Shap Mochan (1955)

An early example of a Kumar-Sen romance of star-crossed lovers. Mahendra (Kumar) belongs to a family of musicians cursed because an ancestor once humiliated his guru (shown in the film’s opening sequence). Mahendra’s elder brother Debendra (Sanyal) became blind and to avoid the same fate, Mahendra promises to abandon the family vocation and moves to Calcutta to live with the rich Umeshchandra (Mitra), whose daughter Madhuri (Sen) tries to make a bourgeois gentleman out of him. However, the impecunious Mahendra sees himself forced to return to music and he vents his anger at urban values with the film’s hit song Suno bandhu suno (sung by Hemanta Mukherjee). The curse strikes and he falls dangerously ill, but is rescued by a now- chastened Madhuri. The hit followed on the success of Pinaki Mukherjee’s Dhuli (1954) and continued the famous theme of musicians who physically suffer the clash between traditional values and urbanisation (cf. Anjan Choudhury’s Guru Dakshina, 1987).