बदला है ज़माना

The first of two duets in the film for Amirbai Karnataki and G. M. Durrani, and the second-highest-rated of its surviving titles. 'Badla hai zamana' — the age has changed, the times have turned — is a declarative rather than a romantic opening, and in a picture about the overthrow of one dynasty by another it does double duty as plot commentary and as sentiment.

Amirbai Karnataki and G. M. Durrani were among the most heavily recorded voices of the war years, and their pairing was a standard commercial combination of 1944-46: her Karnataka-trained, slightly nasal projection against his soft, Urdu-diction tenor. For a mid-tempo declarative duet, C. Ramchandra's practice at this stage was an alternating line structure over a steady rhythm, the two voices meeting on the refrain — the arrangement that let a 78-rpm side deliver a statement rather than a mood.

'Zamana' is one of the load-bearing words of Urdu-Hindi film lyric: it means the age, the world, the times, and by extension the people who enforce their rules — the collective antagonist of a thousand film songs. To say that the zamana has changed is either a complaint or a threat depending on who is speaking, and in a historical about a low-born prince destroying an entrenched dynasty it can be heard as both. Madhur is working in the aphoristic mode here rather than the amorous one, and that mode is what allowed a costume picture in 1945 to sound contemporary without saying anything the censor could name.

Samrat Chandragupta (1945) was produced and directed by Jayant Desai for Jayant Desai Productions, the Bombay banner he founded in 1943 after fourteen years at Ranjit Studios. It is a large-scale historical about Chandragupta Maurya, founder of the Mauryan empire, built around the legend of his break with Alexander's Macedonians and his marriage to the daughter of the Greek general Seleucus Nicator. Ishwarlal, Renuka Devi, Suraiya, Nayampalli, Sulochana Chatterjee and Mubarak headed the cast; the screenplay was by Mohanlal G. Dave, Shaheed Latif and Sagar Hussain, and Dronacharya photographed it. C. Ramchandra — signing himself Chitalkar Ramchandra at this stage of his career — composed all ten documented songs to lyrics by Buddhi Chandra Agrawal 'Madhur', two years before Shehnai (1947) made him a household name.

Both singers' careers were shortly reshaped by Partition and by the arrival of Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammed Rafi: Amirbai Karnataki, one of the biggest playback names of the early 1940s, was largely displaced by the end of the decade, and G. M. Durrani — the singer Rafi himself named as his model — faded from leading work in the early 1950s. Duets like this one document the sound of Hindi film playback in the last full year before that turnover began.