Some thoughts upon the death of Zarina Begum (and a few other notes updating past posts)

I almost typed a little about Zarina Begum in the P.S. to my last post – the one on the Dalrymple books. I had said that a few references from songs and films had made me think about Zafar, and this was why I grabbed Dalrymple’s book The Last Mughal. I had thought a lot about Zafar, actually, after writing my post about the ghazal (and thumri) singer Zarina Begum and her performance of the song Nazar Lagi Tore Bangle Par. Zarina Begum (and a few others) had attributed this song to Zafar, though most people attribute it to the people given the credit in the 1958 film Kala Pani. Given what I have learned about Zarina Begum, I strongly suspect that her claim was correct.

As I said in that post from last December, there were a few articles and documentaries about Zarina floating around in 2015 and 2016 but, unfortunately, they all focused more than anything on the fact that she had fallen into obscurity and poverty, that her family was living in poverty, and that she was very ill but could not afford all the healthcare that she needed. I found out that a little after all this news came out, she did get some help from arts organizations and some money from the government as well, but I could not find anything in terms of updates on her condition, and I said in my post, “Now that a couple of years have passed since all this information came out, I hope that she is still alive.” And that was where everything stood at the end of 2017.

As it turned out, she did last longer than we might have expected, but she passed on May 12, 2018. Per a report in the blogs section of the Times of India dated May 16:

Zarina Begum, the last disciple of ‘Mallika-e-ghazal’ Begum Akhtar, and the only torch-bearer of Baithak Gana, died of a chronic kidney disease at a private city hospital at around 8 am on Saturday.

This is sad, but I’m glad she had a little more time than people expected and lived to the age of 88 (which seems pretty good, considering what she went through).

I have to stress here that I was really impressed with her singing in the clips that I shared in my post last December. I actually enjoyed her performance much more than Asha Bhosle’s playback performance for Nalini Jaywant in Kala Pani. According to a documentary that I viewed, Zarina was 82 when she sang the version of “Nazar Lagi Tore Bangle Par” that I posted. I think some people insist that she had to be a little younger, but in any event, even if she was in her 70s, that was still very impressive.

While looking for more information on Zarina Begum, I found a great tribute to her from 2007 at Last.fm. This short tribute is actually a preface to contents that are linked to at MySpace which I cannot access (I don’t know whether it’s because they’re outdated, because I’m not a member of MySpace or because of other, technical problems). Nonetheless, the preface, all by itself, made the visit to Last.fm more than worthwhile.

Nusrat Durrani wrote:

Bessie Smith is eternal. I am a big fan of Odetta and Nina Simone. For many months in 2003-2005 all I heard was Mazzy Star because Hope Sandoval is a cure for pain. But there is a singer from my hometown of Lucknow, India that is right up there with all of them. Her name is Zarina Begum and you will never hear her songs or her story. She is a master of the “ghazal,” the traditional love song sung in Urdu, a north Indian language. It might be an unfamiliar sound to you but anyone even casually conversant with the technicalities of singing can tell she is a gifted, poetic, songstress. Once a star in the 60s and 70s, a series of misfortunes and the callousness of an unappreciative bourgeois citizenry have forced this enchanting woman to a life of obscure poverty.

As someone else who comes from a western environment in which people are not aware of ghazal singers and the like, I enjoyed that this writer drew comparisons to contemporary western singers that many of us are more familiar with – including Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star, who were generally considered an “alternative rock” group in the 1990s. I like Mazzy Star, too, and Hope Sandoval. I would not say that Hope Sandoval is one of my absolute favorites from ‘90s “alternative rock,” but this is a respectable opinion, and Nusrat Durrani drew the seemingly strange kind of comparison that I might very well draw, myself. Yet I would go further and say that you do not necessarily need to know “technicalities” to appreciate a singer like Zarina Begum – or her mentor Begum Akhtar. I did not come from India and I had no classical Indian music influences in my childhood (well, outside of records and TV clips of Ravi Shankar and George Harrison and an occasional live classical performance at an Indian restaurant that my parents took me to), yet I ended up taking to different kinds of Indian music quite a bit several decades into my life. Maybe I could name a number of pertinent influences that I encountered during my adulthood, but the point I’d like to make here is that the love of great singing and music from any place is not dependent on learning technicalities or learning anything complex, for that matter. When people are encouraged to open their minds, they do learn to appreciate music from different places and different traditional cultures. I think that if anything has prevented people from doing so (especially during an age when everyone can have access to music all over the globe), it is the limits of the marketplace, in which sellers of culture have, for a long time, categorized everything, separating different kinds of music or other entertainment into different little boxes for the sake of niche marketing. That sort of fragmentation of taste is finally breaking down somewhat exactly because people have access to music all around the world with just a click on YouTube or some other streaming forum (and that has helped me to greatly expand my knowledge of Indian music as well). But the obstacles from niche marketing and the like certainly still do exist, as do the prejudices drummed into people’s heads that they should not or cannot enjoy – or work with – music or art coming from cultures that are supposedly not “their own.”

And with regard to damage done by the marketplace, I love a point at the end of the paragraph, where Nusrat Durrani says, “a series of misfortunes and the callousness of an unappreciative bourgeois citizenry have forced this enchanting woman to a life of obscure poverty.” But is it really that a particular “bourgeois citizenry” was unappreciative, or isn’t this just the natural consequence of a certain system that is always run by the bourgeoisie? As long as we live under a system through which everyone’s ability to live decently and stay healthy is greatly determined by money, we’re always going to see stories about artists who had at one time brought great joy to people falling into terrible states of poverty and ruin. From my perspective, the stories seem particularly, jarringly frequent in the history of film stars and musicians from India and Pakistan (ironically, as best illustrated in the lives of some people who had their peak at a time when India was supposed to be socialist and many of the popular films preached against the evils of capitalism), but they are not unheard of in the U.S., either. I think that here in the U.S., the system somehow established greater economic safeguards for people who became successful in the entertainment world (though many are obviously subjected to terrible social pressures until they end up killing themselves in one way or another – also not an unusual story in India). But the U.S. is also a place where people who have slipped a few times for one reason or another might end up homeless and often can’t pay their medical bills.

I was glad to see that Zarina Begum survived a few years beyond the dire messages that were circulating in 2015 and she did live until a decent old age. But since being exposed to the story that was circulated a few years ago, I so much wish that she could have lived a better life.

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Part II: Regarding Some Other (Lighter) Matters:

I wanted to add a few short notes as follow-up to some other, older posts that have come back into focus for me. The reason these older posts have come back into focus is because of extremely helpful comments, especially by a fairly new commenter to this blog identified as Pritha2000. (By the way, I always tell everyone to look at the new comment links on the right side of the blog – sometimes they will lead you to new information that is at least as interesting as anything that I’ve posted on the front page.)

First Pritha revived the conversation about the magnificent Sitara Devi “snake dance” in the film Anjali (1957). In a comment on June 14, she identified this film as an adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Chandalika. This inspired me to look for (and post) a good description of the whole plot line of Chandalika as well as guess where in the plot the dance had to have fit, and Pritha confirmed my guess and elaborated upon it. And so, thanks to this exchange that occurred in June of 2018, we greatly improved upon a post that originally went up in April of 2010.

Pritha also sent an invaluable comment to my nearly ten-year-old post on Uday Shankar’s Kalpana (1948). Apparently, over at Indiancine.ma, they have posted the Scorcese-restored version of the film, with English subtitles. This isn’t the copy that I saw there – or on YouTube – before. All prior copies that I could find online (after a long time of not being able to find any) were far less easy to look at and didn’t have subtitles. And I have now watched pieces of the restored version (here and there), and the dances look beautiful, indeed. Maybe I’ll find a way to write this film up soon. Thank you again, Pritha!

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P.S. The fantastic picture of Zarina above appeared in several places, including an article announcing a concert in 2014. Because it’s been used a few times, I am assuming nobody is going to get very possessive about it if they see it here. (There were other pictures that I saw that were more specific to particular articles which I decided not to use for that reason – and also because I like this one more.)

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Delving Into Dalrymple (The Last Mughal and, especially, White Mughals)

During the past month, I’ve had the very interesting experience of delving into two works by the man from the UK who is probably the best-known writer of Indian history in the English language today (and for good reason), William Dalrymple.

The first Dalrymple book that I delved into was The Last Mughal, which anyone familiar with the subject will recognize from its title as being about Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II. I had become very curious about this subject because of references to Zafar (as he is fondly known to many) and his poetry in Hindi films and related song performances. So, when I picked up this large book (445-plus pages in pretty small print, not including notes and other chapters outside of the main body), I looked forward to reading a whole lot about Zafar and his poetry. Actually, though, I found that most of the book was not really specifically devoted to either.

I think the book is better described by its subtitle, “The fall of a dynasty: Delhi, 1857.” The bulk of this book is devoted to the details of war and the fall of Delhi. In the earlier part of the book, there are some interesting descriptions of a Mughal court that tries for some time to ignore its impending doom, with great amounts of time and energy being spent on art, poetry, music, dancing, and assorted decadent indulgences that the aristocracy actually can no longer afford, considering the peril that it’s in. That part is the most interesting to me. Much more of the book, though, is devoted to the details of battle. This includes some interesting information about strategic successes and failures on both sides, but ultimately, we end up reading much more about atrocities. (Originally, there are some atrocities committed by the mutineering Sepoys, but those, of course, are far outweighed by the ones dealt out by the British at the end.)

I have to admit that I was not looking so much for a long war story, but, on the other hand, I must commend Dalrymple for the obviously voluminous research that he did, sometimes extending into incredibly minute details, and for his skill at conveying all these details so clearly that his writing seems very close to flawless. Most importantly, after reading The Last Mughal, I felt far more educated about historical circumstances that I have seen so often referred to in classic Indian films.

The Dalrymple book that I really enjoyed was the second one I read, but the earlier-written of the two, White Mughals. In The Last Mughal, Dalrymple often refers back to the era that White Mughals covers (that is, the late 18th century and early 19th) because it included a time when many British occupants of India were much more receptive to Indian culture, and the self-superior racist attitudes often associated with the British colonization of India were not as prevalent. In the Introduction to White Mughals, Dalrymple also points out that this is a fact of history that needs to be more widely revealed:

The Kirkpatricks inhabited a world that was far more hybrid, and with far less clearly defined ethnic, national, and religious borders, than we have been conditioned to expect, either by the conventional Imperial history books written in Britain before 1947, or by the nationalist historiography of post-Independence India, or for that matter by the post-colonial work coming from new generations of scholars, many of whom tend to follow the path opened by Edward Said in 1978 with his pioneering Orientalism. It was as if this early promiscuous mingling of races and ideas, modes of dress and ways of living, was something that was on no one’s agenda and suited nobody’s version of events. All sides seemed, for different reasons, to be slightly embarrassed by this moment of crossover, which they preferred to pretend had never happened. It is, after all, always easier to see things in black and white.

(By the way, that passage also reminded me a lot of a passage from another book by a different writer, which I discussed somewhat a year and a half ago. Interestingly, in both cases, the writers found fault with popular writings by Edward Said. I will add more about that in a P.S. below.)

Broadly speaking, especially in the first few chapters, White Mughals is devoted to men who moved to India in service to the British East India Company but who ended up eagerly adopting Mughal styles of dress and living because they admired the culture.

There also is a point frequently made that some of these British men were attracted to such a lifestyle because they could indulge their more sensual cravings in ways that they would have missed out on completely if they’d stayed at home. These sensual pleasures included great indulgent dining, leisurely enjoyment of sublime poetry and music, and the ability to keep several or a dozen Indian women in a harem. (Of course, for the most part, these were men who found a place among the aristocracy.)

But the heart of White Mughals is the romance between two people, an officer in the army of the British East India Company named James Kirkpatrick and an Indian Muslim noblewoman (or noblegirl, really) named Khair-un-Nissa. With great skill, Dalrymple relates all the joy and sorrows, victory and (most of all) heartbreaks involved before, during, and after this affair (and marriage). That is why White Mughals also is better described by its subtitle: “Love and betrayal in 18th century India.”

James Kirkpatrick evidently had had some indulgences with women before he met his great love in this tale and he even had some kind of harem (though not a large one). But these experiences were insignificant compared to his one-to-one romance with Khair. The girl whom he fell in love with was only 14 when he met her, which would certainly raise some questions in the present day, but Dalrymple spends very little time discussing the notion that Kirkpatrick might have in some way taken advantage of her. In fact, he stresses the evidence showing that Khair was the one who started the relationship. Actually, if anyone conducted any manipulation here, it was her mother, grandmother, and other female members of her family, who helped to engineer the meeting and encouraged the romance in part to find a way to get Khair out of an undesired arranged marriage. (Obviously, in 18th century India, 14 was a perfectly marriageable age, at least for a girl.) James does end up marrying her, himself, after a short while, and in the process, he causes great scandal to himself and risks a lot of hardship. Part of the reason for this is that the White Mughal era is actually beginning to wind down as the more typically colonialist and racist attitudes are starting to take over with the increase of British power in India. In James’ own immediate situation, certain officials enter the picture who cause him greater trouble and he is left to do one thing or another to negotiate around these hurdles although, for a while, he manages to maintain and even increase his professional status. Unfortunately, he does not do as well at maintaining his personal health, and Dalrymple strongly suggests that this deterioration in health was directly related to the social stress. Later in the book, we are also provided with information about how the deteriorating social relationships of the era harmed Khair-un-Nissa, who actually had to face a lot more heartbreak in her life years after James was out of the picture. (By the way, I hope that I have not just written too much of a spoiler, but there are plenty of hints from the beginning that life for these two lovers will not end up happily-ever-after.)

The connections that Dalrymple makes between the affairs of his main subjects and the social changes that he is eager to write about are very intriguing and quite ambitious. But by the end of White Mughals, I felt that the writing shone most in the conveyance of emotional drama, and I found the drama here to be more moving than many that I’ve read in fiction.

I would like to find some passages to show how well Dalrymple builds up this drama, but this is a little difficult because he is not the kind of writer who seeks to dazzle a reader with one or another showy paragraph. The effect of the good writing in this book is cumulative. Certainly, Dalrymple is not averse to dropping a little sentence at the end of a chapter to create a cliffhanger that will keep you turning pages (an obvious trick but fun nonetheless), e.g.: “Yet even here the story does not quite end. For after a gap of more than thirty years there is one, final, extraordinary coda.” But the real reason I kept turning the pages was that I enjoyed the way the facts and circumstances slowly built up and progressed, with one good layer of information following the other, all related in a crafty and skillful way. I think it also became clear in this book that William Dalrymple absolutely loves writing detailed histories centered on solidly fleshed out individual subjects and I believe I caught some of that relish too. For me, this turned out to be a highly enjoyable reading experience in addition to being very educational.
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P.S. The passage that I thought about after reading the one that I quoted from Dalrymple was from Wendy Buonaventura’s Serpent of the Nile, which I reviewed as part of a more wandering post back on December 23, 2016. I typed out the passage back then, too, but here it is again, for comparison with Dalrymple’s:

The current, widely held view of Orientalism derives from Edward Said’s thesis that the West has exploited, misunderstood and even invented the East for its own sinister purposes. From the wealth of material available, it is easy to select examples to suit this theory and ignore those which do not. However, Orientalist attitudes to the Middle East are as varied as human beings. An obsession with European colonialism has unfortunately blinded many critics to the complex interrelationship which has existed between Europe and the Arab-Islamic world for hundreds of years. This obsession has merely served to prolong the misunderstanding which exists between them. Many Europeans who went to the Arab world compared the life they found there favorably with that of Europe.

Dhanak (2015)

A couple of years ago, within a post about the song  “Lal Meri Pat,” I included a delightful version from a then-upcoming film Dhanak (which had not yet been released widely although it had won some awards in festivals). This version consisted of a duet between a small Indian boy (who appeared to be blind) impressively belting out “Lal Meri Pat” and what appeared to be a stereotypical American hippie singing “Let’s Give Love A Chance,” which obviously was John Lennon’s “Give Peace A Chance” with just slightly different lyrics. The clip (which I have posted again above) was not strictly a video of the scene where this song occurred – although it included some of that – but also a trailer that contained some other vivid moments from the film. When I wrote about this song and video before, I said that the film looked very sweet. And now that I have finally gotten to see the whole movie, I can say that I was absolutely right. It’s the sweetest movie that I have seen in quite a while.

Dhanak is a heartwarming and lively tale of a journey taken by two children, ten-year-old Pari and her eight-year-old brother, Chotu, who are played superbly by actors Hetal Gada and Krrish Chhabria. We can assume, from looking at these actors (and from an interview I glimpsed) that they are just about the same age as the characters, but, remarkably, the performance by these two children is widely agreed to be the best aspect of the film. But Dhanak is also carried along well by good writing and very smooth direction on the part of Nagesh Kukunoor, a lot of magnificent-looking scenery shots in Rajasthan (cinematography by Chirantan Das) and some wonderful music (by music director Tapas Relia, who also wrote the lyrics for “Let’s Give Love A Chance”).

The plot of this movie may at first seem somewhat familiar, but in ways it also turns out to be highly original…

Chotu is blind from an (unspecified) illness that he suffered at the age of four. Pari desperately wants her brother to be able to see again, but everyone knows that the aunt and uncle who are raising them will never pay for the necessary operation. Part of the reason is that the uncle is unemployed and they are poor, but also, the aunt has always deprived the children and probably wouldn’t want to pay for the operation even if they had the money, because she never wanted to inherit these children from her husband’s brother. The real parents died in an accident several years ago (apparently, shortly before Chotu went blind). And since their present guardians aren’t going to help, the children have to find another way, and Pari is the one who comes up with that other way (peculiar though her idea might be)…

Their plan (which I’ll get to in a minute) certainly is different, but I’m sure everyone reading this post who is familiar with Hindi films has been reminded by this point of the basic plot of something else. Speaking for myself, I instantly thought about Nanda’s first movie, Toofan Aur Diya (1956). In that film, it is the older sister (played by Nanda) who is blind (or rapidly on the way to becoming blind) and the younger, child brother (played by Satish Vyas) who takes on the task of getting money to pay for the operation that will cure her. (Mainly, he does this through a ridiculous amount of work and sacrifice.) And these children are orphans too. I seem to recall that in this film there was also an evil aunt who didn’t want to be burdened by them…or it could be that my mind is now drifting to Boot Polish. As I was saying, there are a few old films that Dhanak could bring to mind, but for me, Toofan Aur Diya seems like the closest – which isn’t such a bad thing, actually.

But I think Dhanak does have better actors and more nuanced characters, and it features a strange twist of plot that couldn’t have been seen in such an old movie, because it involves Shah Rukh Kahn… Not, that is to say, a character played by Shah Rukh Khan, but Shah Rukh Khan as a character in the film (whom we never actually see) who provides motivation for the journey.

Shah Rukh Khan is Pari’s favorite cinema hero (while Chotu prefers Salman Khan). And one day, after the siblings attend a movie, Pari spots a poster of Shah Rukh Khan asking for people to donate their eyes (which I would assume – though it’s never specified – is for some charity for the blind that enlisted him as a representative). Pari takes the poster off the wall, contemplates it, and decides that she will write letters to Shah Rukh Khan, asking him to help cure her brother’s blindness. She cannot afford stamps, so she asks someone else in the village to stamp and mail them, and of course, most of the letters are never mailed but actually end up in her uncle’s possession – which she discovers eventually. Other bad things happen in her household – e.g., her aunt tells her to stop going to school because her help is needed at home. Meanwhile, word gets around that SRK is filming somewhere a few hundred miles away from them, so given everything else that is going on, Pari decides to run away with Chotu in tow, in order to reach Shah Rukh Khan and talk to him directly. And so the journey begins…

I don’t feel a need to go into the progression of the journey in too much detail, because it is basically just a road trip – via a few different people’s vehicles and lots of walking – in which they meet various people, most of whom are a bit crazy, and suffer various setbacks, all of which are overcome in one way or another.  They do finally reach their destination, where things do and don’t turn out exactly as they had hoped – though whether SRK actually helps them remains something of a mystery. (And let’s leave it at that, because I don’t want to spoil the ending too much.)

Most of the journey is fun and sometimes it is enchanting. It is also refreshing for its lack grimness – especially considering that they are two children wandering across a big area all by themselves and this is the 21st century. There is a moment during the film when they are briefly kidnapped by a child trafficker (who has actually been told by a contact to focus more on the blind boy because he could be a “gold mine” – maybe via lucrative begging?). We in the audience know that this bad thing is going to happen a bit before the main characters do, and when this information came out, I thought it would ruin the film, because the suspense about the impending peril could be dragged out, and then we might have to suffer through a depiction of the peril, itself, and its consequences. There are reasons why, at this point, it brought to mind another somewhat contemporary film – only a British one – called Slumdog Millionaire. But thank goodness, none of that happens. The children are rescued from the trafficker in a very amusing scene involving a woman from a nomadic Rajasthani tribe, who stops the trafficker’s car in high dacoit style by pulling a shotgun out from under the side of her dupatta. And then the two children end up sleeping in a Rajasthani nomads’ camp, get some helpful minor prophecy from an interesting old blind woman (who of course understands Chotu in a special way), and then embark on another leg of the journey.

By the way, there is also another scene in the film in which the children end up interacting with a matriarchal figure who has somewhat religious or spiritual significance to a surrounding community. This makes for an interesting side theme in this movie regarding local matriarchal cult leaders (who perhaps also function briefly as maternal figures that substitute a little for the motherly love and/or guidance that the children have been deprived of). More generally speaking, Dhanak does seem to focus at least somewhat on India’s impressive variety of religions. And of course, not all the religions covered by this film are matriarchal, considering that the best scene involves a popular prayer to the great Sufi saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar.

Let’s rewind now and look at that song scene again… The “Lal Meri Pat” scene occurs shortly before the trafficking incident and basically exists apart from every other phase of the plot. It doesn’t really progress the journey aspect of the plot much; it could almost be an item song. But it also happens to be (at least from my perspective) the most enjoyable scene in the film.

And unlike the first time when I posted that song on this blog, now I have a little more information to give about it. The hippie is played by a Louisiana-born actor named Chet Dixon. He is a comedian who does some singing too, and  in Dhanak, he sings for himself. The impressive playback singing for the boy’s part comes from Devu Khan – formally known as Devu Khan Manganiyar because he is from the Manganiyar community of traditional folk singers in Rajasthan. He learned all of his singing skills from his parents, who were also folk singers. He probably comes from a very long tradition. But because he has gained praise for his role in a Bollywood film, he most likely will end up with a following well beyond his traditional audience. So, that makes three children whose lives have probably been changed – at least for a while – thanks to the well-deserved praise they received from their roles in this film.

Dhanak is known and praised as a children’s film. It has won several international awards in the children’s film category. But while watching it, I never thought to myself, “Oh, this is pretty good for a children’s film.”  Curiously, judging by what I’ve seen, this film displays more maturity in terms of acting, writing, and direction that one might find in many contemporary films made for grownups. I would give it an award for being a very good film, period.

[Above is a complete version of the song “Let’s Give Love A Chance”/”Dam Mast Qalandar” (“Lal Meri Pat”) and the corresponding scene, separate from the other material shown in the trailer. The video is defective, as it includes the entire scene twice, the second time around without sound. Of course, you can stop it in the middle. Or, you can play it again if you want to look at the splendid picturization again and re-read the lyrics. At some point or other, all of the lyrics are subtitled in English, including the English ones.]

The Tragedy Queen and the “Nautch Queen of New Jersey” (thoughts after reading two very informative articles)

1. Meena

As of the time I am beginning this post (though it won’t be by the time I post it), it is the anniversary of Meena Kumari’s death. She died on March 31, 1972, just two months after the debut of her best film, Pakeezah. And, by the way, I do really feel – as many others do also – that this was her best. Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam was very good (albeit awfully depressing), but it was not her best. Baiju Bawra was not her best. Pakeezah was the real classic out of everything she did. And that fact begins to seem quite remarkable when we consider all the obstacles that had to be overcome in order for her to complete it. Of course, the director, Kamal Amrohi, deserves a lot of credit for this too. (And though I love his film Mahal, I think Pakeezah truly was his best also.)

But unfortunately, for any of us who know a little background, the drama surrounding Meena’s demise behind the scenes sometimes takes precedence in our minds over the drama of the film, itself. Speaking for myself, sometimes I can’t help looking for more tidbits regarding how Kamal and Meena together managed to make something great out of a situation that was in many ways dreadful, because of the illness that she suffered as a result of the alcoholism that he, her longtime-estranged husband, probably emotionally influenced (and to no small extent). And every time I decide to take a peek at another article on the subject, I find myself discovering some new detail that I didn’t see before.

In an article that I recently discovered that is mostly by Kamal’s son, Tajdar Amrohi, I actually found all those tidbits put together and then some. So, in honor of Meena Kumari on her death anniversary, but also in acknowledgment of the morbid fascination that I am sure many possible readers of this post share with me, I decided to spread some word about the article here.

The article was posted at Filmfare.com on June 8, 2017; it is The Truth Behind Pakeezah Unveiled. The byline goes to Farhana Farook, who writes the introduction, but the bulk of the article consists of the words of Tajdar Amrohi, who obviously had as much inside knowledge on this subject as anyone. I do think he is a bit too worshipful of his father here and too eager to dismiss common knowledge about his father’s awful treatment of Meena Kumari. Nonetheless, he offers some innovative insights into symbols and other ingredients within the Pakeezah (e.g., “the train is the hero of the film”), as well as relating a lot of details regarding how the film was made. With regard to the grim tidbits that I mentioned above, well, here are the pertinent paragraphs:

They resumed shooting in 1968 by first filming the song Mausam hai aashiqana, which Baba had written. Due to her liver ailment, her stomach had bloated. To camouflage that, Baba made her wear a kurta and lungi. And that became a trend! The tent was set up in Filmalaya and later the shots were matched with the outdoor scenes. Though she’d feel tired, she’d perk up before the camera. After every shot, a unit hand would rush to her with a chair. 

Actress and dancer Padma Khanna was used as her body double as Baba believed her body dimensions and face structure matched Choti Ammi’s. Padma’s make-up was done by Joshi Dada. Her eyebrows and lips were made to look like Choti Ammi’s. One of the background dancers in the song Chalte chalte… was also used as a body double in the scene when Sahibjaan runs away from her nikah with Salim (Raaj Kumar). As also in the scene where she runs on the railway tracks. During the last song Aaj hum apni duaon ka asar, Choti Amma had to twirl around and drop in Veenaji’s arms. That was strenuous for her. Her close-ups were taken in sitting position. The song Chalo dildar chalo didn’t focus on her face even once but yet had a surreal quality.

And speaking of Padma Khanna, that brings me to the second part of the post.

2. Padma

On March 10, I saw some notices on Facebook (from one of the enlightening groups or pages that I’m subscribed to) that it was Padma Khanna’s birthday. For a little while, I thought of writing a post entirely about Padma Khanna, but I felt that I was not as knowledgeable about all her dancing vamp performances as many other people might be, partly because the ‘70s isn’t my specialty. But I did do a little research about her, and that’s when I stumbled upon an article from just two years ago by Mayukh Sen about Padma Khanna as the Nautch Queen of New Jersey (Roads & Kingdoms, March 1, 2016).  This article provided me with a good brush-up about the highlights of Padma’s career in Bollywood (beyond being Meena’s body double) and it includes a clip of one of her famous dances in Johny Mera Naam. But this article is most interesting because it also tells about Padma Khanna’s experiences running a dance school in New Jersey, in current times.

As some people know, I am basically a lifelong New Yorker, and since I am also such a fan of old Hindi movies, I take delight in stories about old-time “Bollywood” dancing stars who left India to teach dance in one of my city’s suburbs. Of course, Padma Khanna was far from the first one. For a while, Padmini had a dancing school in New Jersey, too. (Actually, she started it in Flushing, Queens – in a temple that I have visited – but her school became more successful after she moved it to New Jersey.)  Kamala Lakshman/Narayan also came to the New York City area to teach dance, concentrating her efforts in Long Island as well as some suburbs slightly to the north of us. Padma moved to the U.S. significantly later than Padmini and at least a decade later than Kamala, but her New York/New Jersey-area story is pretty close to that of the other two – especially Kamala’s, if you think about it. Essentially, she left India at a time when her dancing skills and the type of role she’d done most often (the vamp and item girl) were beginning to go out of fashion, and Padma was also aware that she was getting a little older. So, with her husband – a director named Jagdish Sidana – she packed up and went to America to start a new dancing school. Actually, they tried Chicago at first but that didn’t work out so well, so they went back to Mumbai for a little while. And then they heard that a lot of Indians were moving to New Jersey so they decided to try that, and their dancing school, Indianica, turned out to do pretty well.

Indianica specializes in Kathak, and it became clear as I read this article that Padma also felt fine about getting away from film roles and focusing on classical dance. (She had actually started out as a classical dancer, performing Kathak professionally at the age of 12.) That part of her story reminds me of Kamala Lakshman’s. Kamala also began to feel unappreciated in India and saw her film career prospects declining, and she seemed happy to focus strictly on dance. But I’ve read some old interviews with Kamala, and it seems that she felt some bitterness about how things turned out. In this interview with Padma, by contrast, she doesn’t seem to feel any bitterness or regrets. And that is a point made very clear at the end of the article, when Mayukh Sen writes:

Khanna, though, is all smiles. Perhaps distance and time have abstracted any frustration, and all that is left is gratitude. “I was always very passionate about dancing, and I still am,” she tells me, noting that she relished being able to dance on film. “Being typecast didn’t bother me at all.”

Padma has had some sad moments – e.g., the death of her husband – but from what I gathered in this article and interview, in 2106, when she was already well into her 60s, she was doing just fine. (And by the way, you can find good current videos from Indianica if you go to YouTube – maybe I’ll post some sometime.)

So, if you happen, by any chance, to be depressed after reading or thinking about the demise of the Tragedy Queen, this very uplifting article about the life of her old body double could prove to be a good remedy.

 

 

No One Could Have Expected This Loss – RIP, Sridevi

I know that an actress most associated with the 1980s and 1990s might seem slightly out of context in this blog, considering that I was focusing on the Golden Age and Vintage era so much for quite a while. The actresses and dancers whom I’ve been most likely to spend time on either are deceased already or are at an age that makes us worry about how much longer they might last. But I actually have spent some time posting about Sridevi before… She is another subject that I am returning to who was featured more in this blog about ten years ago. And I wish I were not returning to her for such a tragic reason, namely, that the actress whom none of us expected could die anytime soon had her life ended by a sudden heart attack. This is one death that must have been a shock to everyone. (And I still am thinking that there must be more to the story; maybe there is. How could this happen? It is just about unbelievable.) [News received the next day: Yes, there was more to it… Not cardiac arrest, but became unconscious in the bathtub (after drinking) and drowned. That is truly awful. And there may be further news to make it all worse.]

In my blog posts of a decade or so ago, I mentioned a number of Sridevi movies and dance scenes. I had watched some of the earliest movies in which she starred as an “adult” (though really only a teenager, as many Indian film stars are when they make their debuts as “adults”), and I also posted about her childhood appearance in at least one film. I also posted a number of scenes of her dances throughout the 1980s, and I seem to recall that those were actually the topic of a good amount of discussion here. (Unfortunately, I can’t find some of that at the moment. Did I delete the posts? Didn’t I have some extensive discussion here with someone about her snake dances?) In any event, my writings and posts were the result of the fact that I did have some great fondness and fascination for Sridevi, and among the actresses who rose up in the ’80s (which usually also are the stars closest to my own age), she is probably the most significant to me – as she is to a lot of people.

Sridevi was not perfect, and I may have pointed out some flaws. I don’t think she was a great a classical dancer (which makes sense, since she never had any classical training). She was impressively dexterous and athletic, but in comparison to a few others – including a dancer who shared her birthday, named Vyjayanthimala – she really didn’t come close.   But she did always present us with tons of character and, often, terrific expressions – which was actually stuff related to her superb acting skills. (I might also add that she could be very sexy, but I think anyone who knows of her at all already knows that. Beyond that, she was also very pretty. Some might want to make an argument that she looked better when she was earthier, before some notorious plastic surgeries. I wouldn’t, though – I think she was always pretty, earlier and later.)

Some of Sridevi’s earliest movies (as an “adult,” that is) had heavy, dramatic elements, and she did very well with those. But she actually impressed me more when she had the chance to mix dance with comedy. Other people have said the same thing, pointing out her terrific comic timing. Maybe that was her greatest skill.

A few people have pointed out that Sridevi was better than a lot of the movies she starred in, and from I have seen, I agree. But this might have a lot to do with the era that she rose up in. (In fact, I would say the same about Madhuri Dixit – whom Sridevi is compared to sometimes. Some of Madhuri’s most wonderful songs and dances were in movies that I couldn’t stand.)

On the other hand, I don’t think Sridevi could ever really be separated from the 1980s in anyone’s mind. And the ’80s would certainly have been a bit worse without her. This could probably be said of some of the ’90s also. And since her recent comeback, even the 2010s…

It is  so sad to see her life cut off so soon!

Farewell, Sridevi, we will miss you (though, thankfully, we will still always have a chance to see you).

Rest in peace.

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P.S. I intend to post and write a little more about Sridevi – with more details, links, maybe some videos – soon.

Returning To: Padmini’s Navarasa, Classical Dancing to Sia, and Bollywood Raag Yaman (plus)

Padmini’s Navarasa

Unless I’m forgetting something, it’s been close to ten years since I posted Padmini’s “Maraindhirundu Paarkum.” When I did this in 2008, I subtitled the post “The Nine Emotions” because Padmini’s rapid demonstration of that ancient theatrical tradition – aka the Navarasa – was the aspect of this dance that I have always found most enjoyable and fascinating. Since that time, I have seen a few better clips of “Maraindhirundu Paarkum” and my enthusiasm for it has only grown.

It is wonderful how Padmini displays the nine emotions in under nine seconds, and the display of each particular emotion is wonderful too. I love the theatricality of the expressions, which perfectly suits the Bharatanatyam dance. (Here, we should not be looking for the naturalistic acting that so many people want to see in contemporary cinema, but intense facial gestures inherited from forms of dance and theater that go back millennia – and no one does that better than Padmini!)

Anyway, here is one of those better clips of “Maraindhirundu Paarkum.” Padmini’s sensational display of the Navarasa starts at about 1:20.

 

Classical (Kathak) Dancing to Sia (with Navarasa) (in an office somewhere)

Curiously, during the past week, just after my mind had returned to “Maraindhirundu Paarkum,” I discovered one charming contemporary effort to speed through the Navarasa, this time in a Kathak dance. I was not looking for another Navarasa display at the time. In fact, I was attracted to the video because of another tendency that I’ve talked about here before (in my Odd(itie)s and Ends post): Indian classical dances done to the music of Sia, the highly successful Australian singer and composer of contemporary pop music. Among the pop stars who have gained a massive following in the past few years, I would consider Sia to be, possibly, the most interesting and talented. (I don’t like every Sia song on her albums or on the many soundtracks in which she’s participated. But I always greatly respect what she’s doing, and when a Sia song clicks for me, I love it.) I actually don’t know why Sia’s music – especially the song “Cheap Thrills” – has been treated to so many classical Indian dance covers. Is it because of some connections between traditional Indian rhythms and the beat of Sia’s music? In any event, I’m glad that so many Indian dancers have this affinity. (I should add, though, that in this particular case, the music is an instrumental cover of Sia’s song. Like the dances being done to this song, the number of musical versions seems to have multiplied.)

The Navarasa is also the best part of this dance. The dancer here dedicatedly goes through the whole Navarasa in the latter part of the clip while the names of the emotions are spelled out in a large caption – not only the original names, by the way, but also the English words for them, which I certainly appreciated. (I wish someone had spelled out her name, though – that remains a mystery.) This dancer didn’t dazzle me like Padmini, but she is quite good, especially considering that she is not a film or dance star but, obviously, someone who had to do a YouTube video in some office somewhere during off-hours, when the electronic equipment was covered up. (What kind of equipment is that? Is that printing equipment? Or photography equipment? Maybe it’s medical equipment. I don’t think it’s standard office computers – but it could be.) At any rate, as readers of this blog should know by now, I’ve gained a special appreciation for dancers who become committed to doing their art in everyday rooms not designed for dance or performance events – such as the ones I posted under the title Another Mujra in A Different Kitchen. Let’s add this fine one to the list.

 

“Raag Yaman in Bollywood Songs”

In another post that’s close to a decade old, I discussed a couple of old Hindi film songs that I had heard were composed around Raag Yaman (or Raga Yaman, as I labeled it back then). (Actually, one of the commenters here disagreed that one of these songs was Raag Yaman, saying it was Raag Shankara, but this is a debate that I have also seen elsewhere that I did not want to get into. The song, “Jhanan Jhan Jhana Ke Apni Payal,” might include a bit of both. As far as I know, the other film song that I mentioned, “Awara Aye Mere Dil,” was always accepted as being based on Raag Yaman and nothing else.)

Within that post, I also included a YouTube clip from Tripmonk’s channel, which showed a couple of guys playing Raag Yaman AND explaining what it was. Unfortunately, that clip disappeared. But recently, I have found a very nice instructional video about “Raag Yaman in Bollywood Songs.” This video mentions and excerpts from a number of classic film songs that I had never mentioned, including “Kahin Ye Wo Toh Nahin” from Haqeeqat (1964), “Nigahen Milaneko Jee” from Dil Hi Toh Hai (1963) (which is a song I’m very fond of, by the way), and “Abhi Na Jao Chhodkar” from Hum Dono (1961). The teacher in this video, Anuja Kamat, gives a detailed explanation about what makes these songs Raag Yaman, what notes and sequences Raag Yaman contains, and the variation called Raag Yaman Kalyan. She also sings the notes of the raag beautifully throughout.

Anuja Kamat has a number of other instructional/singing videos on her channel well worth looking at. There is a second video about Raag Yaman in Bollywood songs, covering more contemporary material. There is also a video about songs based on Raag Bhimpalas, and there are videos that I intend to watch soon that cover more basic subjects such “What Is a Raag,” “Basic Theory of Indian Music,” and “History of Indian Music” (in several parts). So far, this looks like a delightful and very informative channel, and I’m sure I’ll be mentioning some more of Anuja’s videos sometime soon.

“Nazar Lagi Tore Bangle Par” and Zarina Begum

On December 3 – which coincidentally happened to be Dev Annand’s sixth death anniversary – I made an interesting discovery related to a song in the film Kala Pani (1958). The song is the ghazal used for a mujra that Nalini Jaywant performs in front of Dev Anand,”Nazar Lagi Tore Bangle Par.” The song was sung for Nalini Jaywant by Asha Bhosle, and it is one of many people’s favorite songs for both of them. I’ve featured this song in this blog before, but here is a refresher (which I may use to replace at least one other video of this song that I used before that, unfortunately, disappeared over the years).

The discovery that I made for myself that is related to this song is named Zarina Begum. Zarina was a protege of Begum Akhtar, and both famously sung a version of “Nazar Lagi Tore Bangle Par” that predated the one in Kala Pani.

While looking at videos by Begum Akhtar on YouTube, I discovered a performance by Zarina of this song that was taken from a documentary about tawaifs called The Other Song, made by Saba Dewan. At the time this film was made, Zarina was 82 years old, and she was living in obscurity and poverty. But I thought her performance here was excellent, and I played the clip repeatedly. If Zarina could be so charming and compelling in this performance, what might she have been like to see and hear in her heyday? Unfortunately, I could not find any much older videos or recordings of her on YouTube, but I am very glad that I was able to find this one.

I could not find a full uploaded copy of The Other Song (although YouTube does have an interview with Saba Dewan about it, uploaded in two parts). I did, however, find a very informative short documentary from 2015, Zareena [sic] Begum – The last living courtesan of Awadh, which was made as a student project by Shweta Sharma. The film contains some nice excerpts of an interview with Zarina as well as performance footage from a couple of places (including a snippet of the above performance from Saba Dewan’s film). It also contains a few good vintage pics of Begum Akthar along with good musical excerpts from her, too.

It seems that in 2015 and 2016, there were quite a few documentaries and articles about Zarina Begum. There is a good article in Scroll.in that also includes the performance above under the title, Watch a performance from the last surviving court singer of Awadh who now lives in poverty. If you do a search, you’ll also find at least several more articles stressing that Zarina had become impoverished as well as becoming old and ill.

There is one incredibly sad article from October 2015 in The Times of India entitled, What is Awadh’s last court singer’s final wish? And the answer to that question is: “A job for her daughter or son-in-law, or an e-rickshaw for her physically challenged son, so that she could be taken care of in her last days.”

There were some arts organizations that came to her aid and she did get some government help, so it could be that her situation ceased to be quite so dire. Now that a couple of years have passed since all this information came out, I hope that she is still alive. (Since I can find no news of Zarina’s death, I assume that that is the case. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any updates about her in general.)

This sort of tale is not uncommon with regard to once-revered performers in India (and there are quite a few such stories to be found in the rest of the world, too). More than once, I have seen the fate of some of our favorite singers or actors from the Golden Age or Vintage era referred to as “riches to rags.” But regardless of the ill fate that the artists meet, often their art, itself, gets revived, and it is a very rewarding feeling to stumble upon such revivals.

Now that I have seen Zarina Begum sing this song and have learned all about her, I will never again think about “Nazar Lagi Tore Bangle Par” exclusively as a song that Asha Bhosle sang for Nalini Jaywant.
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P.S. If we look further back into the origins of the song, that can take us into another direction entirely. According to at least a couple of sources that I have seen, this was originally a thumri composed by Bahadur Shah II, the last Mughal emperor of India. In Kala Pani, the song is credited to composer S.D. Burman and lyricist Majroo Sultanpuri, but I guess that they were more like the song’s embellishers than its creators. (That is probably true of quite a few famous Hindi and Urdu film songs.)

I cannot find definite information regarding whether Zarina, herself, sang the song before Kala Pani came out. For a moment, I thought this impossible since Shweta Sharma said in her documentary that Zarina was born in 1947, but a little later, I realized that if she had been born in 1947, she would not have been 82 when the Saba Dewan documentary was made or 87 to 88 at the time of Sheweta’s documentary and the numerous articles that appeared. So, she was probably born in 1927, which makes it more likely that she and Begum Akhtar both sang “Naar Lagi Bangle Tore Par” well before Asha Bhosle sang it in Kala Pani. In any event, in the interview footage in Shweta Sharma’s documentary, Zarina, herself, refers to singing it as a version of an old poem by Bahadur Shah Zafar without even mentioning Kala Pani.

P.P.S. I have noticed that there is also a contemporary version of this song that was used in the 2016 film Saat Uchakkey, but since I didn’t care much for it, I’m not inclined to discuss it further here.