In the weeks immediately following my recent protracted visit to India, and with my time being my own until the boss returned, I was able to do what I had not done in a long, long while: simply watch the rain clouds gather and unburden their load. The spring has been unusually verdant this year, here in the northeast, and I often found myself walking long distances, sometimes as much as five miles at a time, wearing out my sneakers and my poor aching soles, returning home only to start again after a few hours this time by car, watching the rain sprinkles scampering up and down the windshield as the air currents led them a merry dance...
And there was a documentary way back, whose name I do not now remember, in which the camera catches the main protagonist standing at a window watching the rain outside, and tracing the course of the raindrops as they splattered on the pane. His attention seems to focus on one drop which in his mind's eye gradually evolves into a ballerina and the sequence explodes into a colourful ballet performance. I did not focus on any particular raindrop on the windshield as I drove along one day (that would have been hazardous) and the ballerina disappeared from the imagination after a while and was replaced by sounds of the lashing wind and raindrops from films past seen and songs listened to many times over with an increasing fondness as the years slip by.
I have often wondered how our music directors were able to project a song sung and recorded within the confines of a small studio, into the great outdoors (indeed, recording studios were tiny during the time which haunts my blogstream!), and almost convince us that what one saw lighting up the screen and our emotions was not indeed seeded in the claustrophobia of four walls! True, the sound engineer and his team played their role but ultimately it remained to the singers and the composers to give a song the ultimate nuance that would retain it in the mind of the listener.
Happily there has been a plethora of rain oriented songs that has lingered in our collective subconscious. They lie just under the surface and all it needs is a prod for remembrance to do the rest. For, the Indian breast is overwhelmed by the advent of the raincloud of the monsoon. There is a poet in everyone of us struggling to shake off the sluggish heat of May and dance to the rhythm of June, be it in the gullies of Bombay or Calcutta, or the rurals anywhere in India. And our film makers have been quick to seize upon this vulnerability. From Raj Kapoor to Bimal Roy to Vijay Anand to Guru Dutt, a film those days was considered incomplete by the masses without at least one rain sequence projecting the moods of the protagonists. Not all these stalwarts are represented here.
The rain meant various things in various films. In Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zameen (1953), based on Gurudev Tagore's ultra short story (2 1/2 pages) and which ushered in the new wave in our films, the sudden onset of the monsoons brings joy to the poor peasant-farmer whose patch of land lies parched and whose cattle are dying. And yet, this joy is not without its tinge of apprehension for he knows that the rains might not be so plentiful the next time around! It's all in the black and white camerawork, people, and the warm lyric penned by Shailendra set to music by Salil Chaudhary, in his first-ever foray into film musicdom. Lata Mangeshkar and Manna Dey lead a fine chorus.... the sound is a bit frayed attesting to the passage of time.
Fast forward a decade to 1962 and Salilda and Bimal Roy weave a different kind of magic with rain and cloud in Prem Patra. Here, a blind Shashi Kapoor is lamenting his lost love, unaware that it is indeed she standing right by him in the role of a nurse, as he muses upon what the rains do to him. Once again it is Lata Mangeshkar crooning, this time with the never-never Talat Mehmood one of the sweetest duets ever, written by Gulzar early in his illustrious career. To watch the entire sequence from before the song actually comes on (missing in this clip) and listening to Shashi Kapoor's soliloquy is to be transported into a different poetic realm altogether.
A short burst of rain and song accompanied by the crashing of the waves and the wind at Bombay's Marine Drive helped us muse upon the quandary that Dev Anand and Waheeda Rehman found themselves in, in Nav Ketan's Kala Bazar (1960). Each was voicing the other's thoughts, going back and forth in time, penned by Shailendra and set to music by Sachin Dev Burman. Director Vijay Anand lent his own poetic touch by having the sound engineer give a fadeout to the song, after the second antara. The full duet rendered beautifully by Geeta Dutt and Mohammad Rafi however, was released on 78rpm and is still heard today. This clip, however, suffers from overexposure on the DVD.
And here is Waheeda Rehman in a sequence from Kohraa (1964), a bad adaptation of Daphne Du Maurrier's Rebecca, sporting that pet cliche of Hindi films: a happy face masking a broken heart. As directed by Biren Nag she might as well have been Thomas Hardy's Tess in the bosom of nature but as the film unfolds she is neither, except her own beautiful self. Perhaps the producers, Gitanjali Pictures, had sought to cash in on the success of that absurd adaptation of The Hound of The Baskervilles, Bees Saal Baad (1962), a runaway success thanks to the great tracks (Hemant Kumar) and lyrics (Shakeel Badayuni) and last but not least Waheeda Rehman herself. In this song sequence from Kohraa, lots of rolling, fleecy clouds shroud Kaifi Azmi's great lyric set to music once again by the immortal Hemant Kumar Mukherjee and Waheeda mirrors each changing, varied mood of the song in that mobile face that made her a rage for so many years.
I know, I know my predilection for the Bengali composers comes through in what I have written above. There were other immortals: Naushad Ali and Shankar-Jaikishan and Anil Biswas (here I go again!) and C. Ramchandra and others too numerous to mention whose compositions will always haunt us, but the Bengali composers knew best how to incorporate the Hardian concept of man-against-nature in their artistry and I could go on and on with what they did but these are the songs that came to mind while I was coasting that afternoon along the back roads and by lanes of Edison and Metuchen.
I would like my readers to write to me, via the Comments box above if only to speak to me of their favourite baadal-o-baarish songs. I am aware that each age brings along with it its own brand of film and music themes but I do believe that the industry is now at the nadir of its creativity in film music. Perhaps it's the fault of the movies themselves, which despite branching off into new territories have left precious little scope for melody to retrieve its place in our hearts!
What else can one say of a generation which, as Raju Bharatan has rightly lamented in his latest, is snug within its parameters set by Rahul Dev Burman and A.R. Rehman?
