चाँद तारा

Chand Tara is a 1945 Hindi feature directed by Mahesh Chandra, with Swarnalata top-billed alongside Jagdish Sethi, Noor Mohammed Charlie, Pesi Patel, Kesari, Ghory and Indira. Contemporary listings place it in the 'social' category — the catch-all label that in 1940s Bombay covered domestic drama, romance and light comedy set in present-day India rather than in myth, history or costume fantasy. No plot summary of the film survives in the reference sources available today, and the picture itself is not known to be in circulation; what has come down intact is its soundtrack — ten songs composed by Gyan Dutt to lyrics by Swami Ramanand Saraswati, preserved through gramophone catalogue listings and the standard Hindi film song registers. The song titles themselves sketch the film's emotional range: an anklet-and-rhythm dance number, a bleak line on life as deception, a farewell addressed to someone departing for foreign parts, a monsoon song, and a mock-courtly comic duet that drops an English endearment into an Urdu construction. Amirbai Karnataki sings on eight of the ten numbers and Noor Mohammed Charlie on five, which together point to the mixed romantic-and-comic register typical of a picture built around India's first star comedian.

The score is unusually concentrated: a single composer, a single lyricist and effectively two voices across all ten songs. Amirbai Karnataki takes five solos and shares three duets; Noor Mohammed Charlie takes two solos and the same three duets. Gyan Dutt came to Chand Tara after an intensive spell at Ranjit Movietone — eleven films for the studio between 1938 and 1939, with the association running until 1940 — and after the biggest success of his career, Bhakt Surdas (1942). No recording of Chand Tara circulates, so nothing can be said about its arrangements; what the surviving record gives is the shape of the list — a payaliya rhythm song, a monsoon song, a farewell, and comic numbers for Charlie. Swami Ramanand Saraswati wrote all ten songs, a complete assignment within a documented filmography that runs from Aabroo and Rekha (1943) through Badi Baat (1944), Tadbir (1945) and Sohni Mahiwal (1946) to Parda (1949).

Very little production detail has survived. Gyan Dutt was born Janan Dutt to a Bengali family in Bangalore and adopted the name 'Gyan' on the advice of friends who thought his birth name sounded too rustic; he debuted with Toofani Toli (1937) for Ranjit Movietone, and scored eleven films for the studio between 1938 and 1939. Noor Mohammed Charlie, born near Porbandar in 1911, had joined the Imperial Film Company in 1925 at forty rupees a month specifically to sing, and took his screen name from Charlie Chaplin after the success of The Indian Charlie (1933) — which is why, unlike most comic actors of the 1940s, he did not need a playback singer. Swami Ramanand Saraswati's lyrics for Chand Tara sit in the same year as his work on Tadbir (1945), whose songs were sung by K.L. Saigal.

Chand Tara matters less as a film — no print circulates and no synopsis survives — than as a well-documented data point about how mid-1940s Bombay used its comedians and its playback voices. Noor Mohammed Charlie is credited as the first comic actor in Indian cinema to have songs picturised on him, and here he carries five of the ten numbers in his own voice, including two solos, at a moment when the industry was already moving toward specialist playback singers who never appeared on screen. Opposite him, Amirbai Karnataki sings on eight of the ten songs — very nearly a complete album for a single female voice, which was how Bombay's leading female playback singers were being used in the years just before Lata Mangeshkar reset the field. For Gyan Dutt — a composer who had recorded K.L. Saigal and whose favourite singer was Khursheed — this is one of at least two 1945 releases (the other being Chhamia), and it shows him working outside the devotional idiom of his biggest hit, Bhakt Surdas (1942).

The film left almost no afterlife of its own. It is not revived, not written about in the standard retrospectives, and its songs did not enter the popular gramophone repertoire the way Rattan (1944) or Zeenat (1945) did in the same period. What Chand Tara does preserve is a complete, cleanly attributed ten-song list for an otherwise vanished picture — the kind of record that makes it possible to reconstruct a composer's working year and a singer's workload. Two years after its release Noor Mohammed Charlie left for Pakistan following Partition, which closed the Bombay half of a career that Chand Tara belongs to; Amirbai Karnataki, whose credited career runs to 1961 and who turned increasingly to acting after 1947, died in 1965; Gyan Dutt worked on until Janam Janam Ke Saathi (1965).