दिन रात

Din Raat is a 1945 Hindi “social” — the industry's catch-all label for contemporary domestic and romantic melodrama — produced by Navyug Chitrapat Ltd. of Poona, the company Master Vinayak joined in 1940 after his own Hans Pictures closed. It was directed by Shori Daulatavi and led by Snehprabha Pradhan and Paresh Bannerjee, with Sulochana Chatterjee, Vasant Thengdi, Feroza and Dar Kashmiri in support. Beyond that classification and that cast list, no plot summary of the film survives in any record accessible today: no print is known to exist, contemporary trade reviews of it have not been digitised, and the specialist researchers who have written about its songs have publicly appealed to readers for information about the story and the picturisation — so far without result. What does survive is the music: eight songs composed by Dada Chandekar to lyrics by Santokh Nadim, catalogued in Hindi Film Geet Kosh, of which the audio of four has resurfaced online since 2013. Those four sketch the film's emotional weather rather than its plot — a courtship duet under moonlight, a woman's reproach after being abandoned, a song welcoming the arrival of youth, and a defiant drinking song. Din Raat is therefore best understood today not as a story but as the surviving gramophone residue of one working Bombay studio's ordinary year.

Dada Chandekar's eight songs for Din Raat are set to lyrics by Santokh Nadim written in plain, singable Hindustani rather than ornate Urdu — the diction of a studio writing for the widest possible audience. The four recordings that survive are built on the light-classical and Marathi natya-sangeet vocabulary Chandekar carried from his years as a harmonium accompanist in the theatre: harmonium and tabla well forward, a small string group behind, melodies that stay in a comfortable middle register and lean on repeating the mukhda rather than on elaborate orchestral interludes. The album covers the standard emotional range of a mid-1940s social — a courtship duet, a betrayal lament, a youth song and a drinking song. The surviving transfers are of poor audio quality, which has made even the identification of the singing voices contentious.

Navyug Chitrapat Ltd. was the Poona company Master Vinayak joined in 1940, after the closure of Hans Pictures — the house he had co-founded in 1935 in partnership with Baburao Pendharkar and Pandurang Naik. Under the Navyug banner he directed Lagna Pahave Karun (1940), Amrut (1941) and Sarkari Pahune (1942). Din Raat is a product of that studio running on its house talent, of whom Dada Chandekar was the most durable: he had scored Vinayak's Marathi and Hindi pictures from Jwala (1938) and Brahmachari (1938) onward, and composed Navyug's Amrit (1941). The film's direction is frequently misattributed — Wikipedia's index of 1945 Hindi films and several databases derived from it credit Roop K. Shorey — but the film historian Arunkumar Deshmukh corrected this in a comment on Atul's Song A Day on 31 December 2013: “The Director of this film was NOT Shorey (Roop or any other), but the name is SHORI DAULATLAVI.” Hindi Film Geet Kosh itself lists the director as Shori Daulatvi, and the near-identical surname appears to be the source of the confusion.

Din Raat matters less for what it was than for where it sits. Hindi Film Geet Kosh credits the film's two leads, Snehprabha Pradhan and Paresh Bannerjee, with singing four of its eight songs themselves, while the professional playback singer Rajkumari was engaged for three more — a hybrid arrangement that captures 1945 precisely, the year in which the actor-singer inherited from the 1930s was giving way to the specialist playback voice that would dominate the 1950s. It is also one of only five Hindi films credited to Dada Chandekar, the Kolhapur-born harmonium player who spent fifteen years on the Marathi stage — part of them as a partner in Master Dinanath Mangeshkar's Balwant Sangeet Mandali — before entering films after the coming of sound, and whose Hindi output has almost entirely fallen out of circulation. Finally, the film is an instructive measure of how thin the documentary record of 1940s Bombay cinema really is: a full-length production by an established studio, with a named director, a named composer and a named cast, whose story nobody today can reconstruct.

Din Raat vanished. It has no Wikipedia article of its own — only a red link in Snehprabha Pradhan's filmography — no print is known to be in circulation, and for most of the last eighty years its only trace was a page of song titles in Hindi Film Geet Kosh. Between 2013 and 2025 the audio of four of its eight songs surfaced on the internet and was documented one at a time on Atul's Song A Day — where the blogger noted that one of them had gathered a single 'like' in six years online. Even the catalogue entry has proved unstable: listeners comparing the recordings against HFGK's credits argue that at least one song attributed to the film's two leads is unmistakably a Rajkumari solo, which means the standard reference work is wrong about a film almost nobody has heard. What Din Raat finally offers is a precise small measure of loss — a complete 1945 studio production reduced to half an album of scratchy audio and a disputed line of credits.