कुरुक्षेत्र

Kurukshetra sets the Mahabharata inside a modern argument about what India should do with itself. Documented plot descriptions have the film open not on the epic but on a contemporary strand - a group of social workers, one of them named Suvarnarekha, campaigning against idleness and trying to build a new social order - before moving into the ancient story: the swayamvar at which Draupadi is won, the humiliation in the sabha after the dice game, and the long slide towards the war on the field of Kurukshetra. The two levels are cut against each other throughout, with lessons drawn from the Bhagavad Gita offered as answers to the problems of the present. K.L. Saigal plays Karna, the epic's great outsider - the warrior who is on the wrong side because of an accident of birth he does not learn about until too late - which is the film's most interesting piece of casting, since Saigal by 1945 was the voice of dignified defeat in Indian cinema. P.V. Narasimha Bharathi plays Krishna, D. Balasubramaniam plays Duryodhana, and Nawab Kashmiri plays Yudhishthira.

Thirteen songs of Kurukshetra are documented across the surviving catalogues; the fullest published account of the film puts its total at fourteen, so at least one number is undocumented anywhere and has not been invented here. Jameel Mazhari wrote every lyric and Pandit Ganpat Rao composed every tune. K.L. Saigal sings four solos - Aayi Hai Tu To, Kidhar Hai Tu Ae Meri Tamanna, Tu Aa Gayi and the ghazal Mohabbat Ke Gul-Haa-e-Tar Goondhta Hoon; Radharani sings three, including the Draupadi plea Bin Kaaj Aaj Maharaj Laaj Gayi Meri, which is the film's most-voted entry on Hindi Geet Mala; Kalyani Das sings one, Ae Mere Swapan Ke Waasi; Satya Choudhary sings one. Two further numbers are credited to a chorus and two carry no singer credit at all, and those four are listed here with empty singer arrays rather than with guesses. Only two masters survive in the Saregama catalogue, and neither of them is a Saigal song; the label on which the original 78s were issued is not documented. Contemporary criticism that was hostile to everything else about the film made an exception for its music.

Rameshwar Sharma directed only three films in his life, all of them for Unity Productions of Calcutta: Bhakta Kabir (1942), Kurukshetra (1945) and Vaasana (1952). The music director, Pandit Ganpat Rao, was Ganapatrao Gurav, from Ratnagiri district in Maharashtra - a first-batch disciple of Ustad Abdul Karim Khan, founder of the Kirana gharana, and for years a court musician in the princely state of Jamkhandi. He scored exactly two films, this one and Bebus (1950), and then returned to the classical concert platform; his grandson, Pt. Kaivalya Kumar Gurav, is a leading Kirana vocalist today. The lyricist Jameel Mazhari was born Syed Kazim Ali on 2 September 1904 in Bihar, took his MA from Calcutta University in 1931, worked in journalism and then in Bihar's Congress government before becoming a teacher of Urdu at Patna University, and published the collections Fikr-e-Jameel and Naqsh-e-Jameel; he died on 23 July 1979 at Patna. Kurukshetra was his only completed film as a lyricist. Two of the film's singers carry name confusions that have muddled catalogues for decades: the Radharani here is the Calcutta singer born in 1903 at Jiaganj, not the Bombay actress-singer of the same name, and the Kalyani here is Kalyani Das, the Calcutta playback singer active from 1942, not the actor-singer Kalyani Bai.

Kurukshetra is the odd film out in K.L. Saigal's last years - an offbeat mythological made in Calcutta by a director with three credits to his name, and sometimes cited as a forerunner of the art cinema that arrived two decades later because of the way it interleaves an epic with modern social argument. Its musical significance is narrower and sharper: it is one of only two films ever scored by Pandit Ganpat Rao - Ganapatrao Gurav, a Kirana gharana vocalist from the first batch of Ustad Abdul Karim Khan's disciples - and the first film assignment of the Bihar Urdu poet Jameel Mazhari, who wrote all fourteen of its songs. A serious classical musician and a serious literary poet met here near the start of the poet's brief film career; Ganpat Rao would score only one more picture, while Mazhari went on to write for four further films through 1951. The film also gave the industry Ajit, who made his screen debut in it.

The film failed. It reached Bombay only on 17 May 1946, at the New West End, and ran four weeks; Filmindia's review that July blamed the director and the story and dialogue writer Kamalkant Varma while praising Saigal and the music director. No print is known to have been restored, and the film survives mainly as a song list, a set of credits and a handful of recordings recovered by collectors. What has lasted is uneven and slightly perverse: four Saigal solos kept alive by the collector culture around a singer who died in January 1947, a Draupadi song that outlived the rest because the scene it belongs to is never forgotten, and two commercially catalogued masters that are neither of those - a Ganesha invocation by an uncredited chorus and a Satya Choudhary solo. Kurukshetra's most durable contribution to Hindi cinema turned out to be an actor: Ajit, making his first appearance on screen.