actor Shashi Kapoor, but Wikipedia's own cast list for the film credits 'Shashi Kapoor Sr.' — an older and different performer — and the identification should not be treated as settled. Of the ten songs, only two are known to circulate today, both as transfers from worn 78-rpm discs posted by private collectors.

Bachpan is worth attention mainly for what it shows about Basant Pictures away from the work that made the studio's name. In 1945 the Wadia brand meant Fearless Nadia, whips, runaway trains and stunt spectacle; Homi Wadia had founded Basant Pictures in 1942 after Wadia Movietone closed, and this quiet domestic drama, carried by two child actresses, is the opposite kind of film. It belongs to the small group of 1940s Hindi features that hand the moral centre of the plot to a child rather than using children as decoration. It also preserves an early lead performance by Baby Madhuri — the younger sister of Meena Kumari — at exactly the point when the trade press was calling her the best of the country's child artistes. And it is one of a handful of 1945 scores by S. N. Tripathi, then only three years past his independent debut with Chandan (1942), and three years short of Shri Ram Bhakta Hanuman (1948), the film that started the mythological run he was later typed by.

The film left almost no commercial afterlife. No print is known to be in public circulation, FilmIndia dismissed it, and the soundtrack never entered the standard 1940s repertoire that radio and later reissues kept alive. What survives is fragmentary and archival: two of the ten songs as collector transfers, a poster, one production still, and a detailed 2019 reconstruction of the plot by the film historian Arunkumar Deshmukh, working from Baburao Patel's review. Its more durable trace is in the careers it touched — Baby Madhuri, who would marry the comedian Mehmood and become the mother of the singer Lucky Ali; Baby Shakuntala, whose credits run from the early 1940s into the early 1950s; and B. Nandrekar, who died in 1949, four years after this film.