परदेसी

A Ranjit Movietone social drama of 1941 directed by Chaturbhuj Doshi, starring Motilal opposite the singing star Khursheed alongside Snehprabha Pradhan and E. Billimoria. Like much of Ranjit's output of the period, it is built around domestic and romantic situations that carry a fifteen-song score by Khemchand Prakash, with the songs — rather than the plot — being the element that survives in collective memory.

The film carries fifteen songs composed by Khemchand Prakash to lyrics by D.N. Madhok and P.L. Santoshi. The vocal weight is carried by Khursheed (solos and duets), Snehprabha Pradhan and Kantilal, with Brujmala and Keshri appearing on a comic number. The songs run the gamut of Ranjit's domestic-musical idiom — nanad-bhabhi teasing duets, viraha (separation) laments, and light romantic pieces.

Ranjit Movietone, run by Chandulal Shah, was among Bombay's most prolific studios of the 1930s and 1940s, and Khemchand Prakash was one of its house composers in this stretch. Khursheed, paired here with Motilal, was at this point one of the studio's biggest singing-actress draws — a few years before her landmark Tansen (1943) with K.L. Saigal.

Pardesi is one of the films from Khemchand Prakash's prolific Ranjit Movietone phase of the early 1940s, a period in which the composer worked closely with the lyricists D.N. Madhok and P.L. Santoshi and with Ranjit's resident singing star Khursheed. It belongs to the body of work that established Khemchand Prakash as a leading film composer in the years before his celebrated Mahal (1949).

Pardesi survives today chiefly through its gramophone records and the documentation of song databases rather than as a viewable film. It is valued as part of the early discography of Khemchand Prakash and of the singing star Khursheed, both central figures of 1940s Hindi film music.