Once upon a cinema: The “viral” music director we don’t hear about so often

Once Upon a Cinema is series which will illuminate the dark, unexplored crevices of Indian cinema. In it, the writer will showcase stories and faces long forgotten, share uncommon perspectives about stars and filmmakers, and recount tales that have never been told. Maharashtrians have had an everlasting impact on the growth of Hindi cinema right from its infancy. In fact, they have been integral to its very foundation. Directors, actors, singers, musicians, cinematographers, the list goes on. Many of them altered their names or truncated them to fit with Bollywood naming conventions, often leaving it unclear which community they belonged to. Actress Nanda , breaker of many a heart during the 60s, was born as Nanda Karnataki, and her father was the star of silent cinema Master Vinayak, originally known as Vinayak Damodar Karnataki. The affable David, to be found in every other Hrishikesh Mukherjee or Basu Chatterjee film, was really David Abraham Cheulkar. Likewise, Jayshree T. is Jayshree Talpade, Sachin is Sachin Pilgaonkar , Bhagyashree was Bhagyashree Patwardhan (before she married and became Mrs. Dassani), Tanuja is of course Tanuja Samarth and N. Chandra, the director of _Ankur_ and _Tezaab_ , is actually Chandrashekhar Narvekar. The legendary V. Shantaram was christened in his crib as Shantaram Rajaram Vankudre. Many assume the composer N. Datta, who started his career by assisting S.D. Burman, to be a Bengali - but his birth-name was Datta Naik. In a similar vein, the name C. Ramchandra seems to indicate a south Indian origin, but before he joined films, the singer-composer was known as Ramchandra Chitalkar. In the 2020 film Ludo , gangster Sattu Tripathi ( Pankaj Tripathi ) keeps humming a song as he watches a video on his phone. He forces his gang to sing along, with a gun bobbing up and down on the dashboard, its nose pointed at their heads. We get a glimpse of the old video, in which a plump cook joyously dances to the song. The film didn’t create any records, but the song and its black-and video rode the cyber-waves for a few days. It became “viral”, garnering millions of views online. The song was “O babuji/ Kismat ki hawa/ Kabhi naram, kabhi garam”. It was from a film called _Albela_ (1951), and the cook on-screen was none other than Bhagwan Abhaji Palav, aka Bhagwan Dada . The YouTube video description claims the song was “composed by C. Ramchandra and sung by Chitalkar Ramchandra.” Well. Since long before the Internet was conceived, many songs of Albela have been going “viral”. Aana meri jaan meri jaan/ Sunday ke Sunday” inspired a popular ad on Indian broadcaster Doordarshan, promoting egg consumption: Khana meri jaan meri jaan/ Murgi ke ande. Another C. Ramchandra handiwork from Albela caused virality of a different kind. An impressionable young man witnessed the hit song Bholi soorat dil ke khote/ Naam bade aur darshan chhote, and the dance steps by Bhagwan Dada made such an impression on him that almost three decades later when the boy became a huge star called Amitabh Bachchan , he adopted the same style. Ramchandra Chitalkar grew up in an era when films had no sound, hence music and songs had little consequence. Every movie theatre had a dedicated instrumentalist who played their music during the screening. Obviously, making a career in films was far from his mind when he learned music as a child. He did so because his father, an ardent music-lover, insisted on it. But irrespective of whichever timeline of history we are talking about, films have always enticed the young. Chitalkar too was dazzled by the magic of celluloid and eventually, like countless other before him and after him, gave in to the desire to be an actor. Yaragudipati Varada Rao was a famed producer-director who made films in the south Indian languages. His daughter Lakshmi would later make a splash in Bollywood with Julie (1975). Y.V. Rao was making his first film in Hindi, called Naganand (1935), and this is where Chitalkar got his big acting break. But by his own admission, it was also the only film in the history of Indian cinema to run for exactly half a show. Chitalkar walked into the theatre during the intermission on opening day, hoping to gauge audience reaction. To his shock, the theatre was empty and the show had been canceled after half of it was shown. There were exactly twelve people in the hall, who had left by interval time. After a few other misguided attempts, Chitalkar gave up hopes of acting, for good. By this time, talkies had become the norm and Indian films in all languages were loaded with songs. He got a job assisting music director Mir Saheb at Minerva Movietone, Sohrab Modi’s studio. During those early days, Chitalkar struck up a friendship with an enterprising Marathi youth called Bhagwan Palav. Bhagwan had been acting in silent films, and debuted in direction with Bahadur Kisan (1938). He was looking for more directing opportunities, which is when something interesting happened. Bhagwan did manage to get directing jobs in two movies back-to-back, but both of them were in the Tamil language. Bhagwan offered his friend Chitalkar to compose music for the films, which were called Jayakodi (1940) and Vana Mohini (1941). Here were two Marathi boys, directing and composing music for mainstream Tamil films! Working first in Tamil films may have been the reason for rechristening himself as C. Ramchandra, but legend also has it that it was producer-director Jayant Desai named him thus. Even C. Ramchandra himself seems to be quite obsessed with using different names, crediting himself as Annasaheb, Ram Chitalkar and Shyamoo in various films. When he sang, he went by the name Chitalkar. C. Ramchandra stepped into Hindi films as a composer with Bhagwan’s film Sukhi Jeevan (1942). C. Ramchandra and Bhawan Dada continued to work together for around 25 films, the peak of which was Albela (1951), with five of its songs not being just hits but attaining cult status over the years. C. Ramchandra continued to create music for the next two decades, hitting the marquee with Anarkali (1953) and V. Shantaram’s _Navrang_ (1959). But coming back to the subject of “viral” songs by C. Ramchandra, a particular composition of his was topping all the charts around 2005-2006. This was the fag end of IndiPop revolution that started in the 90s. All of a sudden, Indian television screens were flooded with images of actress-model Mumaith Khan swinging to Mere piya gaye Rangoon/ Wahan se kiya hai telephone/ Ke teri yaad sataati hai. The original was composed by C. Ramchandra for Patanga (1949), sung exquisitely by Shamshad Begum. More recently, a “remix” of Eena meena deeka was featured in the ill-fated Alia Bhatt -starrer _Shaandaar_ (2015). Chitalkar’s original composition was from Asha (1957), sung by - need I even say it - Kishore Kumar and Asha Bhosle.

But the most viral song ever put to tune by the inimitable C. Ramchandra does not belong to a film. It’s an immortal non-film composition that goes Ae mere watan ke logon/ Zara aankh mein bhar lo paani. It has been reinforced time and again how Kavi Pradeep wrote the song and Lata Mangeshkar performed it the way only she could, and how it drew tears from a Prime Minister. But rarely is it mentioned that the man behind the soulful music was C. Ramchandra. He had earlier collaborated with Kavi Pradeep on another deeply nationalistic number that laid bare the cynicism of a newly-independent India: Dekh tere sansar ki haalat kya ho gayi bhagwan/ Kitna badal gaya insaan from the film Nastik (1954), where C. Ramchandra roped in Pradeep to not only write the song but sing it as well. Ae mere watan ke logon is one of the rare instances where the lyricist is celebrated (rightly so) but the music director has been all but forgotten. Ironically, much like C. Ramchandra, Kavi Pradeep also had a different name in his past life: his real name was Ramchandra Narayanji Dwidevi. Amborish is a National Film Award winning writer, biographer and film historian.

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