वीर कुणाल

Veer Kunal, also released as Son of Ashoka, retells the persistent folk legend of Kunal, the favourite son of the Mauryan emperor Ashok. Kunal's mother Asandhimitra is dead and the grieving emperor eventually marries Tishyarakshita, the young daughter of a chieftain, against the advice of his prime minister Somdev. Tishyarakshita becomes obsessed with Kunal — the film makes his eyes the object of that obsession and the visual spine of the whole picture — and when he refuses her she has him falsely accused of murder, imprisoned and blinded. His other stepmother Kuruvaki, who has raised him with real affection, helps him escape; the townspeople of Pataliputra rally behind the blinded prince and march with him to the palace gates. Ashok, ill and long deceived, finally convenes a durbar, hears the whole story, and delivers judgment against his own wife — the impartial justice that the legend exists to celebrate.

The film carried exactly four songs, composed by Khan Mastana — himself one of the busiest singer-composers of the mid-1940s — to lyrics by three different writers: Neelkanth Tiwari (two songs), Pandit Madhur (one) and Ambikesh Kuntal (one). No singer credits survive for any of the four. Neither the Hindi Film Geet Kosh-derived catalogues (MySwar/BollySwar, Hindi Geet Mala) nor Wikipedia nor the contemporary Filmindia review and the producer's own trade advertisements name a playback voice, and no commercial recording is known to circulate today. Rather than guess, this catalogue leaves every singer field empty. Hindi Geet Mala differs from the other sources on one point, listing Pandit Madhur as composer as well as lyricist of 'Veena Aisa Raag Suna De'; MySwar, Wikipedia and Filmindia all give the whole score to Khan Mastana, and that attribution is followed here.

Veer Kunal was a one-man production in an unusually literal sense: Kishore Sahu produced it, directed it, wrote the story and screenplay, designed the costumes and art, and played Kunal himself. He also took a first-time cameraman, Chandu, whose steady shots Filmindia praised while noting that the pans and trolley moves defeated him; sound was recorded by Narasimh Bendodkar and the film was cut by Kantilal B. Shukla. Sahu's structural idea was to introduce Kunal only through his eyes, holding the rest of him out of the frame and in darkness, so that the blinding late in the film would land as the destruction of something the audience had known first and best — a use of a thematic symbol that Baburao Patel thought better handled here than in a contemporaneous V. Shantaram picture built on the same motif. The blinding scene was staged with enough realism that Patel reported women in the audience screaming. Around the legend Sahu also wove a layer of contemporary political argument in favour of democracy, which is why the picture was described in the trade as more for intellectuals than for the masses.

Veer Kunal is remembered less for its story, which had already been filmed twice in Hindi, than for what Kishore Sahu did with its music. In an industry where the number of songs was a commercial instrument, Sahu put only four songs in the picture, and by the reckoning of Filmindia's Baburao Patel three of those four were mood-and-theme songs written to carry the emotional weight of a situation rather than to entertain on their own account. Patel called it the first time since Indian talkies began that a producer had used so little music and kept so much of it in harmony with the spirit of the scenes — an early, explicit argument for the song as dramatic device rather than as attraction. The film is also the picture in which Shobhana Samarth, typed for a decade in the goddess-and-good-wife roles of Seeta, Damayanti and Taramati, was cast as the predatory Tishyarakshita, and it was widely judged the best performance of her career.

The premiere at Bombay's Novelty Talkies on 1 December 1945 was inaugurated by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel — only the second time he had lent his presence to a film, after Ranjit's Achhut — and Sahu used the platform to attack foreign competition in Indian production, distribution and exhibition, drawing from Patel a public statement on Congress's industrial policy for a free India. The reviews were strong: the Bombay Chronicle for its sets and costumes, the Sunday Standard calling it the greatest picture of the year, the Times of India praising the direction, acting and photography, and Filmindia rating the film's second half as genuinely gripping while faulting its uneven production values, unrelieved seriousness and, in places, morbidity. It ran well at the Novelty and was reported a box-office success. It was the third Hindi film on the Kunal legend, after Manilal Joshi's silent Veer Kunal (1925) and the M.D. Bhavnani and G.S. Devare talkie of 1932, and it followed the Tamil Ashok Kumar (1941) with M.K. Thyagaraja Bhagavathar. Of its four songs nothing but the titles and the writing credits now survives — a sharp irony for the film that argued a Hindi picture could get by on almost no music at all.