चाँद चकोरी

Chand Chakori is a Ranjit Movietone romantic drama directed by Kidar Sharma, built around Mumtaz Shanti — then at the height of the fame that Kismet (1943) had given her — opposite the singer-actor Surendra. Its title names the oldest emblem of longing in Indian poetry: the chakor bird, which is said to spend the whole night gazing at a moon it can never reach, so that the pairing of chand and chakori announces a love held at a fixed, unbridgeable distance before a foot of film has run. No plot summary of the picture survives in any archive that can be consulted today — the Wikipedia entry is a one-source stub, the trade-paper coverage is not digitised, and no print is known to circulate — so what can honestly be said about the story is only what the title, the casting and the surviving song titles imply: a woman's devotion, a separation, and a score built almost entirely around waiting. Ranjit's contract players filled out the rest of the picture, among them Ashraf Khan, Maruti, Shanta Kumari, Nagendra and Baburao Pawar. Whatever the story was, it worked with audiences: on Box Office India's retrospective ranking, Chand Chakori was the sixth highest-grossing Indian release of 1945.

Thirteen songs are catalogued for Chand Chakori, all of them composed by Bulo C. Rani. Amirbai Karnataki is documented as the singer on seven; she is the only singer any consulted catalogue names for this film, and the remaining six titles carry no singer credit at all — none has been supplied here by inference. As the catalogues record them, Pandit Indra wrote twelve of the thirteen and Wali Saheb the thirteenth, 'Doobti Naav Ko Tinke Ka Sahara'; Kidar Sharma is credited as a lyricist on the film without any individual song being assigned to him. The titles cluster hard around separation and distance — a woman turned into a jogan by her lover's leaving, a wind asked to carry a message, a sinking boat and its straw, a chakori measuring how far the moon is — which is exactly the emotional weather the film's name promises.

Kidar Sharma made Chand Chakori in the middle of his Ranjit years, between Mumtaz Mahal (1944) and Dhanna Bhagat (1945), and two years before he set up on his own and cast an unknown Raj Kapoor and an unknown Madhubala in Neel Kamal (1947). He had come into films as a writer rather than a director — his dialogue and lyrics for the Hindi Devdas of 1936 were his first break — which is why his name appears among this picture's three lyricists as well as in the director's chair. Bulo C. Rani was twenty-five and barely a year into composing on his own account. One further connection runs through the credits: Wikipedia's article on Mumtaz Shanti identifies her husband as Wali Sahab, the writer-director with whom she moved to Pakistan in the early 1950s — and Wali Sahab is the credited lyricist of one of the songs Amirbai Karnataki sings in this film.

Chand Chakori matters today less for its narrative, which is lost, than for two things it documents. It is one of the earliest complete scores by Bulo C. Rani, who had joined Ranjit Movietone in 1939 as an assistant to Khemchand Prakash and had been composing independently only since Caravan (1944); the thirteen songs written for this picture are effectively his apprenticeship as a studio house composer, five years before Jogan (1950) made his name. It is also a record of Amirbai Karnataki at the height of her playback career — she sang six of the eight songs of Kismet (1943), whose female lead was this film's star, and her voice is heard again across most of this soundtrack, in the years before Lata Mangeshkar's rise after 1947 redrew the map of female playback singing. And commercially it belongs to the small group of 1945 releases that genuinely made money, which makes its near-total disappearance from the record all the more conspicuous.

Almost nothing of Chand Chakori survives in circulation. No print is known to be publicly available, only a handful of its recordings have ever surfaced online, and as the writer of the song blog Atul's Song A Day observed in 2011 while posting one of them, the film's page on most databases is effectively blank while claiming to be complete. What is left is the song list itself, preserved through the Hindi Film Geet Kosh tradition and the catalogues built on it, plus one or two audio transfers — just enough to put Bulo C. Rani's early manner on record and to mark a genuine 1945 box-office success. For a film that finished sixth in its year, that is a stark illustration of how completely the pre-Partition Bombay archive has been lost, and it is the reason a careful catalogue entry is worth making at all.