नाम बदला, नाम छुपाया: सरस्वती देवी और बॉम्बे टॉकीज़ की ध्वनि का अदृश्य ढाँचा

She changed her name because she had to. Khurshid Minocher-Homji — daughter of an affluent Parsi family in Bombay, trained classical musician, destined by birth for a life entirely away from public stages — became Saraswati Devi when she joined Bombay Talkies.

She changed her name because she had to. Khurshid (Khorshed) Minocher-Homji — daughter of an affluent Parsi family in Bombay, trained classical musician, destined by birth for a life entirely away from public stages — became Saraswati Devi when she joined Bombay Talkies. The name change was practical: no Parsi family of standing in the 1930s would permit a daughter's name to appear on cinema publicity. But the change was also a kind of erasure: the woman who composed 'Main Ban Ki Chidiya' and much else in Bombay Talkies' first decade could not be herself while she worked.

Her classical training was Hindustani and serious: she studied under Pandit Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande, and later at Marris College (now the Bhatkhande Music Institute) in Lucknow. When Himanshu Rai and Devika Rani heard her play and sing, she was hired. The Bombay Talkies sound that emerged — and that Achhut Kanya (1936) exemplified — owed much to her: raga scales and emotional structures under folk-simple melodies, so that the songs worked on multiple levels simultaneously.

The Parsi pushback, when it came, came from within the community rather than from outside. Parsi opinion of the period was split: some held that Zoroastrian women working in film was improper. Khurshid and her younger sister Manek (on screen, 'Chandraprabha') — both of whom joined Bombay Talkies — faced this resistance, and it was for this reason that Himanshu Rai gave them the names 'Saraswati Devi' and 'Chandraprabha'. Her sisters knew. Her parents eventually knew. The wider community discovered gradually, through the evidence of her credited name on cinema programmes — a Parsi name hidden behind a Sanskrit one.

By 1937 she had composed for roughly ten Bombay Talkies productions — beginning with Jawani Ki Hawa (1935), through Achhut Kanya, Janmabhoomi and Jeevan Naiya (1936), to Izzat, Jeevan Prabhat, Prem Kahani and Savitri (1937). The studio publicity credited 'Saraswati Devi' — a name that read as straightforwardly Hindu, obscuring the Parsi classical musician behind it. She was paid by Bombay Talkies on contract — the studio-employment system that Himanshu Rai drew from his UFA experience.

What did it mean to compose under a false name in a medium that was itself false — moving pictures of people who were playing characters? In the 1930s, Hindi cinema was an industry of manufactured identities. Stage names, character names, studio names: the whole apparatus ran on the distance between the person and the persona. Saraswati Devi worked inside this machinery with particular skill. Her scores were often the most authentic thing in the films they accompanied: raga-based, folk-rooted, precise in their emotional architecture. The music told the truth that the names concealed.

Himanshu Rai's death in 1940 and the studio's reorganisation did not end her work: some of her most successful films — Jhoola and Naya Sansar (1941) — came in this very period. She went on to compose for other studios and remained active in film music into the mid-1950s. Yet her name — either name — is rarely spoken today in discussions of early Hindi film music. Many male composers of her era are remembered. She became a footnote. This is the record that needs correcting.