प्रतिमा

Pratima is a Hindi social drama produced by Bombay Talkies and released on 14 December 1945. It was the directorial debut of Paidi Jairaj, until then known chiefly as a leading man in stunt, historical and social pictures, and only the second screen appearance of the young Dilip Kumar — the actor whom Devika Rani had renamed and launched the previous year in Jwar Bhata (1944); he is credited in the role of Rajan. Opposite him was Swaran Lata, cast on the strength of her success in Rattan (1944), with Jyoti, Mumtaz Ali, Shah Nawaz, Cuckoo and the comedian Mukri — making his screen debut — in support. The story, screenplay and dialogue were written by the Hindi novelist Bhagwati Charan Verma. No detailed plot summary of Pratima survives in the accessible record: the Hindi Film Geet Kosh preserves the credits, the censor certificate and the full eight-item music list, but not the narrative, and this entry deliberately leaves the story blank rather than reconstruct it. What is firmly documented is the film's place in the history of its studio — it belongs to the last months of Devika Rani's stewardship of Bombay Talkies, the year in which she married the painter Svetoslav Roerich, sold her shares in the company and left the film industry altogether.

The Hindi Film Geet Kosh lists eight items of music for Pratima — seven songs plus the title music — all seven songs written by Pandit Narendra Sharma and composed by Arun Kumar (Arun Kumar Mukherjee). The voices are spread more widely than the online databases suggest. HFGK gives two songs to the actress-singer Jyoti, including 'Tum Pyaas Bujhana Bhool Gaye', the best-remembered piece of the score; Parul Ghosh takes the moonrise song 'Chand Uga Re' alone and joins a three-voice dawn number, 'Jaago Hua Savera Re', with Arun Kumar and C. Ramchandra; Arun Kumar himself fronts 'Roopnagar Ki Chhori Aayi' with unnamed others; Naseem Akhtar sings the dance number 'Ye Gafil Jawani'; and M. V. Mukherjee is credited with 'Yahi Thi Kahan Gayi'. Hindigeetmala and MySwar instead attribute four of the seven to Parul Ghosh and leave two uncredited; where the two disagree with HFGK this entry follows HFGK and records the clash. Ram Singh is credited as assistant music director. Sharma's lyrics move between a plain, songlike Hindi and a more Persianised register of longing — the same range that would mark his writing for the next four decades.

Mukri and Dilip Kumar were school friends at Bombay's Anjuman-I-Islam High School, where Dilip Kumar was a year senior; Pratima was Mukri's first film, and the Wikipedia article on it adds that Devika Rani, involved in the casting, liked his smile and his off-screen enthusiasm. He built a fifty-year career in Hindi film comedy out of exactly that quality. Swaran Lata came to the film after Rattan (1944), which had briefly made her one of the most bankable names in Bombay. Arun Kumar Mukherjee belonged to the extended family that ran the studio's creative side: a cousin of Ashok Kumar and Kishore Kumar and of the producer Sashadhar Mukherjee, he had rendered playback for Bombay Talkies in Bandhan (1940), Basant (1942), Kismet (1943), Hamari Baat (1943) and Jwar Bhata (1944) before taking the composer's chair here. P. Jairaj, born at Sircilla in the erstwhile Hyderabad State and in Bombay since 1929 — he had made his acting debut that year in a silent film — directed for the first time on this picture and afterwards returned largely to acting. HFGK names M. I. Dharamsey as producer, a credit MySwar also carries, and records the censor certificate as Bombay/31962, twelve reels and 121 minutes, dated 19 July 1945.

Pratima matters less for what it was than for who was in it. It is Dilip Kumar's second film, made while he was still an untested contract player at Bombay Talkies and two years away from the breakthrough of Jugnu (1947). It is the screen debut of Mukri, who would go on to be a fixture of Hindi film comedy for five decades. It carries Arun Kumar Mukherjee — a Bombay Talkies playback voice since Bandhan (1940) — as music director rather than as a singer, though HFGK also credits him as a vocalist on two of its own songs. And it stands at a hinge in studio history: made under Devika Rani in the very year she left the industry, it sits on the boundary between the Bombay Talkies that had produced Achhut Kanya (1936) and Kismet (1943), and the weakened studio of the post-1945 years that went out of business in 1953.

Pratima did not succeed. Dilip Kumar's debut had gone unnoticed and, in the standard account of his career, two more unsuccessful pictures followed before Jugnu (1947) gave him his first real hit; Pratima is one of those two, the other being Milan (1946). The film itself is effectively out of circulation, and what survives of it is the documentation of its soundtrack, of which 'Tum Pyaas Bujhana Bhool Gaye' is the only title to have drawn any measurable listener response online — it carries hindigeetmala's highest rating for the film, from four votes. For Arun Kumar Mukherjee the film opened a second career as a composer that ran on to Hatimtai (1947), Parineeta (1953), Shamsheer (1953), Samaj (1954) and Teen Bhai (1955), cut short by a fatal heart attack on 6 December 1955.