छमिया

Chhamia is a 1945 Hindi social comedy adapted from George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. The title itself does the work of introduction: chhamiya is colloquial Hindustani for a forward, showily dressed young woman of the streets, and it names the film's Eliza Doolittle figure — the loud, unpolished girl who is taken up by her social betters and remade in the speech and manners of drawing-room society. Begum Para, only a year past her debut in Chand (1944), played the lead; Protima Dasgupta, who directed and produced the picture and also appeared in it, cast around her a company of Bombay's most reliable character players, including the comedian David, the dancer Azurie, and Dixit. Detailed plot summaries have not survived in accessible catalogues — the film itself is not in circulation — so what is documented is the frame rather than the incident: a Shaw comedy of class, accent and self-invention, played in Hindustani and set to eleven songs by Gyan Dutt. The song titles preserved in the gramophone catalogues are themselves consistent with that frame, running from a street-hawker's cry ('Mera Chana Masaledaar') and a teasing address to a hat-wearing sahib ('O Topi Wale Babu') to an Urdu ghazal of interior torment ('Vehshat Mein Apne Haathon Mushkil Ko Dhoondhte Hain') — the full social distance the Pygmalion story travels.

Gyan Dutt wrote eleven songs for Chhamia to lyrics by Pandit Indra and Kabil Amritsari. By 1945 Dutt was a decade into a career built at Ranjit Movietone, where he had been the house composer since Toofani Toli (1937) and had scored the enormous devotional hit Bhakt Surdas (1942); working outside the studio system for an independent producer was a departure for him. The score as catalogued is stylistically wide: a bhajan-register plea ('Tum Bin Kaun Sahayi'), a Braj-inflected Holi-flavoured number ('Gulab Chhadi Maar Gayo'), a Punjabi-folk reunion duet ('Pardesi Dhola Aaj Milenge'), a comic street-vendor song for G.M. Durrani ('Mera Chana Masaledaar'), and at least one full Urdu ghazal. The voices documented on the discs are Zohrabai Ambalewali, Amirbai Karnataki, G.M. Durrani, Shyam Kumar and — in the BollySwar compendium — Parul Ghosh; the catalogues do not attribute every one of the eleven titles to a named singer, and this entry leaves those unattributed rather than guessing.

Protima Dasgupta and Begum Para were family: Para's elder brother had gone to Bombay in the late 1930s to act, met Dasgupta and married her, and Para's own entry into films came through visiting the couple and being drawn into her sister-in-law's world. Chhamia was made by the two of them together — Para as the star, Dasgupta directing, producing and acting — which makes it one of the few Hindi films of the decade whose above-the-line control sat almost entirely with two women. The production company is recorded as P.D.G. Pictures; the initials appear to be Dasgupta's own (Protima Das Gupta), though no source consulted states this.

Chhamia's importance is structural rather than musical: it is a commercially successful mainstream Hindi film of 1945 written, produced and directed by a woman, at a moment when the number of women directing Hindi features could be counted on one hand. Protima Dasgupta — educated at Rabindranath Tagore's Santiniketan, who had debuted on screen in the Bengali Gora (1938) and crossed to Hindi with Raj Nartaki — turned film-maker with this picture and set it up under her own banner rather than seeking a studio's patronage. That she chose Pygmalion for her debut is itself telling: a comedy about a woman's speech being confiscated and rebuilt by men, made by one of the very few women then in a position to control how a woman's story was told on a Hindi screen. The film starred Begum Para, whose sister-in-law Dasgupta was, and followed her 1944 debut Chand; it was, like Chand, a commercial success. The English Wikipedia article on Para adds that despite signing many films after Chhamia she "couldn't quite establish herself as an actress" and was largely cast as a glamour figure, so this entry makes no claim that Chhamia launched a career of leading roles.

Chhamia was a commercial success and remained the high point of Protima Dasgupta's brief career behind the camera. She directed twice more — Jharna (1948) and Pagle (1950), the latter again with Begum Para — and then left film-making; the circumstances of her departure are not documented in any source available here. Chhamia itself is not in circulation today, and the soundtrack survives chiefly as catalogue listings and a handful of 78-rpm discs rather than as living repertoire. What endures is the fact of it: a hit Hindi film of 1945 that a woman wrote her own name across as producer, director and player.