मज़दूर

Mazdoor is a Filmistan social drama about a village youth who leaves his sweetheart behind and goes to the city looking for work. After he rescues the mill owner's daughter from a road accident he is rewarded with a manager's post at the mill, and finds himself pulled between the young woman whose gratitude has raised him and the village girl who turns up at the same gate looking for a job. When conditions on the shop floor harden into an open labour dispute, his position between the owner and the workforce becomes untenable, and he ends by exposing the mill owner's conduct and taking his place alongside the workers — and alongside the girl he had left. Contemporary accounts describe the film as having been inspired by John Ford's How Green Was My Valley (1941), the Welsh coal valley of the original transposed to an Indian mill town. It was Nitin Bose's first film for Filmistan and was fronted almost entirely by newcomers.

Six songs, all written by Gopal Singh Nepali and composed by Hari Prasanna Das. Das (1905–1989) was born in Chittagong and had built a substantial Bengali film career — some twenty-six Bengali films, assistant work under Pankaj Mullick, and the composer credit that gave Hemant Kumar his first Bengali film song — before his 1940s run of Hindi assignments, of which Mazdoor is one. The album divides between three voices: Amirbai Karnataki, then one of the most-recorded female singers in Bombay, takes two solos and the duet; Binapani Mukherjee takes two solos; and Manna Dey takes a solo and the duet. The tone ranges from a monsoon song of consolation and a labour anthem to two songs of loss, which matches a story that moves between village romance and industrial conflict. The Saregama/HMV reissue lists the Manna Dey solo as 'Jeet Hamari Hai', while song indexes derived from the Geet Kosh list the same track by its opening line as 'Kya Zulm Kabhi Jeet Gaya'.

Nitin Bose (1897–1986) had left New Theatres, Calcutta after a bitter dispute with B. N. Sircar — so bitter, according to the account of Hindi-film historian Arunkumar Deshmukh, that he never watched his last New Theatres picture, Kashinath (1943), through to the end. His first Bombay assignment was Mujrim (1944) for V. M. Vyas's Vishnu Cinetone; S. Mukherjee, a fellow Bengali who knew him, then brought him to Filmistan, and Mazdoor was the result — his second Bombay film. The cast was made up almost entirely of newcomers. Nasir Khan was debuting a year after his elder brother Dilip Kumar's own debut in Jwar Bhata (1944), and — like his brother — opposite a debutante. Indumati Lele (1927–2013), who had acted in Prithviraj Kapoor's stage productions, played a lead for the first and last time here before moving permanently into character roles. Veera, a Parsi girl from Ankleshwar, was the second heroine on her first film; she went on to some twenty-two films before moving to Pakistan in the mid-1950s. The picture reached the Roxy theatre in Bombay on 18 May 1946, although film lists and song indexes place it under 1945.

Mazdoor belongs to the small group of mid-1940s Hindi films that took industrial labour as their explicit subject rather than as scenery — the mill, the dispute and the question of which side an educated man stands on are the plot, not the backdrop. It is also a marker in three careers at once: it is Nitin Bose's entry into Filmistan after his break with New Theatres in Calcutta; it carries one of the earliest Hindi film playback credits of Manna Dey, then still at the very start of his singing life; and it is the film in which Nasir Khan — the younger brother of Dilip Kumar — made his screen debut, opposite two debutante heroines. For lyricist Gopal Singh Nepali, already established as a Hindi poet, it is part of his first run of Bombay film work.

Mazdoor did not enter the canon, and no print appears to be in general circulation today; what has survived intact is the soundtrack, which remains available as a six-track reissue in the Saregama/HMV catalogue. That gives the film an afterlife typical of the period's mid-budget productions — the picture forgotten, the record still playing. Two of its tracks now carry a weight they did not have in 1945: they are among Manna Dey's earliest surviving Hindi film recordings, made years before Mashaal (1950) and the Raj Kapoor films established him. For the labour-film strand in Hindi cinema — a line that runs on through Mehboob's Roti (1942) before it and reaches Do Bigha Zamin (1953) after it — Mazdoor is a small but real link.