धन्ना भगत

Dhanna Bhagat is a devotional drama built on the life of the fifteenth-century Rajasthani bhakti saint Dhanna — a Jat farmer of Chauru village, near Jaipur, who is remembered as a disciple of Ramananda and whose three hymns were later admitted into the Guru Granth Sahib. Kidar Sharma's film follows the saint from a barefoot cowherd boyhood, through the tests of a peasant life lived on faith rather than prudence, to the miracle for which he is best remembered: giving away his seed grain to wandering mendicants, ploughing his fields with nothing sown in them, and finding at harvest that the earth had answered him anyway. Kamal Zamindar plays Dhanna and Kamla Chatterjee plays Munni, with the child actress Baby Mumtaz — the future Madhubala — appearing as the child Munni. As with most Ranjit Movietone devotionals of the war years, the narrative is episodic rather than dramatic: it moves from one act of trust to the next, each turning point carried by a song rather than by dialogue.

Khemchand Prakash's score runs to ten songs and is unusually evenly divided: three for Khan Mastana in a robust, open-throated male bhajan voice, four for Mohantara Talpade in the plaintive female devotional register, two children's duets for Baby Mumtaz and Master Brijlal, and one number whose singer the surviving catalogues do not name. The most musically ambitious of them is 'Suniyo O Nand Ke Kumar', set as a thumri in raag Bhairavi — a straight lift of the concert idiom into a film soundtrack which the Journal of the Indian Musicological Society (1988) later recorded. hindigeetmala credits Pandit Indra with the words of all ten songs, while listing Wali Saheb and Khawar Zaman among the film's lyricists as well; how the ten were divided between the three is not established by any source consulted here.

Kidar Sharma had begun his Bombay career at Ranjit with Arman (1942) after moving from Calcutta, and by 1945 had a run of Ranjit pictures behind him — a lyricist-turned-filmmaker who would within two years make Neel Kamal and give Raj Kapoor and Madhubala their first leading roles. Khemchand Prakash had joined Ranjit around 1940 and composed steadily for the banner across the following five years, an industrial pace that makes the restraint of this score notable. The film was advertised in The Bombay Chronicle on 1 December 1945 and reviewed within the week, placing its Bombay release in the closing weeks of the year.

The film sits at the intersection of three careers at very different stages. For Ranjit Movietone it was one more entry in the devotional line — Bhakt Surdas (1942) among them — that Chandulal Shah's studio returned to repeatedly through the 1940s. For Khemchand Prakash, in his last years at Ranjit before the run that would end with Mahal (1949), it was a chance to write in an unfashionably plain bhajan idiom rather than the ornate court style of Tansen. And for the child actress billed as Baby Mumtaz it was one of the pre-teen assignments that preceded her renaming as Madhubala in 1947 — including two songs she sang herself, at a moment when children in Hindi cinema were still routinely allowed their own voices on the soundtrack.

Contemporary opinion split sharply. Baburao Patel, writing in Filmindia in February 1946, dismissed it as "a picture which deserves to be avoided inspite of its devotional theme", finding "nothing in it to entertain nor even to provoke thought" — a verdict aimed as much at the exhausted saint-film cycle as at Kidar Sharma. The Times of India, reporting on 8 December 1945, found audiences charmed by it. Neither the film nor most of its recordings circulate today, and it survives chiefly as a footnote in two larger stories: Khemchand Prakash's Ranjit period, and the earliest screen appearances of Madhubala.