Vintage Vistas:
Stars of Yore ~ Segueing to the Fore
Introducing you to the Manohar Movie’लोग’ of Hindi Cinema who debuted in the Silent Era (1913 ~ 33) and in the nascent decade (1931 ~ 39) of the Talkies.
Dattatraya Dabke and Anna Salunke were the lucky lead pair of “Raja Harishchandra”, the very first Hindi film (silent) made by Dadasaheb Phalke, the Father of Indian Cinema.
Actors like Raja Sandow, Patience Cooper, D Billimoria, E Billimoria, Ruby Myers, Madhuri, Jairaj, Gohar, Jillo Bai, Zebunissa, Mehtab, Mubarak, W M Khan, Mazhar Khan, Yakub, Charlie, Dixit, Ghory, Master Vithal, Zubeida, Mehtab, Lalita Pawar, Kanan Devi, Jal Merchant, Sabita Devi, Prithviraj Kapoor, Jagdish Sethi entered films in the silent era between 1920 to 1931.
Relatively more familiar names like Durga Khote, K L Saigal, Ashok Kumar, Surendranath, Motilal, K C Dey, Pahari Sanyal, Nemo, Uma Shashi, Jamuna, Devika Rani, Leela Chitnis, Bibbo, Sitara, Shanta Apte, Shahu Modak, Shobhana Samarth, Prem Adib, John Cawas, Nadia, Chandramohan, Naseem, Leela Mishra, Kanhaiyalal, David, Agha, Gope, Majnu, Bhudo Advani, Mumtaz Ali, V H Desai, Bhagwan, Sundar, Gajanan Jagirdar, Nana Palshikar, Trilok Kapoor, Ulhas, Wasti, K N Singh, Jayant, Jeevan entered the foray during the first decade of the talkies i.e. between 1931 ~ 1939.
Some of them dazzled in the f~ilmi firmament for a while and receded gradually into the dark alleys of oblivion; others continued to shimmer for long and straddled the scene with consummate ease even in the post ~ independence times.
Nevertheless, today they remain, unforgivably, as distant as a dream and as remote as a reality!
More about each of these stalwarts in the future blog posts.
Manohar Iyer
