Nargis: The Life

At the time of the release in 1957 of Mother India, which was the film with which she was conclusively associated from then on, Nargis was among the most prominent figures of the Indian cinema; the facts of her biography are now legend, but they do need to be rehearsed briefly. Nargis’s mother, Jaddanbai, was by birth a kothewali (professional singer and performer/courtesan), well known in Allahabad and Calcutta as a specialist in the musical form known as thumri. She had, according to her daughter’s biographer,^[14] married at seventeen and become the mother of two sons; nothing is known of this first partner or indeed of how formalized such a domestic arrangement might have been. In any event, when in 1928 a wealthy young medical student named Mohanbabu proposed to convert to Islam (thus becoming Abdul Rashid) to marry her, she consented. Nargis was born the following year. (It may be of interest to note the demand that the respectable and wealthy medical student convert for the sake of the [already married] courtesan, a demand that Nargis, at the height of her career, was unable or unwilling to make of Raj Kapoor or Sunil Dutt.) Jaddanbai moved to Bombay in the mid-1930s, having by this time established herself as a film producer, music director, and actress (this being the era predating the ascendancy of the playback singer, an era in which roles were assigned according to vocal talent). She was soon to become a Bombay institution, attracting many of the leading figures of the film world to her home and to the studio where she worked. Though Nargis appeared as a child actress in Talash-e-Haq (1935), she was carefully educated, and her access to the world of films was strictly controlled. She was a student at St. Mary’s, an elite girls’ school in Bombay, and was to entertain hopes of training as a doctor, an ambition that her own father, Mohanbabu, had abandoned in order to marry Jaddanbai. She was with difficulty persuaded by her mother and her mother’s friend, the director Mehboob Khan, to perform her first “adult” role at fourteen in the latter’s Taqdeer (1943). All such scruples were set aside after the success of Taqdeer, though the young Nargis is said to have faced some degree of social ostracism from the families of her more respectable, non-filmi classmates.^[15] While Nargis’s rapid change of heart is all too easily attributable to her great youth, coupled with the glamour of the industry in which she found herself, the sense of isolation and degradation that accompanies the glamour and responsibility is not without interest. Certainly Nargis’s feeling that the decision to be an actress was one from which there was no going back (“Quite rapidly she realised that life would never be the same again for her or her family. Nothing more was heard about Mehboob’s promise to leave her to her studies or indeed about the planned studies”)^[16] is coded in terms analogous to those attendant upon a narrative of the loss of sexual innocence. Rosie Thomas’s report of the Nargis mythology conforms more unambiguously to such a trajectory: “Once she reached adolescence, however, Nargis’s mother not only tricked her into (most unwillingly) starring in a film for her friend Mehboob Khan but also allegedly put her daughter’s nath (virginity) on the market and allowed a wealthy Muslim prince to pay handsomely for her. This episode is sometimes denied, or recounted as her first affair. Its purpose seems to be to construct as already tarnished before meeting Raj Kapoor.” ^[17] Nargis never quite lost the sense of being less than fully respectable that such an ancestry and such a career implied, and she always cherished as a utopian possibility the dream of becoming a doctor. She appeared in several more films in the 1940s, achieving star status by the time she was approached by a then comparatively unknown Raj Kapoor, to play opposite him in his first production, Aag (1948). After a number of hits, which featured her opposite some of the best-known leading men of the day, especially Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar, she became one of the most important luminaries of the newly emerging star system in Bombay cinema; she was routinely billed above her male leads, and, for some years in the 1950s, she commanded higher fees than any of them did. The international success of some of the films (Awaara, 1951; Shri 420, 1954) that she had made with her lover, Raj Kapoor—which were runaway hits in the Soviet Union, West Asia, and North Africa—added another kind of nuance to her star image, as she became, in these post-Independence years, the ambassador of “Indian culture” on a world stage.

Nargis achieved a significant measure of star power in the years between the late 1940s and mid-1950s, not only because of her histrionic virtuosity (which was considerable) but also because of her very public romance with the rising male star Raj Kapoor. While it is true that Nargis was, as a review of a book on Raj Kapoor’s films unequivocally states, central to the making of Raj Kapoor himself as an actor and a director and of RK Studios^[18] (she worked at minimal wages for the studio and, in a partial throwback to the early days of the studio system, acted in non-RK films only at the pleasure of her lover), it was also true that her association with Raj helped invest her fully with star status. He had begun to pursue her very early in their association, and by the time they acted together in Andaaz and Barsaat (both 1949), they were already an item. Raj Kapoor was married and a father, in addition to being a Hindu. Their love affair was conducted without any particular subterfuge; and since they were young, glamorous, and successful, and from all accounts passionately in love with each other, they were envied as well as reproached. As her biographer admits, “It was her appearance with Raj Kapoor that thrilled audiences. Their romance had an appeal that nothing else could rival.” ^[19] The love scenes in Barsaat in particular were marked by an intensity hitherto unseen in the Bombay cinema. Critics have pointed to the unorthodox camera work and sound effects in the love scenes, with their lingering close-ups and a low-decibel pitch that intimates intimacy.^[20]

The star biography took another significant turn in the mid-1950s, when Nargis realized that Raj Kapoor would not marry her, that is, he would not make her his second wife; he began instead to demonstrate a marked romantic interest in other actresses. Besides, it was becoming clear to her that her that her near-exclusive association with RK Studios was keeping her from important roles (such as that of Anarkali in K. Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam, for which she had been chosen); some of her most highly regarded performances (though not necessarily the ones that brought her stardom)—in Andaaz, Anhonee, Jogan, and Mother India—were performed outside RK Studios, which had a fairly limited vision of the female lead’s role in a film.^[21] She had once complained to screenwriter K. A. Abbas about the triviality of her role in the wildly successful Awaara, insisting that he create for her a more substantial role in Anhonee, produced under the Naya Sansar banner.^[22] Accordingly, she let Mehboob (who had “discovered” her and who had always begrudged Raj Kapoor his powerful claims on her) know that she was available for Mother India. A remake of Mehboob’s 1940 classic, Aurat (Woman), Mother India was more self-consciously epic and nationalist. It was designed (among other things) to function as an implicit rebuttal of Katherine Mayo’s notorious book of 1927 that had detailed the pathological sexual practices of Hindu males.^[23]

The film was three years in the making, involving enormous resources and the paid and unpaid labor of thousands of people. When it was released in 1957, it was successful on a scale unprecedented in Bombay cinema. It ran for fifty weeks in Bombay, breaking all box-office records, and was granted tax-exempt status in the Bombay province; it was the first Indian film to be nominated for an Oscar (in the foreign-film category), and it won Nargis the Filmfare Award for 1957 as well as the Best Actress award at the Karlovy Vary film festival.^[24] The role of Radha in Mother India was the one that irrevocably defined Nargis for the Indian cinema-going public as well as for the history of Indian film, not simply because of its epic scope and her own brilliance in it, but also because it effectively marked her departure—at the height of her career—from Bombay cinema. Several other films, on which she had been working concurrently with Mother India, were released in 1957–1958, though she bowed out of her acting career once Mehboob Khan’s epic was completed. She was to appear in the movies only once after this, in Raat aur Din [Night and Day, 1967], in order to help her producer brothers out of a severe financial crisis.^[25]

The fascination of the film was augmented by a behind-the-scenes story of its making, a story that was to constitute an epic narrative in itself. It is said that during the famous fire scene in the film, Nargis was trapped behind some burning haystacks and was rescued at considerable personal risk by the relatively unknown young actor Sunil Dutt, who played her wayward son Birjoo in the film. This is one of the stories most often repeated about Nargis, satisfying every expectation about life imitating art. “Mother” and “son” fell in love and were married quietly in March 1958, at which point Nargis retired from her acting career. Marriage is said to have been her salvation; said one of her costars, K. N. Singh, “With marriage it was like she had reached home. She thought God had come to earth in the form of Sunil Dutt. So much did she worship him.” ^[26] She became an exemplary wife and the devoted mother of three children, especially of her son Sanjay. She also dedicated herself to a number of charitable causes, including that of spastic children. She led an active life, working for her husband’s film-production company, participating in government-sponsored delegations to foreign countries, and serving briefly as a member of the Rajya Sabha, to which she was nominated by her friend Indira Gandhi. During these years she was made unhappy by the delinquency and drug addiction of her much-pampered son and by her husband’s criticism of her overindulgence of Sanjay. In 1980 a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer took her to New York for treatment; she died in Bombay in 1981, a month before her fifty-second birthday.

Before we read the intertextuality of the epic film and the epic life, we need to speak briefly of the film itself. Mother India, which is said to have played continually in one part or another of the country since its release, is one of the great classics of the Bombay cinema. It is the story of the trials of the peasant woman Radha, who spends her life battling the malign forces of nature and humanity and who assumes the mythic stature of the matriarch by the film’s end. A devoted wife and the mother of four boys, she toils heroically at home and in the fields, enduring poverty and the rapacious extortions of the village moneylender, Sukhilala. Her husband loses his arms in an accident and forsakes his home, unable to bear the shame of his dependence on her. After floods have killed two of her sons and devastated her home and her harvest, the moneylender proposes to feed her children in exchange for making her his mistress. Sorely tempted though she is, she prizes her laaj (chastity) above all else and manages to rebuild her life. She raises her sons on her own and becomes “the mother of the whole village,” keeping the villagers from fleeing their home after the floods. As she sings to them, in the name of Mother Earth, a map of pre-Partition India forms on the screen. In the second part of the film, Radha is older, her sons grown. Her older son, Ramu, is domestic and law abiding; her younger and rebellious son, Birjoo, is passionately devoted to her, a devotion that is intimately bound up in his keen sense of the wrongs done to her and to the village by Sukhilala. Becoming a bandit, he kills Sukhilala and attempts to abduct the moneylender’s daughter in an attempt to counter the insult offered earlier to his mother’s honor; but his mother, who regards the chastity of the village women as her own, kills him rather than letting him bring disgrace to the village.

In retrospect, Nargis’s decision to play the role of the heroine in Mother India seems to be charged with extraordinary symbolic import. Not only did it signal her break with her erstwhile lover, it also meant a markedly differently role from the ones that she had been used to playing. She typically played the glamorous Indian woman whose modernity coexisted with her rhapsodic submission to a whole ensemble of “Indian” values.^[27] This gendered drama of the overthrow of western cultural values through an elaborately reinflected Indian tradition was (and is) a staple of the Bombay cinema, allowing for a staging of the differential seductions of both modernity and tradition. The role of Radha, on the other hand, was entirely without any such obvious glamour, requiring her to play a poor peasant woman (an extraordinary demand for a glamorous star, especially before the advent of the so-called parallel cinema) and to age more than twenty years in the course of the film.

Tales of Nargis’s professionalism and her strong identification with the role are legendary. She (at least in her recall of it) saw this as a dream role, in which she could play the paragon, the identificatory ideal of the Indian woman. P. K. Nair recalled with what relish she deglamourized herself for the role and the way she “completely transformed herself into the ‘Kali’ image of the ‘Mother.’” ^[28] Even the notoriously acerbic film critic Baburao Patel was moved to exclaim: “Remove Nargis and there is no Mother India. Nargis is both the body and soul of the picture.…Nargis lives the role better than Radha could have lived it.” ^[29] It is instructive to read her description of her experience of the film, especially the horrific scene of the burning haystacks, which she chose to do herself instead of entrusting it, as was expected, to a double:

Preparations were being made for the fire sequence in Mother India. Nargis, made up to look like an old woman, was talking…of death and saying how much her hands, with the make-up on them, resembled her mother’s hands.…She ran in, to embrace the flames. The flames responded willingly. They embraced her and planted burning kisses on her weary but determined brow.

It was soon over. Nargis was rescued. She had sustained burns. But, in the flames, she had at last found the Truth she had been searching for, the Truth which freed her. The old Nargis died in those flames.^[30]

The filming, and especially the trial by fire which was fortuitously authenticated by real-life occurrences, is explicitly coded as transformative of the “life” and as the repository of a certain truth. What is perhaps more curious for me is the monumentalizing and distancing effect of the use of the third person. Nargis seems quite aware of herself as legend, larger than life; but in a moment of simultaneous subjective splitting and incorporation, she is also curiously positioned as the obituarist of an older, legendary self. She dies to the old forms of existence, in order to achieve a certain transcendence and entry into a new legendary status; and death alone provides the condition of possibility for such transcendence.

Part of the fascination of the film for Indian audiences is of course the iconicity of various constitutive moments: the trial by fire and the rescue, the prestige of motherhood, and the attainment of mythic status. This was to prove, for Nargis, literally the role to end all roles. Given the mythic quality of the role, and given the mythic status she had herself attained because of its publicity and its wide circulation and popularity, it seemed that she had effectively made herself unfit for ordinary roles. Only marriage and motherhood in “real life” could provide a script that matched the epic quality of the film. And while it is true that the female star’s renunciation of films for marriage is the norm rather than the exception in the popular Hindi cinema and is routinely attended by the inflated rhetoric of the felicities of matrimony and motherhood, there is a way in which Nargis’s preparation for that last, most exalted role had been distinctively, indeed uniquely heralded, by her own professional trajectory. It is precisely her renunciation—which seemed so great and so apposite at the same time—that allowed someone like K. N. Singh to rate her wifehood as the culmination of a brilliant acting career: “I think her greatest achievement was getting a husband like Sunil. Twenty-two years of married life were her happiest years.” ^[31]