Sapnon Ka Mahal: The Golden Age of Hindi Cinema

Door desh ek mahal banaye
Pyaar ka jisme deep jalaye
Deep jalakar bujha na dena...

This is by way of being my own little shrine to the magic and art of the golden age of Hindi cinema. "Golden ages", of course, always tend to be a bit subjective... so I guess I'd better clarify that, for me, the golden age of Hindi cinema extends roughly from the mid 1940s to the early 1960s, from war and independence to rock-and-roll, the ubiquity of colour, and the birth of " masala cinema". This is not to say, naturally, that many very worthy films have not been made in India outside of this period... but somehow a confluence of circumstances seems to have come together and given birth to a kind of magic serendipity in the mid 40s... and somehow, even though many of the same major figures continued to work in the industry, that magic coming together seems to have largely dissipated in the 60s. What can I say? That's my two annas' worth, anyway... and, if given the slightest encouragement, I'll probably rabbit on a good deal more about it in these pages.

So... what can you expect to find here? Well, more of me maundering on about my favourite Hindi pictures, for one thing. And if anyone else would like to contribute relevant stuff, then I'd be happy to represent other points of view besides my own here. But certainly a shrine to these wonderful films should contain more than just words. A gallery of pictures would, I think, be in order. .. perhaps formatted suitably for use as desktop wallpapers. And the songs, the songs! Of course the sangeet must be here! I'm not going to post audio files... but what I will do is post a bunch of music to my favourite film songs in standard western musical notation. I've been doing those for years, and I have quite a stock of them... so I'll post a few now, at the inauguration of this site... and hopefully, as we go along, I'll post more. If you have a special favourite, I may be able to do it for you - but I'm afraid any requests must be from my 'golden age'... and even then I can't promise.

Bas. Enough preamble. Let's have some content. I started with the music, since that's probably the most uncommon thing I have to offer. And now I've added some pictures, suitable for use as desktop wallpapers, for you to look at and download. More music, more pictures, and some musings will (hopefully) come later. For now, please proceed to the music or pictures I've so far put up:

Any suggestions re this page, submissions of possible content, queries, or just general chit-chat about the Hindi cinema and related topics are most welcome. Feel free to write to me at xorys@idirect.ca. Please don't send binary attachments without corresponding with me first (sorry, but I get a lot of mail, what with one thing and another, and I have problems with mailbox size, and also with viruses etc.)

You might possibly be interested in visiting my other web pages (although they're all on various, unrelated, topics):