बड़ी माँ

Set on the Indian home front in the closing months of the Second World War, Badi Maa follows Dinesh, a young man stranded in London through the Blitz while his father Durgadas sinks deeper into debt to the moneylender Ghanshyam in the village of Dinapur. Ghanshyam's son Rajinder has secretly become an agent for the Japanese, assisted by a dancer named Mona; Ghanshyam's daughter Hema — patriotic, compassionate, and in love with Dinesh — knows nothing of her brother's treason. When Durgadas refuses to buy off his debt by marrying his daughter to Rajinder, his property is confiscated. Dinesh returns from England to find his father ruined and his village under enemy attack, takes up arms alongside Hema, and loses his sister Usha to enemy fire; a repentant Rajinder dies fighting the very side he had served. The 'Badi Maa' — the elder mother — of the title is India herself, and the film closes with Hema and Dinesh surviving the fight they waged for her.

K. Datta — born Datta Korgaonkar in Sawantwadi, a composer who came to Hindi cinema from Marathi films and from a childhood steeped in bhajan singing — wrote ten songs for Badi Maa across three lyricists: six by Zia Sarhadi, who also wrote the screenplay, three by Anjum Pilibhiti, and one by the Marathi poet Raja Badhe. The score is unusually clearly segmented by voice. Noor Jehan takes the four adult romantic-melancholic numbers; Lata Mangeshkar takes the devotional and patriotic register; the child singer Baby Alka takes three light numbers; and Meenaxi one. That division — a war film in which the romantic songs, the prayer and the marching patriotic song are each given to a different singer — makes the album a compact map of what a 1945 Bombay social drama was expected to contain.

Master Vinayak — born Vinayak Damodar Karnataki in Kolhapur, half-brother of Baburao and Bhalji Pendharkar and maternal cousin of V. Shantaram — had left Hans Pictures and Navyug Chitrapat before setting up Prafulla Pictures, and Badi Maa was made in Hindi under that banner. He had recognised Lata Mangeshkar's ability as early as 1942, casting her in Pahili Mangalagaur, and after Master Dinanath Mangeshkar's death that year he effectively took the family under his protection; when his company shifted its headquarters to Bombay in 1945 the Mangeshkars moved too. The story came from V. S. Khandekar, the Marathi novelist who had also written Vinayak's Chhaya (1936); Zia Sarhadi wrote both the screenplay and the majority of the lyrics; Madhav Bulbule shot the film. Filmindia reported in September 1945 that the production had been made under pressure from the colonial Information Department, which was then pushing Bombay studios towards war-effort subjects.

Badi Maa was made by Master Vinayak for his own Prafulla Pictures banner, and it sits at an unusual crossing point in Hindi film music history: Noor Jehan, then the most bankable singing star in Bombay, carries four solos on one side of the score, while a fifteen-year-old Lata Mangeshkar — placed in the film by Vinayak, a family friend who had taken charge of the Mangeshkars after her father's death in 1942 — sings a bhajan on the other. Asha Bhosle appears in a minor role in the same film. It is also one of the clearest surviving examples of the Indian wartime propaganda feature: made, in Filmindia's phrase, 'under the constant goading of the Information Department', it casts the Japanese as the invading enemy and India as the mother to be defended. The commercial verdict and the critical one went in opposite directions — Filmindia gave it a single star and called it 'the year's most rotten show', while the film became the third highest-grossing Indian release of 1945.

Master Vinayak died in Bombay on 19 August 1947, four days after Independence and two years after Badi Maa; he completed only two more features. The film outlived him in an unexpected way. For the enormous literature on Lata Mangeshkar, Badi Maa is a fixed early reference point — the Hindi film in which she and Asha Bhosle both appear on screen at the very start of their careers, and in which she sings a bhajan two years before 'Aayega Aanewala' would change her life. It is equally a marker at the other end of a career: Noor Jehan's four solos here belong to the last two years of her Bombay life before Partition took her to Pakistan permanently. And unlike most Hindi films of 1945, Badi Maa survives complete and freely viewable — a full print is preserved on indiancine.ma and mirrored on Wikimedia Commons in the public domain, so the songs can still be seen in the scenes they were written for.