What did the notion of a language and its music constitute? When boundaries were not drawn, there existed a free flowing and rich blend of ideas

During a conversation, theatre music expert R. Paramasivan spoke of Gubbi Veeranna’s foray into films. His first film was Subhadra, released in 1941. Having led a very successful theatre company, Veeranna knew the taste of the audience. Making sure that there was something to everyone’s liking, he had three music composers for the film. Mallikarjun Mansur for Hindustani music-based songs, B. Devendrappa for Carnatic music-based songs, and HR Padmanabha Sastry for songs based on light classical music. This was unprecedented and perhaps has not been repeated either. Curious to listen to the music of this film, I set out looking for it: it was a fruitless search, as it was not available even in the National Film Archives of India. I however learnt that not just Subhadra, but films like Krishna Sudhama, Krishna Leele made during this period were also unavailable. The single copies of these films had apparently gathered moisture and were completely washed out. This may well be the story of many landmark films which we have lost over time.

But having set out in this direction, I stumbled upon some very interesting details. In 1939, Gubbi Veeranna took a year’s break from his theatre company and stayed in Pune for 11 months where the film was shot over 11 months at Aruna Studio. He took many of the artistes who worked for his company to be a part of the film. The court musician of Mysore B. Devendrappa, and Mallikarjun Mansur who were close to the company and Veeranna were composers for the film. 10-year old R Paramasivan worked as an assistant to almost all the three composers. Sharp that he was, even as the score was being played, he wrote notations which were handed out to the instrumentalists. Bellave Narahari Shastry wrote the lyrics, and B Puttaswamayya, who wrote many drama scripts, wrote the story and screenplay for the film. Honnappa Bhagavatar who was a star actor at the company, GV Malathamma, B Jayamma and Gangubai Guledagudda – played roles in the film.

What is however very interesting is that Veeranna brought C Pullayya, a Telugu director to direct the film and Padmanabha Sastry who had made a name in the Tamil film industry to compose songs in the modern idiom. It is a matter of awe and surprise that how in those times they had access to each other, and were in the know of what was happening elsewhere in the country: the best of people from other regional languages were brought to work together. In fact, an early poster of the film even reveals how professional they were in their approach – it declares “A great love story from a great epic” and further says, “Love, Romance, Comedy, Gripping Story, Powerful Dialogues, Music, Melody, Dancing, Beautiful setting, Enchanting Songs….” The person who held the clap for the first shot of this film was none less than V. Shantaram.

H.R. Padmanabha Sastry was a sought after music director for Tamil films of those days. He has composed music for some Kannada films too. Our own Rajan and Nagendra, trained under Padmanabha Sastry in Madras before they came to work under P Kalinga Rao. When he composed music for the film Premada Putri in 1957, he introduced two voices to Kannada. One was of Pandit Raghunath Panigrahi, a classical musician and music director from Orissa who was then active in the Tamil music scene. The song “Premave Daiva” that he renders in the film is wistful and mellifluous, almost reminding you of Talat Mehmood and Hemant Kumar. “Tribhuvana Janani Jaganmohini”, an iconic song was sung by P Leela from Kerala. She sang over 5000 songs in south Indian languages and was a contemporary of the three divas of Carnatic classical music – M.S. Subbulakshmi, ML Vasanthakumari and DK Pattammal. From her rendition it is clear that she was phenomenally talented with a voice that could produce complex ideas effortlessly.

If you turn the pages of film history you will find many such names that were formidable talents but disappeared from the Kannada imagination when boundaries were drawn. Was linguistic reorganization then a good idea at all? Languages across India borrowed freely from each other’s thoughts and views. More often than not — unless it was subject to scrutiny — one hardly knew it came from outside a language imagination. Today, we are left with fetters. We are shackled into our thin ideas of nationalism, and are left with self-conscious jugalbandis. The days of synthesis of ideas, fusion music in the true spirit belongs to a distant past.