A few days after talking about Ragini’s membership in the “died young club,” I realized that we have an important death annviersary coming up – always a good excuse for posting rare clips by one’s favorite stars. Below are all charming clips from Meena Kumari’s earliest days in movies as an “adult” (or at least when she stopped being called “baby”), back when she did mythologicals. The third clip below is especially nice, some of the sweetest singing by Geeta Roy/Dutt picturized on the cutest young Meena. (Of course, both singer and actress would later be part of a special subset of aforementioned club. Advice to all: if you must drink, please do so in moderation…)
No, I am not asking other bloggers to participate in a week for Ragini (I don’t do that sort of thing); rather, I just wanted to mention that from my little blogging corner, this has turned out to be a week for Ragini, mostly unplanned.
It started out with the conclusion of somebody else’s Shashi week, because while Shashi doesn’t really stand out in my mind that much, when I think of Shashi, I always think of a great song clip from a movie that starred Shashi and Ragini. I’ve shown this one before, but I can never tire of posting it, so here it is again (unfortunately, with embedding disabled, so just click on the YouTube screen):
With this song and scene running through my mind, I decided to try my luck at Ragini research again, though it doesn’t usually yield much, with Ragini info being relatively scarce, mostly confined to side mentions in biographies about Padmini. (It’s kind of like looking for info on Minoo Mumtaz – you’ll find it only in side comments to bios of Mehmood.) But this time, I did turn up a few facts that I hadn’t known before…
One, which startled me, was that Ragini had died in 1976, at the age of 39. I noticed this the other day when I posted the Travancore Family Tree (and by the way, if I ever find the source for that again, I’ll note it – sorry about sloppy research methods there…) I had read before that Ragini died in “midlife” and died “young,” but that could easily mean ’50s, and it made me very sad to learn that Ragini was in the same club with Madhubala, Geeta Bali, and Meena Kumari, never getting a chance to see her 40s. (I have read somewhere that she died of cancer, but I haven’t gotten more info than that.) Now, it seems, from what I can tell, that Ragini did not have a tragic life; it was very charmed for the most part, but it really put some tears in my eyes to think that this woman whose dances I’ve enjoyed so much, and who had such a vivacious screen presence, had her life cut so short. (Ragini was particularly good in comedies and often played the cheerful type, as opposed to Padmini, who did the most weeping over the years. Ragini was actually pretty good as a comic actress, which brings out the sad comparison to Madhubala even more.)
In my stint of research, I also learned that Ragini had married a man who was part of a famous aristocratic family, who lived in a famous house. But Ragini’s husband died at an even younger age, in his early ’30s. In this case, since he was about a decade younger than Ragini, this meant that he had lived through Ragini’s death. Piecing things together from the comments, I saw that he provided another example of how wealth does not always bring happiness, as he probably died from illness resulting from alcoholoism and was not a happy sort at all. (Now that brings us to other tragic examples from classic Bollywood – one mentioned already, above, and let’s leave it at that.)
Onto cheerier matters, it was fun discovering the site of the “Travancore Cousin” Sukumari (who is still active as an actress even today, after literally thousands of films)… That site actually has some fantastic photos, including one great picture of Sukumari with Ragini…
I also discovered some good information on Ragini at a Rediff Movies post, which was more of a memorial to Padmini but contained some interesting tidbits about Ragini too. (Assuming it’s all accurate. I noticed that it gave 1952 as the year that Padmini debuted in Kalpana, which is way off. But the rest seems to be OK.) One thing I didn’t know which this site mentions is that the Travancore Sisters were friends with Raj Kapoor and Nargis around the time of Chori Chori. And according to this article, Nargis was particularly good friends with Ragini…
I looked at all of that information on about March 20 to 21. Then on March 21, I digressed from my week for Ragini because I discovered that March 21 was the birthday of Ragini’s niece Shobana. (I might have known this sometime before, but if I did, I’d definitely forgotten it.) Given the unlikelihood of learning about Shobana’s birthday on Shobana’s birthday, I felt at that point that I was just fated to do a Shobana birthday post – which was fine with me because, as I’ve said before, she has proven to be a great dancer in her own right, enough to make her aunts proud. (Well, enough to have made Padmini proud, I know; the other aunts didn’t really live to see Shobana’s film success.)
But then the next day, I got some good comments under a couple of old posts, from Manu J. Krishnan, who apparently knows about Ragini more than most of us. I was glad to read one comment in particular, in which Manu informed me that he is organizing a photo exhibition of the Travancore Sisters in Kerala for the death anniversary of Ragini, in December of 2010. And this, I know, is a perfect time to visit Kerala, as an Indian friend of mine (presently living in Edison, NJ) tried to organize a trip for me to go there around this time last year. But even with contacts, etc., there was no way I could find to afford it. Maybe things will somehow be different this year. Or maybe I’ll find a way to earn my way while in India – e.g., by joining a gypsy song-and-dance troupe…
By the way, that clip and the screen cap at the top are from Amar Deep (1958), one of the best Hindi films starring both Padmini and Ragini (and Vyjayanthimala and Dev Anand and Johnny Walker…).
I think most of the Hindi films from the 1950s that featured Ragini were Padmini starrers, but Ragini did branch off on her own a few times, especially as the ’60s rolled along. Reportedly, she had a nice rapport with Ashok Kumar, and she starred with him in 1965 movie called Adhi Raat Ke Baad. And just last night, I was able to enjoy a very good and detailed writeup of that movie by Sunheriyaadein – I couldn’t think of a nicer way to close out this great unplanned Ragini week.
I’ve posted some songs from Mousiqar before, but it’s been a while and they disappeared, so it’s time to post from this film again. Anyway, I am now actually watching the movie, even though it’s in Urdu without subtitles, because it really is worth it for the great music alone, including not only the songs but the background music. (The music director here was Rasheed Attre. The singers are some of my favorites including, primarily, you know who!) Unfortunately, the version of the film that I am watching (also on YouTube) has the music coming in through only one channel. That’s fine with me, because I just bought headphones that make it quick and easy to adjust the sound to mono, and it doesn’t spoil it for me at all. However, for here, I’m going to post the clips that I could find with both channels working. The sound is still far from great in some of these, but the music is fantastic! And some of the dancing is very nice too…
I’ve been looking at, and listening to, a lot of stuff from Lollywood this past day (yes, looking for something a little different…), but it’s getting late now and I wanted to post something, so I’m going to cut the theme short. That is to say, I’m not going to try to post a whole lot of stuff connected to the old Sufi poem “Terey Ishq Nachaya” by Baba Bulleh Shah (I’m not even going to get into the old movie by that name that had vocals by Noor Jehan – though I might do so in another post), because tonight/this morning, I just wanted to mention two things from contemporary Pakistan that really caught my attention…
First, a fine dance by the mujra dancer Nargis, with Naseem Vicky. I like Nargis a lot… She is even a bit different (and funny and charming) when she does the usual bawdy stage mujra bit, but she is even more unique when she does this sort of thing once in a while…
…And then there’s the film that this particular (version of the) song comes from, the 2006 film Majajan, featuring the Lollywood actress Saima, who also produced the film, and the actor Shaan, who is the dancer in this great scene below. I guess the scene is exceptional mostly because you don’t usually see the guy dancing with bells on his ankles while the woman in the scene plays the singer-musician. But it’s also a very good dance, and there is really nice singing by Azra Jahan.
Reading about this film a little, I see that it was directed by Syed Noor, written by his older wife, Rukshana Noor (apparently, he made Saima his younger wife sometime during the filming), with music by Wajid A. Nashaad. Most of the songs look pretty good; it looks OK for a contemporary film, and I see there hadn’t been many good films coming out of Pakistan in recent years… It would be nice to find a copy of this film with English subtitles (unlikely, though, but it’s worth a thought, I guess).
Hey, it’s “A Fish Out of Water”! I got tipped off to this one when I went to old post at Parties, Sarees and Melodies to download a copy of the original soundtrack by Laxmikant Pyarelal. Thanks for the tip, Stella_1! This has some real ROTFL moments (I really fell off my couch at 1:30)… That having been said, after one viewing of the “dancers” here, maybe some of you will have a better appreciation of Sandhya.
OK, I have to admit, at least in terms of the music, I think the next one is actually good! (By the way, I think I once also posted a Pakistani mujra done to this remix – partly for the same reason, I actually like it!) I don’t mind the video so much either (though I admit I didn’t exactly like it at first either) – it is pretty funny in a tacky way. (In fact, it embarrassingly reminds me of some of my own experiences in my youth, when I went to “New Wave” clubs.) I suppose it’s a bit insulting to the Asha Parekh dance that the main part comes from, but on the other hand, it also samples “I Love You” from Hare Rama Hare Krishna, and it contains a parody of Zeenat Aman in that very scene that I find pretty on-spot hilarious. (Actually, it’s a combination of the Zeenat Aman character and a western woman dancing in a short skirt next to her who is egging on the crowd – but in the remix, of course, she has to be updated, so she’s a bit more vulgar – though not half as vulgar as the star of the video. What would Dev Anand’s character have said about this scene?) On top of all that, if I’m not mistaken, there is also a fragment of “Mehbooba Mehbooba” from Sholay…
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P.S. I considered also linking to the remix of “Ek Pardesi” (since I just linked to “Ek Pardesi” in comments to another post the other day), but I decided that that one is just too awful. And I couldn’t find any other of these remixes that I could stand (of course, there is Bally Sagoo, but that falls into another category). So, I’ll just leave it at two for now.
Since I praised this song last Holi and since I wrote up Navrang sometime further back, a few artists whom I liked very much then have actually ascended in the ranks of my personal opinion, most notably: one of my absolute favorite music directors, C. Ramchandra, one of my faovorite actress-dancers, Sandhya, and one of my favorite directors, V. Shantaram. And maybe also Asha Bhosle, whom I have not paid enough attention to (while paying a lot of attention to a couple of other singers…). This Holi song, “Are Ja Re Hat Natkhat,” is a glorious meeting of all those great talents, and though Navrang may not have been a great movie (I liked it, but I could understand the point of some critics that it was far from Shantaram’s best), it still had one of the best soundtracks and some of the best dances in any of his films.
Fortunately, a lot of people still realize how great “Are Ja Re Hat Natkhat” is, and how momentous Navrang was, at least for its songs and dances (whether or not they want to say that it actually was a good film). Here’s a nice clip from an awards show that I mentioned before, the one that happened a couple of months ago:
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Dances on the Footpath 