Mere piya gaye Rangoon by Shamshad Begum and Chitalkar
Decades before the Nineties hit Telephone dhun mein hasne wali, there was an even more popular Bollywood number that evoked the gadget we can’t do without today.
The film was H.S. Rawail’s Patanga in 1949. The song: Mere piya gaye Rangoon, wahan se kiya hai telephoon. Telephoon, mind you, to rhyme with Rangoon. This comic mispronunciation, which lyricist Rajinder Krishan had designed as the “hook”, proved catchy. The duet, composed by C. Ramchandra and sung by him — he used the name Chitalkar for playback — and the legendary Shamshad Begum was a runaway hit.
The film scored at the BO too, with good reason. Set in newly independent India, Patanga, written by Rawail’s wife Anjana, had a spunky heroine, Rani, played by the pretty Nigar Sultana. Rani was a saleswoman selling “throat-clearing medicine” and harboured movie star ambitions. The film’s many twists and turns haven’t aged well, but Rani sparkles and the “telephoon” crackles.
You could also take it literally. Telephone lines did crackle eight decades ago. This duet, an “item number” performed on the stage, is about how lovers in different countries, the man in Rangoon and the woman in Dehradun, convey their longing through the crackling wires of the “telephoon”.
For the woman, Krishan writes: Mere piya gaye Rangoon/ Wahan se kiya hai telephoon/ Tumhari yaad satati hai/ Jiya mein aag lagati hai.
For the man, Krishan gets real, speaking of the plight of many men who stay and work away from their wives — that staying away from her has made him celibate, a “sanyasi”, and he makes do with whatever food he gets to eat — “rukhi sukhi baasi”.
The plight goes deeper than the frothy song lets on. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, countless Indian men migrated to Rangoon (now Yangon) as labourers. Both India and Burma (now Myanmar) were British colonies and migration was easy. But with the rise of Burmese nationalism and the country’s independence a year after India’s, the immigrants had a hard time. Many Indians working in Burma had to flee home.
Born Ramchandra Narhar Chitalkar on January 12, 1918, in Maharashtra’s Puntamba, Ramchandra was a trained musician who joined the movies as an actor in the 1930s. Fortunately for him and us, music proved more rewarding. He excelled in breezy ditties — Aana meri jaan meri jaan Sunday ke Sunday, Shola jo bhadke, Bholi surat dil ke khote, Ina meena dika, Mere piya gaye Rangoon, to name a few — but went on to stun the world with haunting melodies in Anarkali (1953) like Yeh zindagi usiki hai, one of Lata Mangeshkar’s finest.
Ramchandra also composed Ae mere watan ke logon, possibly India’s best musical tribute to soldiers. He was only 64 when he died in 1982, but by then his career had waned, Bollywood was high on disco.
Krishan (June 6, 1919 to September 23, 1987) frequently collaborated with Ramchandra, but also hit the jackpot with other composers like R.D. Burman (Padosan, 1968) and Kalyanji-Anandji (Blackmail, 1973). He also literally hit the jackpot — around Rs 46 lakh — in horse-racing in the early 1970s, becoming the richest songwriter in the business.
The magnificent Shamshad Begum, a contemporary of Ramchandra and Krishan, went into a shell after her husband and the love of her life, Ganpat Lal Batto, died in a car accident in 1955.
Often, real life beats reel hollow.