वसीयतनामा

Wasiyatnama — literally 'the will', 'the testament' — is New Theatres' Hindi telling of Krishnakanter Uil, the 1878 Bengali novel by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay that had already been filmed twice in Bengali, as a silent in 1926 and as a talkie in 1932. The old zamindar Krishnakanta Ray sets down a will disposing of his estate, and in doing so passes over his own son Haralal in favour of his nephew Govindalal. Haralal turns for help to Rohini, a young widow attached to the household, and persuades her to tamper with the document. Rohini repents the forgery almost as soon as it is done — but by then she has fallen in love with Govindalal himself, and what began as a quarrel over property turns into the slow destruction of a family: a wife displaced, a will rewritten, and three lives ruined by a desire nobody in the household is able to name aloud. Sumitra Devi, whom New Theatres had introduced opposite K.L. Saigal in Meri Bahen only a year earlier, plays Rohini — described in the standard account of her career as the beautiful widow who draws Govindalal away with her — opposite Asit Baran, with Bharati Devi, Latika Bannerji, Ahindra Choudhury, Hiralal, Devi Mukherjee and Tulsi Chakraborty in support.

R.C. Boral composed six songs for Wasiyatnama, all of them written by Munshi Zakir Hussain, the lyricist who wrote the Hindi songs for New Theatres' other 1945 release, Bimal Roy's Hamrahi. The score is built around Asit Baran, the tabla-player-turned-actor who sang his own numbers, and who takes three of the six: the exultant 'Man Phoole Nahin Samaye', the restless 'Kahe Mann Bechain Sajni', and the duet 'Duniya Ka Gham Bhool Ja' with Sumitra Devi — the one track on which the film's heroine is credited with her own voice. Songs of Yore's survey of 1945 lists 'Man Phoole Nahin Samaye' as a duet by Asit Baran and Bharati Devi, and Atul's Song A Day confirms a second, female voice is audible on the record while calling it unidentified; hindigeetmala and MySwar credit Asit Baran alone, so the second voice is not entered here. Two of the six carry no singer credit at all. The lament 'Guzar Gayi Hai Chaman Ki Bahaar' is entered without a voice in the Hindi Film Geet Kosh and in both the hindigeetmala and MySwar catalogues, and the attributions in circulation contradict one another — a Songs of Yore reader credits Ila Ghosh and ranks it sixth among the year's female solos, Atul's Song A Day guesses Sumitra Devi from the cast list, and a commenter there reports that listeners on YouTube say Utpala Sen. The album's rarity for collectors is 'Gaye Ja Tu Geet Suhane', sung by the Bengali light-classical singer Utpala Sen, who recorded only fifteen or sixteen Hindi film songs in her whole career and almost all of the others with Pankaj Mullick. The sixth song, the Urdu ghazal-idiom 'Payaam-e-Mohabbat Saba Laa Rahi Hai', is likewise listed without a singer; two readers of Songs of Yore's 1945 survey attribute it to Utpala Sen, but no catalogue confirms it. The set is a mixed Hindi-Urdu brief typical of Boral's late New Theatres work: a joy song, a restlessness song, a consolation duet, a spent-garden lament, a philosophical solo and a ghazal.

Soumyen Mukherjee directed for New Theatres. The Pakistani film database Pakmag carries the picture on its Indo-Pak list as a 1945 New Theatres Hindi/Urdu production 'made in Calcutta', with R.C. Boral as music director and Bharati Devi, Asit Baran, Choudhury, Hiralal and Devi Mukherjee among the cast; its 'released date in Lahore' field is left blank, and no exact release date for the film is documented anywhere reachable. One casting detail links the film back to the story's own screen history: Ahindra Choudhury, the Bengali stage 'Natasurya' who appears in the 1945 cast, had played Krishnakanta Ray himself in Jyotish Bannerjee's 1932 Krishnakanter Will, the first talkie made from the novel. The film also caught Sumitra Devi at the exact moment of her rise — she had won the BFJA Best Actress award for Sandhi and had just been the female lead of Meri Bahen, the fourth highest-grossing film of 1944 — and the catalogues credit her with singing on one of its six songs, the duet 'Duniya Ka Gham Bhool Ja', rather than being given a playback voice for it.

The film matters less for what it achieved than for where it sits. By 1945 New Theatres was no longer the studio that had defined Indian sound cinema: Nitin Bose had gone, Bimal Roy was directing his first Hindi feature at the same moment, and R.C. Boral — the man who had put playback singing into Hindi film with Dhoop Chhaon a decade earlier — was, in the phrase used by the Songs of Yore survey of the year, 'past the golden age of the New Theatres'. Wasiyatnama is that late New Theatres in miniature: a prestige literary property from the Bengali canon, a Bengali company's Hindi-market release, an actor-singer hero of the sort that playback was already making obsolete, and a composer whose innovations had been so thoroughly absorbed by the industry that his own new work no longer sounded like news. It is also one of the more direct examples of the studio's founding conviction — that Bankim, Sarat Chandra and Tagore were the right raw material for popular cinema — being carried into a Hindi market that was, by 1945, moving decisively towards Bombay.

Wasiyatnama is, in the words of the blog that has done most to document it, 'by now a forgotten movie'. No print of it is known to be in circulation, and the blog that has posted its songs works only from the audio; what survives is the 78-rpm record set and the paper trail — the Hindi Film Geet Kosh listing, the hindigeetmala catalogue entry, and four of the six songs posted online between 2014 and 2025 by Atul's Song A Day, whose readers are still being asked to identify the uncredited voices. Two of the songs, 'Man Phoole Nahin Samaye' and 'Kahe Mann Bechain Sajni', made it into the Songs of Yore retrospective shortlist of memorable songs of 1945. That is a thin afterlife for a Bankim adaptation from India's most literary studio, but it is also a fair snapshot of what happened to New Theatres' Hindi output in the years just before Partition: the Calcutta studio's prestige productions slipped out of national memory while Bombay's took its place, and the record label, not the film archive, became the only reason anyone can still hear them.