नल दमयंती

Nal Damyanti retells the Nalopakhyana, the love story of Nala, king of Nishadha, and Damayanti, princess of Vidarbha, which sits inside the Vana Parva of the Mahabharata. A golden swan carries word of each to the other before they have ever met; Damayanti chooses Nala at her swayamvara; and their happiness is broken when Nala's kinsman Pushkar goads him into a game of dice and wins his kingdom from him. Exiled to the forest, husband and wife are separated and pass through a long ordeal of disguise, service in other courts and endurance before they find each other again and the kingdom is restored. Janak Pictures' version was scripted from a story by K. S. Thackeray with dialogue by Fani and Ghafil, and cast Prithviraj Kapoor as Nala and Shobhana Samarth as Damayanti, with Trilok Kapoor as Pushkar, David Abraham as the sage Narad and Chandrika as Damayanti's maid Keshini. Reviewing the film in July 1945, Filmindia noted two departures from the received text: Pushkar was rewritten as Nala's step-brother, and the scene in which he demands a share of the kingdom was given what the magazine called a deliberate 'Pakistani touch' — an unmistakable 1945 allusion to the demand for partition.

Ramchandra Pal — the Bombay Talkies composer of Kangan (1939), Bandhan (1940) and Punarmilan (1940), credited with bringing Western orchestration into that studio's scores — wrote eight songs for Nal Damyanti to verses by a lyricist credited simply as Lakshman, whom Filmindia described in July 1945 as 'an utterly new man to the game'. The eight titles preserved in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh listings reproduced by HindiGeetMala and BollySwar/MySwar sit squarely on the legend's turning points: an opening invocation of Adi Bhavani, two bird songs belonging to the golden swan who carries the lovers' messages, a song of a prince awaited, a plea for divine protection, a hymn to the victory of love, a devotional verse at the beloved's feet, and a lament for a life's treasure lost. Filmindia's reviewer was scathing about the result, writing that the score 'had it not been given at all, would have contributed less to the general boredom of the picture'. No playback credits survive for any of the eight songs in either catalogue, and none are asserted here — the singer arrays are deliberately left empty.

Janak Pictures was the banner of the Bombay producer Chhotubhai Desai. Filmindia's January 1945 gossip column reported that Kumarsen Samarth — a Marathi director who had studied cinematography in Germany, and Shobhana Samarth's husband — had taken over the assignment of Nal Damyanti only after the picture was already half-way through, and needled Desai for a 'distant hope of showing Nal Damayanti in Moscow and Hollywood'. The film was photographed by P. Divecha and recorded by Minoo Katrak. Jamnadas & Co. took world rights while it was still on the floor; the story was by K. S. Thackeray and the dialogue by Fani and Ghafil. It opened at the New West End, Bombay, on 9 June 1945, and Liberty Pictures were still advertising it at the same cinema in its third month that August. The golden swan of the legend was staged as a physical prop, and Filmindia's reviewer mocked it, complaining that the bird looked inert throughout — a reminder of how literally the studios of the period rendered the miraculous.

Nal Damyanti matters less for what it achieved than for what it records about the Hindi film industry in 1945. It is one of the last studio-era mythologicals built on the Nala-Damayanti legend, made at the moment when the mythological was being displaced by the social and the Muslim social. It is the film in which an eight-year-old Nutan first stood in front of a camera — on a set that belonged to both her parents, her father directing and her mother playing the title role — five years before her formal debut in Hamari Beti (1950). And it is a small, clear instance of scripture being quietly re-tuned to contemporary politics: the quarrel over the division of Nala's kingdom was written, Filmindia reported, with a topical partition colouring that the magazine disliked precisely because audiences would not miss it.

Filmindia's July 1945 notice was among the harshest the magazine printed that year: an 'all-round poor production', the direction 'a complete misdirection of energy', the dialogue written in 'jaw-breaking Hindi words', and the year-end index filed the film at two stars with the summary verdict 'a killing time-killer'. Baburao Patel's magazine was famously merciless, and the Bombay box office was gentler: the picture reached its third month at the New West End. What has outlasted both the reviews and the run is the cast list — Prithviraj Kapoor and his brother Trilok Kapoor in the same mythological, and a child named Nutan on a set run by her father and led by her mother, an appearance that biographies now treat as the first line of one of Hindi cinema's greatest acting careers. The film itself survives mainly as a paper record: trade advertisements, a savage review, and an eight-title song list in the Geet Kosh.