Object of the week: the 1930s publicity ‘song book’ for the Hindi romance Jeevan Naiya
Lavishly illustrated and featuring all the lyrics, song books were routinely created as part of the publicity for films released in India during the 20th century. Look inside this example from 1936.
In focus this week, we have an Indian song booklet for the 1936 Hindi language film Jeevan Naiya. Song booklets are a kind of publicity ephemera that were most popular in India during the mid 20th century. They contain a synopsis of the film and cast lists, along with lyrics of songs in several regional languages (in this case English, Gujarati, Hindi and Urdu), so that audiences could follow the narrative and understand the song lyrics. At the BFI National Archive, we hold a collection of Indian song booklets ranging from the 1930s all the way through to the 1990s, showing changes in graphic design, popular film genres and audience demographics.
Jeevan Naiya follows the story of Lata, the child of a dancing girl, who is due to marry the wealthy Ranjit, who doesn’t know about her mother’s occupation. When she is blackmailed and forced to reveal the truth about her mother’s profession, Ranjit leaves her but is blinded in an accident. He is nursed back to health in secret by Lata, and upon realising her identity he falls back in love with her.
The film stars early Indian cinema icon Devika Rani, who was well established in her career at the time, and it was the debut feature film of Ashok Kumar who went on to have a career as one of India’s foremost leading men. Kumar’s appearance in this film was something of a happy accident – the male lead was originally to be played by Najm-ul-Hassan, who fell in love with Rani during the filming and eloped with her, resulting in him being dropped from the project. Kumar was an unknown who was brought in quickly to replace him, which ended up kickstarting his career.
The song booklet for Jeevan Naiya features a cutout on the cover, which places Devika Rani’s face in the shadow of the waning moon. Turning the page, a more conventional title page featuring the two leads is revealed, which has the title of the film in Hindi and Urdu.
The song booklet also features a number of stills from the film, collaged together in order to highlight key scenes and show how the two leads appear together on screen.
An interesting feature that is unique to our copy of this song booklet is a number of pencil markings that are found throughout the song lyric portions. We have no information as to who made these annotations or why, but they appear to be crossing out or marking particular verses.
It’s a good example of how, even in cases where a piece of collected ephemera may be mass produced, there can be unique additions that reflect the object’s past ownership.
Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.