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BLAST FROM THE PAST

 Naya Daur 1957

Song and society A scene from “Naya Daur”

Distance in time diminishes emotion. But every now and then, we come across a moment that lives with us years after we had first experienced the magic. The first crush, the first love, the first earning…all have a special place in our heart. Si milar sentiments accompany us when we talk of B.R. Chopra’s Naya Daur, a film that offered us the most playful of romances in the most innocent of ways. It had peerless Dilip Kumar with Vyjayantimala – they were to recreate the magic later in Madhumati. But what did we say about the joy of the first time? This had that pulse, that tingling sensation, when neither the time nor the day or the month mattered. One lived in the moment.

One in a series of big films in that year, Chopra’s film defied mortality by backing that mischievous romance with a subtle take on the socio-economic conditions of the country. Remember the film was made when the country was taking its first baby steps of nationhood. The machine age was upon us and we had not proved quite equal to the collateral challenges it brought in its wake: was man to be sacrificed at the altar of machine? Was the immediate completely subservient to the distant? Such questions Chopra handled with a dexterity all too rare in mainstream cinema. His credit lay in tackling a serious subject without slipping into the realms of boredom often known by the misnomer of parallel cinema.

Made at the height of Nehruvian socialism, the film’s appeal transcends generations. Chopra may not have been a soothsayer when he filmed that unforgettable tonga and bus race but the film proved a precursor of the things to come: once machines and men were engaged in a battle for survival. Now it is globalisation versus domestic capitalism, malls versus the local grocer, skyscrapers versus green fields. Only the notes have changed, the tunes remain the same.

Talking of tunes, O.P. Nayyar’s music had magic as its middle name. The incomparable Rafi with Asha Bhonsle in Sahir Ludhianvi’s “Ude Jab Jab Zulfe Teri” was probably the earliest instance of the girl teasing the guy. Yet the song had dignity as its soul: the guy and the girl talked of clandestine meetings but waited for the night to set in, for the moon to fade, for nosy neighbours to mind their own business. The energy of the dholak, the beat of the tonga, the death of the day…it had it all. Another song that remains in the memory is “Maang ke Saath Tumhara”. It became the anthem of the lovebirds in the 1950s. Many lived the song for the next 50 years, others proved unworthy, deserving a parting of ways.

Yet another song of the film talked of egalitarianism in the simplest of ways. “Saathi Haath Badhana” had a meaning befitting the age of progressive writers. It had a lilt peculiar to O.P. Nayyar.

A black-and-white exercise that later lent itself to a colour adaptation, Naya Daur remains as relevant today as it was then. Its abiding appeal lay in its subtlety, its greatness in incorporating serious issues in a language comprehensible to the common man.

Remembered for its lilting music, soulful lyrics; and a unique presentation of Nehruvian socialism in the language of the common man.

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