कर्मा की देवी

The 1933 Indo-British film Karma — produced by Himanshu Rai and starring Devika Rani — gave Indian cinema its first English-language song ('Now the Moon Her Light Has Shed'), surprised London audiences, and announced the creative partnership that would become Bombay Talkies (1934) the following year.

Himanshu Rai was born in 1892 into an aristocratic family in Cuttack — he read law in Kolkata, then went to London to become a barrister, but art outran the courts. In the 1920s he made three silent films with German director Franz Osten — The Light of Asia (1925), Shiraz (1928) and A Throw of Dice (1929) — which remain among the precious few Indian-made silents to survive. During the post-production of these films in Berlin he met an extraordinary young woman: trained at RADA and the Royal Academy of Music in London, daughter of India's first Indian Surgeon-General, and through her paternal line a great-grandniece of Rabindranath Tagore — Devika Rani Chaudhuri, born 30 March 1908 in Visakhapatnam. They married in 1929.

The film Himanshu Rai made in 1933 was a bold experiment. Karma — directed by J.L. Freer Hunt, music by Ernst Broadhurst — was shot in India and completed at Stoll Studios in London. It was a bilingual production: released in English as Karma and later in Hindi as Naagan Ki Raagini. The film premiered in London in May 1933, where British critics praised Devika Rani's performance. But the film's most enduring distinction is a song — 'Now the Moon Her Light Has Shed', sung by Devika Rani; it was the first English-language song in an Indian-produced film. A princess sings for her beloved — and Devika Rani's English diction and musical training astonished London audiences.

Karma is also remembered for the on-screen kiss between Devika Rani and Himanshu Rai — a couple in real life. In India the scene caused controversy in an orthodox social climate, but the film had been conceived primarily for international audiences, and the Hindi version found little success at home. Just one year after Karma, on 22 June 1934, Himanshu Rai and Devika Rani founded Bombay Talkies — the most modern and well-equipped film studio in India at the time, which would go on to launch careers including those of Ashok Kumar, Leela Chitnis and Dilip Kumar. Devika Rani, who in 1969 became the first-ever recipient of the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, came to be called the First Lady of Indian Cinema — and that journey had begun with a line in English, sung in 1933, for a London premiere.