Background
Times of India (TOI) is an English-language daily of India that started publication in 1838. TOI Weekly Edition came out in 1880 and was renamed The Illustrated Weekly of India (IWI) in 1923. In 1953, A S Raman who had earlier been with Hindustan Times, Statesman and TOI joined IWI as Asst. Editor and soon took over as its first Indian editor. Our father was a keen reader of ‘Chiaroscuro’, Raman’s column devoted to art and culture. At his behest, I dug up the meaning of this obscure word and found the contents of Raman’s column to be as arcane as its title. I warmed up to IWI only when Khushwant Singh sassed it up after taking over as editor in 1969.
The Word
Chiaroscuro is a compound word made up of chiaro and scuro meaning light and dark respectively in Italian. It is pronounced key-uh-roh-skuh-roh. In art, it refers to the strong contrasts between light and dark elements used to convey space and depth. It is also the technical term for using contrasting light to visualise objects, figures and models in 3-D. Similar effects used in films and black-and-white photography also go under the name of chiaroscuro.
Chiaroscuro in Films
In cinema, light is not used just to illuminate scenes but as a powerful storytelling tool to shape the mood, tone, and narrative of a film. For this, the technique used is ‘Chiaroscuro Lighting’ (CL) that exploits the interplay of light and shadow to create visually compelling images.
CL was part of the broader German Expressionism of the 1920s. It soon crossed the Atlantic as the darkness it was able to bring out was readily usable in movies like Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. Film noir was born soon thereafter and since the 1940s, CL became a staple in various film genres, from horror to drama. The interplay of light and shadow can bring out the inner turmoil of a character, enhance the atmosphere of a scene or even convey moral ambiguity. By using chiaroscuro effectively, filmmakers can engage viewers on a subconscious level, drawing them deeper into the story.
Romanticising Chiaroscuro through Film Music
If Europe and America were drawn to chiaroscuro by its ability to depict the darker and harsher side of life, Indian cinema discovered its efficacy in portraying softer moods and musical scenes. This ‘romanticisation’ of chiaroscuro was led by directors like Bimal Roy and Guru Dutt and cinematographers like Kamal Bose and V K Murthy. Their rich collaborative output is what this blog is setting out to celebrate.
Immediate Provocation for the Blog
A few nights ago, I happened to watch the Rafi solo Aap Ke Haseen Rukh from the film Baharen Phir Bhi Aayengi on TV. The song picturised on Dharmendra, Mala Sinha and Tanuja is popular on film music shows. I was struck by how well the director and cinematographer had collaborated to give us a visual classic to match the music of O P Nayyar.
I knew straightaway that there are far too many such gems where, as much the lyrics, music and voice, the setting and photography have been superbly exploited. So, this is a relatively short blog where I merely list the songs and let you enjoy the chiaroscuro effects yourself. I want to believe that I have picked the songs randomly, but some bias in favour of songs from my growing up years cannot be ruled out.
A second caveat may also be in order. In selecting the songs for this blog, I have focused on those where the director and cinematographer have combined artistically to enhance the chiaroscuro effect beyond the contours of black and white photography by a combination of scene setting, shot composition, etc. I comment on this aspect briefly in each song.
I also depart from my usual practice and list the names of the cinematographer and director instead of the lyricist, music director and the singer.
Tere Bina Aag Ye Chandini – Awara (1951) – Radhu Karmakar – Raj Kapoor
Awara enjoyed cult status and success. Here, Raj Kapoor and his cinematographer build on his dark character in the film as a petty thief and produce a stunning dance song. The fire is used to produce both light and heat in building up the initial nightmare into a delectable Ghar Aaya Mera Pardesi climax.
Bachpan Ke Din Bhula Na Dena – Deedar (1951) – Dilip Gupta – Nitin Bose
Another early song of this genre that left an impression on me. I like the chiaroscuro opening of the white swans against the dark water and the way the camera pans across the trees that have shed their leaves as the children sing Rut badle ya jeevan beete, dil ke taraane ho na puraane.
Jayen To Jayen Kahan – Taxi Driver (1954) – V Ratra – Chetan Anand
In his songs, Dev Anand hogs the footage usually. Here, even in a moving solo picturised on him, elder brother Chetan Anand is able to devote a lot of attention to the sea and its waves. Ratra uses long shots more than close ups to augment the impact.
Hum Aap Ki Ankhon Mein – Pyaasa (1957) – V K Murthy – Guru Dutt
Of the many great songs from Pyaasa, I have picked this as proof of Murthy’s genius in using CL to combine a dream sequence with a waltz number so tellingly. Smoke and mirrors may be a pejorative term but not for me and certainly not after Murthy’s brilliant demonstration of its positive aspects!
Suhana Safar Aur Ye Mausam Haseen – Madhumati (1958) – Dilip Gupta – Bimal Roy
In this song, Dilip Gupta captures the tender beauty of the flowers close by as well as the distant majesty of the hills and makes the painter-hero decare that he has not seen such a confluence of the sky and the earth anywhere else on earth. Like Dilip Kumar, we the audience see the proof of this on the screen thanks to the combination of Gupta and Bimal Da.
Sun Mere Bandhu Re – Sujatha (1959) – Kamal Bose – Bimal Roy
Here the depth of the river is conveyed by its darkness. The brief conversation between Sunil Dutt and Nutan acts as an interlude to the song rendered in the sonorous voice of Burman Da himself.
Waqt Ne Kiya Kya Haseen Sitam – Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959) – V K Murthy – Guru Dutt
Among Hindi films, this is the most iconic song sequence captured using CL techniques. It is shot in a film set and reveals Murthy at his best, winning him his first Filmfare Award as Best Cinematographer.
O Sajna Barkha Bahar Aai – Parakh (1960) – Kamal Bose – Bimal Roy
Even the falling rain is made part of the chiaroscuro effect. New comer – her debut film Love in Simla was released earlier in the same year – Sadhna’s radiant face adds to the ‘chiaro’ part of the overall effect.
Khoya Khoya Chaand – Kala Bazar (1960) – V Ratra – Vijay Anand
Murthy had been Ratra’s assistant earlier. Here the guru shows signs of his own greatness. The entire scenery with the hills, valleys, tree lines, cloud-specked sky and lake come alive as though they were an indoor studio set with CL. It may have been the effortless mastery of Ratra, but a lot of hard work must surely have gone into bring it off. For me, Waheeda Rehman’s silhouette towards the end of the song looking at the lake into which the hills cast their own shadow is an effort worthy of a Renaissance master like Vermeer.
Tere Ghar Ke Samne Ek Ghar Banaunga – Tere Ghar Ke Samne (1963) – V Ratra – Vijay Anand
This is a song shot with chiaroscuro special effects with Dev Anand imagining Nutan in his liquor glass!
O Beqarar Dil – Kohraa (1964) – Marshall Braganza – Biren Nag
This is again an outdoor song sequence. In addition to all of Ratra’s repertoire, Braganza brings in his own little deft touches – like the bullock carts lined up to pick up the women at the end of the days’ back-bending work, the spokes of the wheels of the cart, etc. So arresting are the visuals that you forget Kaifi Azmi’s deeply haunting lyrics and Hemant Da’s masterful use of raag Bhimplasi. This is the skill of romanticising chiaroscuro.
Naina Barse Rim Jim Rim Jim – Woh Kaun Thi (1964) – K H Kapadia – Raj Khosla
Given the snow-bound landscape and Sadhna’s white saree contrasted with Manoj Kumar dark jacket and trousers, this is a complete chiaroscuro song.
Kuch Dil Ne Kaha – Anupama (1966) – Jaywant Pathare – Hrishikesh Mukherjee
In this outdoor shoot, the cinematographer focuses not on the whole of the landscape but on the trees in particular. It is almost as through the entire scene has been shot in an arboretum. The chiaroscuro effect is enhanced by the light saree worn by Sharmila Tagore contrasted with the dark shawl draped around Dharmendra’s shoulders. He watches her unobtrusively as she walks around singing, till she climbs the hill and comes up in front of him.
Aap Ke Haseen Rukh – Baharen Phir Bhi Aayengi (1966) – K G Prabhakar – Shaheed Latif
To end where it all started! Instead of the outdoors and the whole of nature, the cinematographer works with three faces as Dharmendra’s song is heard differently by Mala Sinha and Tanuja as can be inferred from their facial expressions. Brilliant exploration, or is it extrapolation of chiaroscuro!
Vandha Naal Mudhal – Paava Mannippu (1961) – G Vittal Rao – A Bhim Singh
So as not to give the impression that CL was used only in Hindi movies, I conclude with a song each from a Tamil and Kannada movie. In Tamil, I have chosen Vandha Naal Mudhal, Kannadasan’s immortal verse from Pava Mannippu. It is picturised in rural Tamil Nadu in a setting that most viewers can relate to. The message seems to be that chiaroscuro is not an esoteric artifice but something that you encounter in everyday life!
Dhoni Saagali Mundhe Hogali – Miss Leelavathi (1965) – S V Srikanth Kumar – M R Vittal
The magic of these iconic verses written by KuVemPu are captured by the sense of flow created by the music and by the lapping sound of the waves caused by the rowing by excellent cinematographic work.
Conclusion
For the 16 songs I have listed, readers may easily come up with dozens more. That hardly matters as it will only buttress my argument that an Italian painting style of the 17th century was preserved and adapted to films nearly four centuries later and that Indian cinematographers had their own role in refining and extending CL beyond the horror and crime genre to romances, musicals and even family/social dramas. This remains an unheralded achievement that I hope my blog will begin to correct.
Acknowledgement
In reading about chiaroscuro lighting and its use in films, I greatly benefited by going through No Film School, a popular website on filmmaking. In particular, a 2023 post by Jason Hellerman was very useful. It can be accessed at: https://nofilmschool.com/chiaroscuro-lighting.
The above post lists Da Vinci, Caravaggio, Vermeer and Rembrandt as early proponents of CL. Luckily for me, a print of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring adorns one of the walls of our home. I have therefore used it at the beginning of the blog.
S. Krishna Kumar
31st March 2024
Bengaluru
Blog # 92
Talk the Walk 
Thank you so much for this priceless gem of a blog post you have come up with. Yes, there are many others, like ‘Ye raat ye chandni phir kahaan…’ from the movie Jaal (1952), which captures the pristine beauty of nature so very well.
More power to your pen/keyboard, sir!
Thanks a lot, Ashok. You rightly bring up Jaal. Another friend has referred to Bandini and Khamoshi. I myself considered Hum Dono but preferred to use Tere Ghar Ke Samne instead. Chiaroscuro lighting was an integral part of the movies of Bimal Roy, Dev Anand, Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt to name but a few.
Ashok, special thanks too for re-blogging this piece.
Yes, indeed. I shall soon share with you a couple of blog posts of mine, one covering my favourite songs, another mentioning some songs which do not have lyrics.
Once Anu Kapoor narrated the story of V K Murthy’s visit to England to work with the crew of “The Guns of Navarone” to learn about lighting effects in movies. According to the Union rules, Murthy was not allowed to work with the crew. So he sat throughout the day just watching what the crew were doing. Gregory Peck saw him and asked him if he was from India. When Murthy said yes, Gregory Peck told him he had been to Bombay and saw Suraiya. Murthy was very happy Gregory Peck, an American, talked to him the first time he saw him whereas Englishmen did not speak to him even after two months. The combination of Guru Dutt, Abrar Alvi and V K Murthy gave many gems for Hindi Cinema and you have written beautifully about them. The lighting effects of V K Murthy were awesome in black and white. I wonder if in colour you can have the same effect.
Wonderful selection of songs. Thank you for reblogging this – I enjoyed it a lot!
Thank you, Madhulika Ji. Such is the pervasive influence of good music that even in a blog devoted in equal measure to songs and the manner they have been picturised using chiaroscuro lighting, it is the songs that leave an impression! Thank you too for sharing the link to your website and blogs. I would love to go through them and share my comments.
Thank you very much, Giri for the appreciation and for recalling the anecdote about V K Murthy and Gregory Peck. Not many know that Murthy was born and grew up in Mysore and is a proud alumnus of Sri Jayachamarajendra Polytechnic, an integral part of the celebrated K R Circle landscape. I was going to add in my blog that colour photography somehow diminished cinema from the glory of its black and white past. I then asked myself if Dr. Zhivago would have been just as good in black and white, found my answer and dropped the idea. Incidentally, I may have watched Aap Ke Haseen Rukh on Anu Kapoor’s Masti program any number of times. Though he is a good anchor, he tends to repeat himself. But I had missed the story you referred to. So, it is not all that bad as someone new is watching the episodes all the time.
Shall we say chiaroscuro, in simple terms, in context of film music would be the entirety of picturisation of the song to create a particular mood.Camera and photographer plays a big part.
As you say, there is no end to the songs that come to one’s mind while reading the blog.
Can’t help mentioning some like
Bandini’s songs SDBs Ore majhi… and Asha’s Ab ke baras bhej bhiya ko babul …, Khamoshi’s Humne dekhi hai …… by Lata and Geeta Dutt in Kagaz ke phool Ishq ne kiya kya hansi sitam…..
Even songs of Aandhi come to mind.
By the way AS Raman of IWI was also an art critique and my father knew him well.There were writeups on father’s paintings by Raman with pictures of paintings in IWI more than once.
Thanks, Krishna. Not many people have even heard of A S Raman and much less his Chiaroscuro column in the IWI. ASR was from Kadapa district and Andhra University at Waltair, today’s Visakhapatnam. Your father and he may have known each other even before their stints in Delhi. In sharp contrast to his successor Khushwant Singh’s wit and spontaneity, ASR’s columns were laboured and dull. Reminiscing in 1981, this is what the Sardar himself wrote: “…Under its first two Indian editors [The Illustrated Weekly] became a vehicle of Indian culture devoting most of its pages to art, sculpture, classical dance and pretty pictures of flowers, birds, and dancing belles. It did not touch controversial subjects, was strictly apolitical and asexual (save occasional blurred reproductions of Khajuraho or Konark). It earned a well-deserved reputation for dull respectability. I changed all that. What was a four-wheeled Victoria taking well-draped ladies out to eat the Indian air, I made a noisy rumbustious, jet-propelled vehicle of information, controversy and amusement. I tore up the unwritten norms of gentility, both visual and linguistic. . . . And slowly the circulation built up, till the Illustrated did become a weekly habit of the English-reading pseudo-elite of the country….”.
Coming to the blog, it was not about chiaroscuro, per se, but to an offshoot of that art form that came to be known as chiaroscuro lighting. Also, I had wanted deliberately underplay the music and give credit to the cinematographers and directors. But such is the craze for old film music in India, that the songs are recalled and not always their memorable picturisation using chiaroscuro lighting. The Bandini and Khamoshi songs you refer to deserved to be included in this blog. Waqt Ne Kiya is already featured. In fact, I regard it as an iconic chiaroscuro song created by Kaifi Azmi, Geeta Dutt , V K Murthy and Guru Dutt. So much so, I have added an image of it at the end of the blog.