स्वरानंद

 Born in Ahmednagar and trained in Music while in Nagpur, (is that the special connect?) along with Pt. Vasantrao Deshpande,  Ramchandra Chitalkar  moved to Hyderabad as a musician and subsequently came to Chennai to try his luck. That’s how a name like Ramchandra Narhar Chitalkar, got transformed to suit the local palette as C. Ramchandra, and the same name stuck to him, even after he shifted his focus to Bollywood.

His movie debut was with Tamil movies Jayakkodi and Vana Mohini. He composed songs for Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Bhojpuri and Hindi movies. He was first amongst the mainstream composer to experiment with Western instruments and also western chalan in songs, examples being ‘Ena Mina Dika’ and ‘Meri Jaan, Sunday ke Sunday’.

He was a ‘generous’ Composer in the same league of Naushad Ali, or Dada Burman, who were happy composing different tunes for different lines of a stanza and different tunes for different stanzas, unlike the later composer, who would create a song with just 2-3 lines of compositions, which kept repeating in different forms.

C. Ramchandra used different names in different roles, as a singer he used only his surname ‘Chitalkar’, for quite a few of his Marathi movies his screen name was ‘AnnaSaheb’, or at times Ram Chitalkar, R.N. Chitalkar and also Shyamoo. (for all you know, he may be holding the record for having maximum number of screen names, by one person.)

Anyways, his biggest Hindi hits included Anarkali, Azad and Albela. Though C. Ramchadra’s most enduring song which is played at least two days every year for more than 50 years and counting, is the one he composed after the Indo-China war of 1962, the unforgettable ‘Aye Mere Vatan Ke Logon’, penned by Kavi Pradeep, and eventually sung by Lata.

BTW, he also produced films, acted in films and also played instruments for songs recordings…But, what’s the fun if there is no personal anecdote to accompany all this third party compilation ?

So here we go…….This was in my second year B.E., a few of us used to get together at a friend’s place, in the evenings, and sing/play songs from lyrics books sourced from railway platforms (the only source of song lyrics those day was these books named such as  “Rafi ke Dardbhare Geet” ”Lata ke sadabahar nagme”, “Hindi Yugul Geet”etc., and sold on Railway Platforms). And this friend’s room was right next to his maternal grandpa’s study, who was a well known marathi writer. The Grandpa was none other than  well known marathi writer Shri. Vamanrao Chorghade

 So, one fine evening, Grandpa entered our music room and started chatting with us, and there was discussion on C. Ramachandra songs and his style and his interlude nuances etc.etc. and at the end of the chat he popped a question “ would we be interested in meeting Anna Saheb?”, we were taken aback, and we of course wanted to see the man in person. Grandpa told us that ‘Anna saheb is visiting me in Feb.’ and that he would get us to meet him….. but Alas, that was not to be. Sometime in that Jan, we read in the newspapers that C. Ramchandra passed away in Mumbai.

So, an anecdote, which was really not one… but then, there are anecdotes and then there are non anecdotes, it all depends on how we want to see them….

 महेफ़िल में जल उठीं शमा- शिरीष पुरोहित 

Shirish Purohit