मेघदूत

Meghdoot is Debaki Bose's screen version of Kalidasa's Sanskrit lyric Meghadutam, the poem in which a yaksha banished from the celestial city of Alaka to a hill hermitage in central India stops a monsoon cloud drifting northward and asks it to carry a message of longing to the wife he has been separated from. Bose, who had spent the previous decade turning Bengali devotional and literary material into talkies at New Theatres, built the film as a costume drama around that single conceit of separation, casting Shahu Modak and Leela Desai in the leads with Kusum Deshpande, Wasti, Hari Shivdasani, Agha, Madhukar Gupte, Nimbalkar and Biman Banerjee in support. Kirti Pictures released it in Bombay in October 1945. No print is known to be in circulation and contemporary trade documentation of the production is thin, so exactly how Bose expanded a short courtly poem into a feature-length narrative is not reliably recorded. What has survived intact is Kamal Dasgupta's eleven-song score, which carries the film's central emotional argument — viraha, love measured by distance — more completely than any surviving plot summary does.

Eleven songs are documented for Meghdoot, all composed by Kamal Dasgupta, with Faiyyaz Hashmi, Gauddas and Pandit Narottam Vyas credited as the film's lyricists as a group rather than song by song. Song-level lyric attribution survives for only three numbers, all to Faiyyaz Hashmi. Playback credits are similarly incomplete: Jagmohan Sursagar is documented on three songs, Kalyani Das joining him on two of them, and the singers of the remaining seven are simply not recorded in any catalogue available to us — so those credit arrays are left empty here rather than filled with guesses. Stylistically the score is Dasgupta's Calcutta light-music idiom — geet and ghazal melody, the voice carried well forward of a small, unhurried accompaniment — rather than the folk-and-orchestra manner then dominant in Bombay. Saregama's ten-track digital reissue muddies the record further by crediting several tracks to character names (Yaksh, Priya, Madhumukhi) instead of singers, and by omitting 'Kaahe Nahin Aaye' entirely.

By 1945 Debaki Bose had left the New Theatres system that made him and set up his own banner, Debaki Productions — but Meghdoot was made for Kirti Pictures, one of the smaller Bombay houses of the war years, and is usually listed among his Bombay-period assignments rather than his own productions. Kamal Dasgupta was at his commercial peak in the same years, so prolific inside HMV Calcutta that he is credited with something approaching eight thousand compositions across Hindi, Bengali and Tamil, film and non-film; Meghdoot was one of the few times a Bombay production drew him out of that studio. The male lead, Shahu Modak, was by then an unusual kind of star — a Marathi Christian actor who had been playing Krishna on screen since he was fourteen, and who sang two songs himself in Bharat Milap (1942) — while Leela Desai had come to Hindi cinema from New Theatres, where her training as a classical dancer had been the basis of her screen presence.

Meghdoot is one of the very few attempts Hindi cinema has ever made on Kalidasa, and it came from the director best equipped to try: Debaki Bose, whose Chandidas (1932) introduced background music to the Indian talkie and whose Seeta (1934) became the first Indian sound film shown at an international festival, winning an honorary diploma at Venice. It is also one of Kamal Dasgupta's rare Hindi film assignments — he spent most of his career inside HMV's Calcutta studio, where he built the modern Bengali song and the Hindi non-film geet — and the score's poise owes far more to that recording-studio tradition than to the Bombay filmi mainstream of 1945. Its best-remembered number is Jagmohan Sursagar's solo 'O Varsha Ke Pehle Baadal', which his Wikipedia entry calls the most notable of the many film and non-film songs he sang for Kamal Dasgupta.

The film itself has effectively vanished from view — no circulating print, no restoration, almost no critical literature — but its score has outlived it. 'O Varsha Ke Pehle Baadal' is still the number the film is remembered by, and the same combination kept working: MySwar's listing for Zamin Asman (1946) has Kamal Dasgupta composing and Faiyyaz Hashmi writing for Jagmohan and Kalyani Das again the following year. Saregama reissued the soundtrack digitally in 2017, which is why a Kalidasa adaptation nobody can watch is still, in an odd way, listenable. Jagmohan Sursagar received the Padma Shri in 1999; Kamal Dasgupta, who died in 1974 after moving to Dhaka, is a standing example of how completely a composer's credit could be erased from the records he made.