हमराही

Anup is a poor, idealistic writer who earns his living at a Calcutta newspaper office and lives with his mother and his sister Sumitra. When Sumitra is invited to the birthday party of her wealthy friend Gopa and is publicly accused of theft and humiliated by Gopa's sister-in-law Roopa, Gopa comes to the family's home to apologise — and Anup refuses the apology, telling her the insult was aimed not at one girl but at every poor person in the country. Circumstance keeps throwing the two together: Anup is sent to ghost-write a speech for Gopa's industrialist brother Rajendra, who then steals the manuscript of Anup's unpublished novel about poverty and issues it under his own name, collecting the critical praise that follows. When the workers in Rajendra's factory strike over pay and conditions, Anup and Gopa take the strikers' side, and Rajendra breaks the agitation with bribed workmen and hired goons. Disillusioned by the hypocrisy and arrogance of her own class, Gopa leaves her family, her comfort and her name behind and walks out with Anup towards a harder and more honest life.

R.C. Boral wrote seven songs for Hamrahi, with Hindi lyrics by Munshi Zakir Hussain. Three are solos for Binota Roy (credited on records as Binota Bose), who plays Gopa: the ghazal 'Jigar Ke Daag Naye Gul Khilaye Jate Hain', the spring song 'Din Hain Bahaar Ke Aaye', and the moonlight number 'Hansi Chand Ki Aaj Nirali'. Rekha Mallick has the film's other female solo, 'Gaye Ja Tu Apna Geet', which admirers of Boral single out for his prelude writing. Two Tagore compositions carried over from the Bengali version are kept in Bengali — the duet 'Madhu Gandhe Bhara', sung by Binota Roy with the young Hemant Kumar, and 'Jana Gana Mana' — and the score is completed by the marching chorus 'Badhte Chalo Jawano', pitched at the film's striking workers. It is a notably wide brief for one composer in one film: hymn, ghazal, Rabindrasangeet, romantic solo and march.

Hamrahi was made as a bilingual: New Theatres shot the Bengali Udayer Pathey first and then remade it in Hindi with the two leads, Radhamohan Bhattacharya and Binota Roy, repeating their roles while several Bengali supporting players were replaced. Jyotirmoy Roy wrote the original story and Bengali dialogue; Mohanlal Bajpai wrote the Hindi dialogue, which reviewers picked out as the film's strongest single element. Bimal Roy directed and also photographed the film himself. Of the Bengali original, The Cinema Corridor records that Udayer Pathey was 'made by New Theatres on the smallest budget' and 'actually became the studio's biggest earner'; no source consulted extends that budget-and-earnings claim to the Hindi Hamrahi, though Wikipedia notes both versions did well at the box office, and Filmindia reported in November 1945 that 'New Theatres' Hamrahi with its socialistic theme hit the headlines of success'.

Hamrahi is Bimal Roy's first film as a Hindi director — the Hindi version of Udayer Pathey (1944), the Bengali film with which he had stepped out from behind the camera after years as New Theatres' cinematographer. It is the studio's most openly political production: a mainstream romance whose real subject is class, stolen labour and a factory strike, made while the independence movement was in its final years. Filmindia's Baburao Patel, not an easy critic, called it 'a picture for intellectuals' that fulfilled 'the higher purpose for which the screen is intended', and singled out Bimal Roy's direction as 'an excellent beginning to his new profession'. The film also carried Rabindranath Tagore's 'Jana Gana Mana' onto the Hindi screen years before the Constituent Assembly adopted it as India's national anthem in January 1950.

Ritwik Ghatak, looking back in 1966, said of the film that 'people for the first time saw in them their everyday life — this revolutionised the concept of film as a social document of contemporary reality'. Its combination of neo-realist instinct with popular melodrama is the seed of everything Bimal Roy would do in Bombay a few years later, from Do Bigha Zamin (1953) onwards, and of the socially engaged strain of Hindi cinema that followed him. For music historians, Hamrahi is one of the last significant scores of R.C. Boral, the composer who had effectively invented Hindi film playback at New Theatres a decade earlier; and it is routinely cited as the film that put 'Jana Gana Mana' on the Hindi screen before the anthem was official.