Harano Sur (1957)

The amnesiac Aloke (Kumar) is rescued from the asylum by doctor Roma (Sen) who takes him to her father’s (Sanyal) edenic country house. They marry, but a second accident, and a new bout of amnesia, makes him forget her and recall instead his earlier life as a rich businessman in Calcutta. When Roma follows him there, he does not remember her, but he hires her as governess to his niece, causing her considerable anguish. Moinak Biswas characterised the film as a domestic melodrama of ‘a subordinate woman winning over her boss’s heart’, in the genre of English novels such as Richardson’s Pamela (Biswas, ‘The Couple and Their Spaces: Harano Sur as Melodrama’, 1995). Roma keeps trying to stimulate the hero’s memory, using e.g. the refrain of their wedding song (and the film’s musical hit) Tumi je amar, but is unable to reply when Aloke, haunted by her presence, asks ‘Who are you?’. The plot provides a schematic version of the classic Kumar-Sen romance with a medical angle (cf. Sagarika, 1956; Deep Jweley Jai, 1959), many lavishly mounted scenes of windswept expanses, fluttering curtains, incense and mnemonic objects such as a bunch of tube-roses, countered by two abrupt eruptions of realist outdoor locations (when Aloke first recovers his memory, and when Roma follows him into his Calcutta office). The film was adapted from Mervyn LeRoy’s Random Harvest (1942).