What did India’s greatest polymath Rabindranath Tagore have in common with yesteryear Bollywood actress-singer Suraiya and Hindi poet Pandit Narendra Sharma?
This year, when Tagore’s birth anniversary Pochishe Baishakh — or the 25th of Baishakh — is making political headlines in the state of his birth — it’s time to listen to a song from a lost film to marvel at how effortlessly his music travelled cultures.
Afsar (1950) was the first offering from the Navketan Films stable. Chetan Anand, fresh from his staggering triumph at Cannes — his debut Neecha Nagar (1946), which explored the gulf between the rich and the poor and was inspired by Maxim Gorky’s play, The Lower Depths, won the Palme d’Or — and his younger brother Dev Anand, then an emerging new star, decided to form their production house for more creative control. (Vijay ‘Goldie’ Anand, their younger brother, who directed Guide much later, was too young then.)
For Afsar, Chetan was again inspired by a Russian, Nikolai Gogol. He transplanted Gogol’s satire on corruption, The Government Inspector, to a post-Independence rural milieu, roped in his brother Dev and top actress Suraiya to play the leads and S.D. Burman to compose the music.
S.D. adapted the well-known Rabindrasangeet, Shedin dujone dulechinu bone, which Tagore had composed in 1927, inspired by Raag Pilu, to Naina deewane ek nahin mane. Suraiya sang it with an aching, tender vulnerability.
For all its lush — or loud, take your pick — violins and the orchestra, the song stands out for Suraiya’s voice and the lyrics.
Wisely, Pandit Narendra Sharma did not translate Tagore’s lyrics, he wrote his own to suit the film: Naina deewane ek nahin mane/ Kare manmani mane na (these crazy lovelorn eyes don’t obey, they do as they please, they don’t obey).
If the song starts with the stirrings of a young girl’s love, it also plumbs philosophical depths with a touch of pathos.
Mann kya jane kya hoga kal/ Dhaar samay ki behti pal pal/ Jeevan chanchal jeevan chanchal/ Din jake phir aayena (The heart knows not what tomorrow will bring, and yet time streams on, moment by moment, life’s fickle, days that pass do not return).
The lines were prophetic: the days that passed did not return for Dev Anand and Suraiya. As Dev Anand writes in his candid autobiography, Romancing With Life, the lovebirds had to contend with Suraiya’s watchful grandmother on the sets. Suraiya’s family bitterly opposed their relationship, which ended in 1951.
Afsar tanked at the box office, perhaps the 1950s audience didn’t want to go to theatres to watch what was wrong with society. The film’s print is lost, but the songs live on.
Suraiya caved in to her family but never married. Dev Anand married Kalpana Kartik in 1954, the year Suraiya would have her career defining film, Mirza Ghalib, with her haunting ghazal Nukhtacheen hai gham-e-dil.
Tagore or Ghalib, Suraiya was a total slay, effortlessly and unknowingly living the idea of India. Tagore would have approved.