देवदास: एक टूटे हुए आदमी के गीत

In the spring of 1935, at New Theatres' studio in Calcutta, P.C. Barua staged an act of artistic autobiography.

In 1935, at New Theatres' studio in Calcutta, P.C. Barua staged an act of artistic autobiography. Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay's Devdas had been a novel since 1917 — the story of a zamindar's son who drinks himself to death over a forbidden love — and Barua, himself the son of a zamindar family, identified with the character to the point of playing him in the Bengali-language version, which released on 30 March 1935. For the Hindi version that followed, released in 1936, he cast K.L. Saigal in the lead.

Saigal was already New Theatres' singing star. He had recorded Ghalib under Pankaj Mullick's music direction in Yahudi Ki Ladki (1933) — his rendition of 'Nuktacheen Hai Gham-e-Dil' had become his first great hit. But Devdas asked something different of him — not a ghazal's controlled grief but the disintegrating grief of a man who has chosen destruction as his response to loss. The songs credited to Timir Baran — 'Balam Aaye Baso More Man Mein' and 'Dukh Ke Ab Din' — had to be vehicles not for artistry but for collapse.

The recording context at New Theatres in this period was a moment of transition: the company's playback technique was being developed for Nitin Bose's Dhoop Chhaon (1935), the first Hindi film to use playback singing. Saigal's Devdas songs, by contrast, belong to the live-singing tradition — sung on set, in character. Contemporary accounts suggest his performance carried a degree of improvisation, with vocal ornaments and phrasing of his own; the exact recording method, however, is not precisely documented.

Kidar Sharma's lyrics for these songs deserve their own recognition. Sharma was in his mid-twenties when he wrote (and supplied dialogue) for Devdas, and his gift was for the classic braj-inflected love lyric — 'balam' (beloved), 'more man mein' (in my heart) — redirected from the nayika-Krishna devotional tradition into the intensely secular grief of the Devdas narrative. The result was among the first Hindi film lyrics that worked simultaneously as classical poetry and as character dialogue.

When the Hindi Devdas reached audiences across India in 1936, it travelled in a way the Bengali version could not. Railway networks, travelling cinemas and the gramophone spread it further than almost any previous sound film. The songs became among the first genuinely national hits of Hindi cinema — played in tea shops, whistled in streets, quoted in conversation. Saigal became not merely a film star but a cultural icon in whose voice an entire generation heard their own private sorrows.