परिंदे

Parinde is a wartime social drama built around the Burma campaign of the Second World War. Ashok (Surendra), a schoolteacher and the son of a soldier who died in service, resigns after a quarrel with his principal, takes a second teaching post where he meets Shyama (Vanmala), and — with recruitment drives running everywhere in the background of the war — finally enlists and is trained as a pilot, leaving Shyama behind for a posting on the Burma frontier. On a reconnaissance flight he sees a Japanese patrol seize a family; he reaches them too late to save the parents but rescues their daughter Neela (Sitara Devi), who is brought unconscious to the air base hospital and, as she recovers, attaches herself to him. At home, Shyama's father (Dixit) is making a fortune out of hoarding and the black market with a doctor (Baburao Pendharkar) as his silent partner; the doctor wants Shyama for himself, and he and Neela strike a bargain to convince Shyama that Ashok is about to marry the other woman. Believing it, Shyama gives up on marriage and joins the forces as a nurse — and is posted, along with the doctor, to the very air base hospital where Ashok is eventually brought in wounded. The deception collapses in that three-way meeting and the couple are reunited. Only a heavily cut print survives, and it now plays with abrupt breaks in the story line.

Eight songs, all written by Rammurti Chaturvedi and composed by Pandit Gobind Ram — the Lahore-trained composer who was at the height of his career in 1945, the year he also scored Laila Majnu and Hamara Sansar. The album divides almost evenly into two registers. Four songs are romantic and turn on Surendra's actor-singer voice paired with the female playback that the record listings credit as Srimati Ghosh: the departure duet 'Sajanva Bhool Hamein Na Jaana', the night duet 'Upar Ho Chand Tara Neeche Jahan Sara', the waiting song 'Aaja Salone Sipahiya' and Surendra's solo 'Hawa Jo Tera Udhar Ho Jaana'. The other four are patriotic, devotional or exhortatory — 'Doobte Bharat Ko Bachao', which is Zohrabai Ambalewali's single contribution to the film, plus 'Bharat Desh Hamara Pyara', 'Jaao Veer Rann Mein' and 'Kabhi To Jago Ae Sone Walo'. The female playback attribution is not fully settled: HindiGeetMala and MySwar both use the billing 'Srimati Ghosh' on some tracks, MySwar credits Vanmala directly on two others, and Sadanand Kamath, writing on Atul's Song A Day after watching the film, identifies the voice as Parul Ghosh and records his surprise that Vanmala — a capable singer herself — was given playback at all. Singers for 'Bharat Desh Hamara Pyara' and 'Jaao Veer Rann Mein' are not documented in any listing consulted, and are left blank here rather than guessed.

Atre Pictures, the Bombay banner of Acharya Atre, made Charnon Ki Daasi (1941), Raja Rani (1942), Vasantsena (1942), Tasveer (1943), Dil Ki Baat (1944), Parinde (1945) and Dulha (1946). Parinde was the second and last of the two on which Atre himself took the director's chair, and he wrote its story, screenplay and dialogue as well. The film was in production while the Burma campaign was still being fought, so the recruitment drive that pushes its hero into uniform was current news rather than history for its first audiences. What survives is in poor condition: the circulating VCD runs about one hour and forty-five minutes against an original length of roughly two and a half hours, some passages have lost their soundtrack entirely, and towards the end there are stretches where the sound is intact but the picture is gone. Sadanand Kamath, who reconstructed the plot from that print, judged the story and screenplay too thin to hold and thought the film is likely to have failed commercially — a reading he offers with the explicit caveat that he was watching a mutilated copy.

Parinde is one of only two Hindi films that Acharya P. K. Atre — the Marathi playwright, poet, educationist, journalist and later politician — directed himself; the other was Dil Ki Baat (1944). Everything else that came out of his Atre Pictures banner he produced and wrote rather than directed, which makes this film part of a very short list in the career of one of twentieth-century Maharashtra's largest literary figures. It also belongs to the small wartime cycle of Hindi films that put Indians in Allied uniform on screen while the Burma campaign was still being fought, and it is unusual in pairing that with an unflattering domestic subplot about hoarding and black-marketeering — the profiteering the same war produced at home. The score carries both impulses side by side: romantic duets for the separated couple, and open patriotic-devotional appeals — 'Doobte Bharat Ko Bachao, Mere Kartaar', which is Zohrabai Ambalewali's only song in the film, and 'Bharat Desh Hamara Pyara', which HindiGeetMala files under its Patriotic Songs category.

Parinde has dropped almost entirely out of circulation as a film; what keeps it in the record is its music and its subject. Writing on Pandit Gobind Ram calls 1945 the most successful year of his career, though the films it names from that year are Chalees Karod, Hamara Sansar, Laila Majnu and Naseeb rather than Parinde. Collectors' archives have preserved seven of the eight songs as audio even though the picture itself is damaged, which is the usual fate of a 1945 programme picture: the record outlives the print. Beyond the songs, the film survives as a curiosity of Acharya Atre's short Hindi-cinema career — a major Marathi writer directing an Indian air-force romance — and as one of the few 1940s Hindi pictures to look directly at both the Burma front and the black market the war fed at home.