रामायणी

Ramayani is a 1945 Hindi film directed by Sarvottam Badami for Purnima Productions, with music by S. N. Tripathi and lyrics by Bekal. Reference works describe it as a mythological drawn from the Ramayana: the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema lists it among Badami's 1940s output, and Heidi Pauwels places it in the wave of Ramayana adaptations that followed the enormous success of Vijay Bhatt's Ram Rajya (1943) — Purnima Productions' answer to that film, titled Ramayani rather than after Rama himself. Beyond that framing, no detailed plot summary survives in any accessible source, and this entry does not invent one. What is securely recorded is the company it kept: a cast headed by the Bengali actor-singer Pahari Sanyal and the veteran character star Chandra Mohan, with a very young Nargis — only two years past her first adult lead in Taqdeer (1943) — alongside the silent-era 'dancing actress' Rose Musleah, Moni Chatterjee, Kanhaiyalal, Prabha, and the singer-actress Amirbai Karnataki. The surviving catalogue is a nine-song score issued on Columbia Records. Notably, English-language sources disagree on the film's category: Wikipedia's article calls it a Ramayana mythological, while the same site's List of Hindi films of 1945 files it under 'Social', and several of the documented song titles read as social-drama rather than devotional material. Both readings are recorded here without preferring one.

Nine songs are catalogued for Ramayani, all composed by S. N. Tripathi to lyrics by Bekal, and issued on the Columbia Records label. Per-track singer credits have largely not survived: of the nine, only two carry attributions in any accessible catalogue — 'Aise Na Hame Chhedo', credited to Pahari Sanyal with Rajkumari, and 'Mere Mann Mandir Ki Devi', credited to Hamida Banu with Pahari Sanyal. That Pahari Sanyal sings on the record is unsurprising; he was one of the last of the actor-singers of the pre-playback generation, and studios cast him as much for the voice as the face. The remaining seven titles are recorded here with empty singer arrays rather than guesses, even though Amirbai Karnataki — a leading playback voice of the mid-1940s — appears in the film's cast and may well be among them.

Sarvottam Badami had made his name at Sagar Movietone in the 1930s directing socials, and Ramayani sits late in a directing career that effectively ended in the 1940s. The casting is the most striking documented feature of the production: Pahari Sanyal came out of New Theatres in Calcutta and its actor-singer tradition; Chandra Mohan was among the most commanding presences of the period; and Rose Musleah, born in Calcutta in 1911 to a Baghdadi Jewish family, had been a star of the silent era known for dance before talkies forced her to learn Hindi from scratch. Ramayani is one of her late credits — she retired after a back injury from which she never recovered. Nargis, still in her teens, was at the very start of the career that would define the next two decades of Hindi cinema.

Ramayani belongs to the busiest stretch of S. N. Tripathi's early career: 1945 alone brought him Bachpan, Ji Haan, Adhar and Ramayani. Tripathi — Benares-born, trained in classical music at Pandit V. N. Bhatkhande's Morris College in Lucknow, and first employed in Bombay as a violinist assisting Saraswati Devi at Bombay Talkies — had been an independent composer only since Chandan (1942). Assignments like Ramayani sit at the start of the association with mythological and religious subjects that defined the rest of his career: from Homi Wadia's Shri Ram Bhakta Hanuman (1948) he both composed the score and played Hanuman on screen himself, a role he returned to in Hanuman Patal Vijay (1951).

No surviving print of Ramayani is recorded in any source consulted — Wikipedia's article on its cast member Rose Musleah states that the only one of her films known to survive is Nai Kahani (1943), and Ramayani is her last credit — so it survives chiefly as a catalogue entry — a title in the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, a row in the 1945 filmography, a nine-song list on the gramophone registers. Its interest today is threefold: as evidence of how quickly the industry moved to imitate Ram Rajya's success, as an early credit in S. N. Tripathi's long association with religious and mythological subjects, and as one of several 1945 credits for the teenaged Nargis, two years after her first leading role in Taqdeer (1943) and four before the Andaz/Barsaat breakthrough of 1949 — the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema rates this group of films only moderately successful. The lost singer credits for seven of its nine songs are a small, representative instance of how thin the documentation of mid-1940s Hindi film music has become.