BAIJU
BAWRA
(“Baiju the Mad”)
1952, Hindi, 168 minutes.
Directed by Vijay Bhatt
Screenplay: R. S. Choudhari; Dialogues: Zia Sarhadi; Lyrics: Shakeel Badayuni;
Music: Naushad; Cinematography: V. N. Reddy
This film about North Indian or Hindustani music was hugely popular in its
day and is now most famous for its soundtrack, which includes performances
by (in addition to such inevitables as Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammed Rafi)
the classical singers D. V. Palusker and Ustad Amir Khan of Indore. A costume
drama set in the Mughal period, it interweaves legends concerning Tansen,
the famous court singer of Emperor Akbar, with discourse about music as a
Hindu spiritual discipline or sadhana (set in implicit opposition to
Islamicate—but not explicitly Islamic—courtly culture and its ornate
“classical” music), and a folktale-like romance culminating in a
watery Liebestod. Needless to say, there are plenty of other ingredients:
a bold bandit queen, a poisonous snake, pastoral lovesongs with Radha-Krishna
imagery, a set of raga-mala tableaux (a “garland of ragas”,
in which the principal melodic modes of North Indian music appear personified
as gods and goddesses, in imagery derived from 18th century Rajput miniature
painting) and a climactic musical duel that generates sufficient emotion to
melt marble. The film is both haunting and (by today’s visual standards)
hokey—e.g., with abrupt transitions from location shots to obviously-painted
backdrops. Its large-hearted but temperamental and ultimately tragic hero
Baiju combines the “mad” lover of Indo-Persian folklore, the moody
artiste of the courtly (and bourgeois romantic) tradition, and just a trace
of the thwarted subaltern hero bent on revenge. The uneven mix is held together
by wonderful songs.
As resident musical superstar of the Mughals, the otherworldly Tansen (Surendra)
lives in a palatial mansion where he performs on a marble dais amid clouds
of incense; he also commands a troop of retainers who enforce, throughout
the surrounding neighborhood, a strict policy of silence when he is composing
new ragas. This policy is defied by the comical street singer Ghasit Khan
(Radha Kishan) and by a troupe of Hindu bhajan-singers who chant “Ram,
Your name is truth.” When Tansen’s guards try to silence the latter,
a brawl ensues in which the troupe leader (Bhagwanji) is fatally wounded;
before dying, he commands his son, Baiju (Rajan Kumar), to take revenge on
Tansen. The traumatized but talented boy is eventually adopted by a village
singer and meets pretty Gauri (Baby Tabassum) a boatman’s daughter who
rescues him when he falls in the river (provoking her portentous remark: “You
don’t know how to swim? Father, this boy only knows how to drown!”)
Baiju
grows into a handsome young musician (Bharat Bhushan), who woos the adolescent
Gauri (19-year-old Meena Kumari in her first important role) with joyous lovesongs
(like Tu Ganga ki mauj main Jamuna ka dhara, “You are the Ganga’s
surge, I the Yamuna’s flow”), but periodically lapses into dark
thoughts of revenge—the latter always signaled by an ominous orchestral
theme that appears to parody the opening bars of the old Liszt chestnut, Hungarian
Rhapsody No. 4. Just to complicate matters, Gauri is engaged to the comical
Narpat (Mishra), and Baiju is abducted by the amazonian dacoit Roopmati (Kuldeep
Kaur), who falls in love with his voice. His interrupted quest to avenge his
father’s death eventually leads him to the pilgrimage town of Vrindaban
and to Tansen’s own musical guru, the aged Hindu saint Swami Haridas
(another historical figure, memorably played by Rai Mohan), but it is not
until his heart is pierced by intense grief—due to Gauri’s aparent
death from snakebite—that he is able to acquire the musical powers he
needs to effectively challenge his courtly archrival. But after an imperially-witnessed
triumph, and a gracious pardoning of the happily-humbled Tansen, there is
no place for our hero to go but down, taking his beloved Gauri with him. Baiju
thus joins the ranks of angst-ridden 50s film heroes (cf. the archetypal DEVDAS,
and Guru Dutt’s Vijay in PYAASA) who are Too Good for This World.
[Vijay Mishra, in his impressive study Bollywood Cinema, Temples of Desire
(Routledge, 2002), offers a lengthy and fascinating segmental analysis of
BAIJU BAWRA, which he treats as one of the “foundational texts”
of the mainstream Bombay industry; see pp. 159-165, 168-171, 179-188.]