Meena Kumari, traditionally known for perfecting the role of the tragedienne in films, is actually the embodiment of the woman as Essence rather than flesh. The droop of her kiss curl, the anguish-laden voice never more than a sob from abject despair, the unblemished beauty made her the ultimate tragedy queen in Indian Cinema. In a career spanning three decades, she chiselled the contours of two role models and created some kind of an ideal in the mind of the viewer. This was the image of the woman as wife and the woman as mother.
Mahjabeen Ali Bux, her real name was was daughter of the Parsee theatre actor and music teacher Ali Bux and the dancer Iqbal Begum. Having hit upon hard times and living near Rooptara Studios, Ali Bux sought to get his daughters into films. She was renamed Baby Meena and cast in Vijay Bhatt`s Leatherface (1939).
She hit the big time with Vijay Bhatt`s Baiju Bawra (1952). With Baiju Bawra, the suffering Indian Woman found a new face in Meena Kumari. The heroine in the film is ever ready to negate herself for the material and spiritual advancement of the man she loves and is even willing to annihilate herself to provide him the experience of pain so that his music would be enriched! It was a strong performance and fetched her the inaugural Filmfare Award for Best Actress.
She became Film Director Kamal Amrohi`s second wife and with Daera (1953), Ek Hi Rasta (1956), Sharda (1957) and Dil Apna Aur Preet Parayi(1960), Meena went from strength to strength playing the suffering woman, the martyr to perfection.
In Daera, her barren life and subsequent disintegration underscores the Indian Womans lack of selfhood and remains one of the great moments of screen acting. In Sharda she gave a tour de force performance as Raj Kapoors lover who becomes his stepmother. Unfortunately coming in the same year as Mother India, Nargis swept all the awards but the Bombay Film Journalists Association named Meena as their best actress of the year for Sharda.
In the few light-hearted films she did in between like Azaad (1955), Miss Mary (1957), Shararat (1959) and Kohinoor(1960), she displayed an uninhibitedness that was refreshing to say the least. In these films, her physical movements are free and unrestrained and her dialogue delivery absolutely normal - a stark contrast to the studied mannerisms and passive postures of her tragic roles.
In Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, produced by Guru Dutt, the film tells the story of Choti Bahu, the youngest bride in an aristocratic zamindar family who strives to make her errant husband return to her even at the risk of self-destruction. It is perhaps the greatest performance ever on the Indian Screen. That year Meena made history as she garnered all the three Best Actress nominations for the Filmfare Award - For Aarti (1962), Main Chup Rahoongi (1962) and of course Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam for which she won the award.
While on the professional front, the emphatic success of Dil Ek Mandir (1963), Kajal (1965) and Phoor Aur Pathar (1966) kept her a top star, her marriage with Kamal Amrohi ended in 1964. Meena increasingly relied on the intimate kindness offered by younger men like Dharmendra and often dulled her senses with liquor. Her image grew in dimension as she was now widely seen as the eternal martyr.
Meena spent the last years of her life playing the doomed diva. With heavy drinking she had lost her looks and she began playing character roles albeit strong ones in potboilers like Jawab (1970) and Dushman (1971).
A talented poetess in her own right, she recorded a disc of her Urdu poems - I write, I recite. Thankfully her exquisite speaking voice remained intact.She came up with a strong portrayal of an old woman caught between two street gangs of frustrated, unemployed youth, whose killing finally makes them realize the futility of violence in Gulzar`s directorial debut Mere Apne (1971) and realizing she had limited time left went out of her way to complete what has now become a cult classic- Pakeezah (1972).
The film is a stylized, larger than life mythicization of the familiar tale of the prostitute with the heart of gold. Jointly planned by Meena and husband Amrohi in 1958, the film took 14 years to finally reach the silver screen. Filming had come to a halt when the couple split but Meena was now determined to complete it. There is grandeur in Amrohis filmmaking-an epic magnitude of treatment. The evocative songs and the background music create the right period mood and Amrohis eye for details brings great depth to the lavish sets. The film is helped by a stunning performance by Meena in the dual roles of the mother and daughter.
Pakeezah finally released in February 1972 and opened to just a lukewarm response but after her death on 31st March 1972, the film went on to become a huge success at the box-office and has since then acquired legendary status and is regarded as her best known film. Gomti ke Kinare was her last film.
The first role she almost perfected was in the Guru Dutt classic Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam (1962) as the protagonist, Chhoti Bahu. Fighting for her rights in the 19th century feudal milieu of Bengal, Chhoti Bahu was the epitome of the pativrata nan (devoted wife). She may have been viewed as an iconoclast by her family members, but her iconoclasm too was born out of a desire to be the perfect spouse. Nothing more and nothing less. Languishing in her boudoir, while her husband Chhote Babu (Rehman), an autocratic, purely hedonistic zamindar followed the dictates of his manhood in distant brothels, Chhoti Bahu plots and schemes to bring the prodigal back to her. She rebels against social and religious injunctions, resorts to alcohol, dances and desperately tries to seduce her husband, so that he might remain faithful. But all along her profligate ways - drinking and aggressively seducing - were condemned by her own conscience. Even as she let down her hair and lifted the cup of liqour to her lips, she bemoaned the fact that she was breaking the behavioural code prescribed for good Hindu wives. Yet the fact that these transgressions were perpetrated in order to preserve a dharma that must be paramount in any woman’s life - a good wife’s dharma - deified her further. Here was a neglected woman who, in the sober 1960s, was throwing herself at a man’s feet in a drunken stupor, aggressively demanding satiation. But the fact that this act was depicted as a glorious sacrifice (Chhoti Bahu was sacrificing her religious virtuosity), not only sanctified it, it also created a prototype for the sixties Savitri (a typically faithful wife). For if the mythological Savitri could confront the angel of death for her husband’s well- being, this celluloid Savitri could even compromise her religious sanctimony for the observance of a greater duty. That of the woman as wife.
Earlier, in Bimal Roy’s Parineeta (1953), too, Meena Kumari had essayed a similar, all-consuming, unswerving devotion to Ashok Kumar, the man who had secretly married her. A victim of the rich-poor divide, Lalita is separated from her lover and is on the brink of a marriage of convenience - one that might help her poor uncle to repay the debt he owes to her beloved’s father. Lalita refuses to marry, yet she is unable to bridge the class divide. Nevertheless, these superficial barriers cannot sully her wifely devotions. For Lalita, despite separation and misunderstanding, chooses to remain faithful to her secret husband. She is willing to lead a life of solitary abandonment, even though her husband is willing to marry again. Simply because both she and society believe that a wife must remain faithful, irrespective of similar reciprocation on the part of her husband.
It is a similar blend of devotion, pain and purity that weaves its way into her delineation of the beloved and the mother-figure too. In S.J. Row Kavi’s Bhabhi ki Chudiyan (1961), Geeta the foster-mother to her young brother-in-law, Mohan (Sudesh Kumar) is more than the mother the orphan could ever have had. As he sits and watches her paint the traditional rangoli pattern (graffiti made on festive occasions) in the courtyard of the modest family home, the clanging of her bangles fills his life completely. Mohan is never able to find happiness with another woman, for his sister-in-law’s piety, domesticity and devotion have created an image of a nonpareil that cannot be matched by another earthly love. Here, the mother image born out of Meena Kumari’s indefatigable nurturing of the family towers above all other relationships. So much so that Mohan is never able to form another satisfying bond with the opposite sex. Tireless and totally undemanding, Geeta spends her life and even relinquishes it in catering to the emotional and physical demands of her family.
This image is repeated in Dulal Guha’s Dushman (1971) and Gulzar’s Mere Apne (1971), albeit with a pronounced accent on righteousness. In both these films, Meena Kumari embodies the voice of conscience that surfaces amidst the moral blight of the men and brings back the prodigals to virtue. In Dushman, her propriety sets straight the man (Rajesh Khanna) who murdered her husband. Khanna, an alcoholic, a womaniser and a truck driver with tardy morals, is forced to stay with the widow and her family as punishment meted out by the courts. The sentence comes as a godsend. For the widow’s virtuousness and unwavering propriety cures him, not only of his pRofligate ways, but it cleanses his soul too. The blackguard, under the benign influence of the maternal widow, metamorphoses into a shining white soul who works hard, doesn’t drink, doggedly looks after the welfare of the victimised family and can never ever think of harming another living creature. In short, the ideal mother-figure metaphorically gives birth to an ideal, new man.
In Gulzar’s Mere Apne, the mother-figure weaves her cleansing magic, not on an individual, but on groups of individuals. The old woman and her talisman of goodness makes her an oasis of peace in the midst of a city torn apart by gang warfare. When everything fails to cure the anarchic hoodlums of their overriding lust to kill, plunder and loot, it is the mother-figure who manages to purge the city and the humans of their evil. The warring gang leaders (Vinod Khanna and Shatrughan Sinha), prototypes for the nation’s wayward youth, are brought back to order, ethics, family and country by Meena Kumari’s motherly tutorials on the good life of glorious virtue.
Reverence then was the only virtue permissible to Meena Kumari’s celluloid image. For Meena Kumari represented a rarefied concept of traditional womanhood that was divested of all its physical antecedents. If beauty, not sensuality, was the defining characteristic of her physicality, then pain, not pleasure, was the predominant emotion which she opted for. Purity was the keynote of this metaphor for melancholia, where suffering and self-sacrifice became more pleasurable than satiation and self-appeasement.
It wasn’t incidental that Meena Kumari perfected the role of the virginal nautch-girl in Kamal Amrohi’s Pakeezah. For it was only Meena with her metaphorical sanctity and overriding penchant for tragedy who could infuse body and soul into cinema’s biggest oxymorn. Naturally, a prostitute had to be pure, if she was played by Meena. The fact that she was the most popular dancing girl who caught the fancy of all the nawabs and the nouveau riche of the city hardly posed a threat to her intrinsic chastity. Despite being in a profession where display and artful seduction are inevitable, the hero (Raaj Kumar) was only allowed a fleeting glimpse of the dancing girl’s foot in the first encounter. Even the sheer physical beauty of the screen diva was meant to be revered, not savoured in a more physical manner. At the most, the lover could dream of embarking on a sublime voyage to the moon with the moon-faced beloved ‘Chalo dildar chalo, chand ke paar chalo’, (Let us go beyond the moon, beloved) enthused Raaj Kumar on a love tryst, when he has the woman all to himself in sylvan surroundings. An overture that is fit and proper for a woman, whose femininity can only be serenaded from a distance. Through poetry and verse. Not passion.
Filmography
Aarti
Abhilasha
Adil-E-Jahangir
Akeli Mat Jaiyo
Aladin & The Wonderful Lamp
Anmol Ratan
Ardhangini
Azad
Baadbaan
Bachchon Ka Khel
Bahana
Baharoni Ki Manzil
Bahu Begum
Baiju Bawra
Bandhan
Bandish
Behan
Benazeer
Bhabhi Ki Chudiyan
Bhai Jaan
Bheegi Raat
Chand
Chandan Ka Palna
Chandni Chowk
Char Dil Char Raahen
Chiraag Kahan Roshni Khan
Chitralekha
Daera
Dana Pani
Dil Apna Aur Preet Parai
Dil Ek Mandir
Do Bigha Zameen
Dushman
Ek Hi Raasta
Ek Nai Ladki
Ek Teri Nishani
Ek Thi Ladki
Farishta
Foot Path
Ghazal
Gomti Ke Kinare
Halaku
Hamara Ghar
Hanuman Patal Vijay
Ilzaam
Jagir
Jawab
Kajal
Kinare Kinare
Kohinoor
Laxmi Narayan
Madhosh
Madhu
Magroor
Main Bhi Ladki Hoon
Main Chup Rahugi
Manjhali Didi
Meena Kumari Ki Amar Kahani
Mem Saheb
Mere Apne
Miss Mary
Naulakha Haar
Naya Andaaz
Neelam
Noor Jahan
Pakeeza
Parineeta
Patjhad
Pattharon Ka Saudagar
Phir Milenge
Phool Aur Patthar
Pinjre Ka Panchhi
Piya Ghar Aja
Purnima
Pyar Ka Sagar
Pyar Ki Dastan
Rukhsana
Saat Phere
Sahara
Saheb Biwi Aur Gulam
Sanam
Sanjh Aur Savera
Satta Bazar
Savera
Shararat
Sharda
Shatranj
Shree Ganesh Mahima
Shri Naqad Narayan
Shrimati 420
Tamasha
Veer Ghatotkach
Yahudi
Zindagi Aur Khwab
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