देवलोक उतरा परदे पर

In 1933, an extraordinary proportion of Hindi cinema's seventy-odd films turned to mythological and devotional subjects — Rajrani Meera, Puran Bhagat, Mahabharat, Ramayana, Krishna Sudama and more. Debaki Bose and R. C. Boral, working for New Theatres, carried the idiom of temple music onto the screen and laid the foundation for a tradition that made the bhajan-kirtan a permanent fixture of Hindi cinema.

By 1933 Hindi cinema had found its stride. Some seventy Hindi sound films were made that year — New Theatres, Sagar Movietone, Ranjit Studios, Madan Theatres — and a striking proportion drew on mythological or devotional subjects. Mahabharat (dir. Nanubhai Vakil), Kurukshetra (Sardar Balasaheb Yadav), Ramayana (J. J. Madan), Sita Swayamvar (H. M. Reddy), Krishna Sudama (Jayant Desai), Nal Damayanti, Pandav Kaurav — one after another, the divine epics descended onto the screen. This was no coincidence. Indian audiences already knew these narratives from the Puranas, from Ramlila, from the storyteller's lips — and now they came singing. The cinema hall was becoming a new kind of temple.

At the heart of this wave stood New Theatres (Calcutta) with Rajrani Meera — directed by Debaki Bose, music by R. C. Boral. The film told the story of Mirabai, the sixteenth-century Rajput poet-saint who, even as wife of the Rana of Mewar, remained submerged in Krishna-devotion — wandering from temple to temple, singing bhajans — until she renounced the palace altogether. The film carried nineteen devotional compositions, each rooted in the classical idiom of temple music: dhun, bhajan, kirtan. That same year Debaki Bose also made Puran Bhagat — another devotional biopic, with K. L. Saigal and K. C. Dey as its singing voices, again scored by Boral. Both films were among the most talked-about of the year.

Playback singing had not yet arrived — actors sang themselves, sound and image on one strip. This constraint turned out to be an unexpected gift for devotional cinema: in bhajan and kirtan, the singer's bodily presence, the expression in the eyes, and the voice are inseparable — all must happen in the same instant. Chant, aarti, kirtan on screen seemed made for the audio-visual medium. The 1933 devotional films brought together three streams: the song-centred dramatic tradition of Parsi theatre, the storytelling manner of Puranic recitation, and the raga-and-tala grammar of temple music. The tendency formed in this single year would make the devotional song an indelible genre in Hindi cinema for decades to come.