Kanan Devi

Kanan Bala was born in Howrah in 1916 into poverty — her father died when she was a child and she and her mother worked as domestic help — and she entered films at ten through a family acquaintance, acting in silents for Madan Theatres. With sound she sang as well as acted, trained under Allah Rakha and later Bhishmadev Chatterjee and Anadi Dastidar, and by the mid-1930s was the most popular actress in Bengali film.

At New Theatres she made Mukti (1937) with Pankaj Mullick, Vidyapati (1937), Street Singer (1938) opposite Saigal, Sapera, Jawani Ki Reet and Parichay — Hindi versions were made alongside the Bengali, and her songs for R.C. Boral and Pankaj Mullick were widely sold on record. She also recorded Rabindrasangeet and modern Bengali songs.

She left New Theatres in the 1940s, continued in Bengali films, and from 1949 produced her own through Shrimati Pictures, mostly adaptations of Sarat Chandra; she stopped acting in the mid-1950s. She was given the Padma Shri in 1968 and the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 1976, and died in Calcutta in 1992.

Kanan Devi sang in a high, sweet, slightly tremulous voice that was fashionable in the 1930s and sounds very much of its time now — fast, bright, with a fluttering vibrato and clear Bengali-accented Hindi. She was a trained singer and could handle the ornamented film song of the period with ease.