सावन

Sawan is a Hindi 'social' — the 1940s trade term for a contemporary-set drama built around family, money and moral choice rather than myth or costume history — produced by Sanjivan Art Productions of Bombay and directed by Dwarka Khosla. It brought together two very different kinds of star: Motilal, the most naturalistic leading man of the decade, whose underplayed conversational manner set him apart from the declamatory style around him, and Shanta Apte, the Prabhat-trained singing actress who by 1945 was working outside the studio system that had made her famous. Sushil Sahu, Chandraprabha, Kayam Ali and Pratima Devi complete the credited cast. Beyond these credits no plot summary of Sawan survives in any reference work or archive accessible today — the picture left almost no trace in the indexed trade press, and its story is simply not on record, so none is reconstructed here. What does survive is the soundtrack. The Hindi Film Geet Kosh records eleven songs for the film; hindigeetmala.net and myswar.co catalogue nine, all composed by C. Ramchandra to lyrics by I. C. Kapoor, and myswar gives the label as Regal Records. Their titles alone sketch the film's emotional map — a Raksha Bandhan song, a woman calling down from a high terrace, a bitter address to people who laugh at the poor, and a summons to the women of India to wake.

Nine songs are catalogued for Sawan by hindigeetmala.net and myswar.co, all composed by C. Ramchandra to lyrics by I. C. Kapoor; the Hindi Film Geet Kosh lists eleven. MySwar gives the label as Regal Records. Singer credits survive for three songs: 'Barkha Ki Rut Hai' is credited by the Geet Kosh to C. Ramchandra, Kusum Mantri and Hamida Banu with unnamed others, 'Mori Oonchi Atariya Pe' is listed as an Amirbai Karnataki solo, and 'Hanso Garibo Pe' as a duet by Hamida Banu and Khan Mastana. For the remaining six the catalogues preserve title, composer and lyricist but not the voice, and no singer has been attributed here rather than guessed — the fields are left deliberately empty. The titles cover an unusually wide emotional range for a single score: a Raksha Bandhan song in 'Barkha Ki Rut Hai', flirtation in 'Naino Se Naina Milao Ji' and 'Itna Bhi Humse Na Sharmaiyega', consolation in 'Khwaab Ki Duniya', social protest in 'Hanso Garibo Pe' and a reformist address to Indian womanhood in 'Jago Bharat Ki Ramani'.

C. Ramchandra used at least four professional signatures in this period — C. Ramchandra, Ram Chitalkar, Annasaheb, and R. N. Chitalkar for the Marathi films in which he sang and acted — and the Sawan records are credited to 'Chitalkar Ramchandra'. He had arrived at composition sideways: bit parts at Minerva Movietone in the late 1930s, then work as harmonium accompanist to the Minerva composers Bundu Khan and Habib Khan, then a debut as music director in Tamil cinema before Master Bhagwan handed him Sukhi Jeevan. The voices documented for Sawan were all fixtures of mid-1940s Bombay recording: Amirbai Karnataki, then among the most-recorded female singers in the industry; Hamida Banu; Kusum Mantri; Khan Mastana, who worked as a composer as well as a singer; and Ramchandra himself, who recorded playback as Chitalkar. The Geet Kosh entry adds two production facts that no other source carries: the film was produced by Madhav Kale for Sanjivan Art Productions, its screenplay was written by Amrit Lal Nagar, and it passed the Bombay censor on 23 April 1945 at 10,900 feet over fourteen reels — a running time of just over two hours.

Sawan matters chiefly as a document of C. Ramchandra's formative years. In 1945 he was three years past the breakthrough Master Bhagwan had given him with Sukhi Jeevan (1942) and still two years short of Shehnai (1947), the Filmistan production that became the fifth highest-grossing Indian film of its year; he was also still signing his work under several identities, and hindigeetmala.net catalogues this film's composer as 'Chitalkar Ramchandra' rather than the 'C. Ramchandra' used by the Geet Kosh and myswar and by which he is remembered. The film is likewise one of the small handful of Hindi pictures Shanta Apte made in the mid-1940s after her Prabhat years, a period in which the industry's most famously independent-minded female star chose her work film by film rather than under contract. It also adds an early credit to the filmography of the lyricist I. C. Kapoor, whose better-documented work came later and largely alongside the composer Pandit Govindram. Finally, its song list is unusually broad for one 1945 score — romance, consolation, a Raksha Bandhan song, social anger and a reformist address to women — which is itself a useful sample of what a mid-1940s Bombay 'social' was expected to contain.

Sawan today is a catalogue entry rather than a film. No print or plot summary is accessible, its songs are absent from the streaming and video platforms that have revived so much other 1940s music, and it survives chiefly in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh-derived song listings that specialist databases maintain. Its value now is as a fixed point in two careers: it places C. Ramchandra in Bombay in 1945, still working outside the Filmistan orbit that would soon absorb him, and it records Shanta Apte still on Hindi screens nearly a decade after Duniya Na Mane. For the wider history of the period it is a useful reminder of how much of 1940s Hindi cinema is now known only through its gramophone records — the film gone, the song titles preserved.