नारी

A Bombay-made social drama of 1942 produced by Venus Pictures and directed by Raja Yagnik, the film pairs Trilok Kapoor with Lalita Pawar in a domestic melodrama of the kind that dominated the early-1940s social genre. As its title 'Nari' (Woman) signals, the story centres on the place and trials of a woman within the family, its conflicts resolved through the era's familiar moral arithmetic and carried by an eight-song score from Harishchandra Bali.

Harishchandra Bali scored eight songs for Nari, with the playback carried largely by Lalita Parulkar, joined on a duet by the male singer Majumdar. The lyrics were written by Basheer Jamali and Pandit Phani. The songs sit in the melody-and-harmonium idiom of early-1940s Bombay social cinema, far from the Punjabi-folk revolution then breaking out of Lahore.

Nari belongs to the busy wave of Bombay social dramas of 1942 and is chiefly of interest today for its Harishchandra Bali soundtrack and for an early screen presence of Lalita Pawar, then a leading lady years before her career-defining turn to character roles. It is an obscure title whose songs survive on gramophone-era catalogues more durably than the film itself.