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Directed by Kamal
Amrohi Music: Ghulam Mohammed, Naushad Lyrics: Kamal Amrohi, Kaifi Azmi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Kaif Bhopali Starring: Meena Kumari, Ashok Kumar, Raj Kumar, Veena, Nadira, Sapru |
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| Pic courtesy: Filmfare |
So, Pakeezah it is.
The film opens with the beautiful Nargis (a hennaed, grey-eyed Meena Kumari) being ‘rescued’ from the kotha in Lucknow’s notorious Chowk district by her lover, Nawab Shahabuddin (Ashok Kumar). The nawab loves her dearly and has pledged to marry her. But when they arrive at his haveli, with Nargis bedecked in bridal red, his very respectable father condemns her as a ‘tawaa'if’, who is not fit to be their family’s bahu.
Horrified, Nargis flees to a graveyard, where, nine months later, she dies giving birth to a baby girl. She has informed her elder sister, Nawab Jaan (Veena) and also left a note for her beloved, informing the Nawab of the birth of his daughter. Alas, the note is misplaced. And Nawab Jaan, arriving at the graveyard, whisks her little niece away.
Seventeen years pass. Nargis’ note, placed in a book, has fallen into the hands of a second-hand book seller. When a buyer finds the note addressed to the nawab, he hurries forth to hand it over. The distraught father, who had searched high and low for his Nargis, now learns of the daughter he never knew he had.
He hurries to the kotha, where he demands that Nawab Jaan hand his daughter over. Nawab Jaan, who blames Shahabuddin for her sister’s death, has been adamant that her niece, Sahib Jaan (also Meena Kumari) would only leave the kotha when her doli leaves, blessed by her father. Now, she tells Shahabuddin that his daughter is presently engaged. He should come by the next day…
…by which time Nawab Jaan has made hurried preparations to leave for Delhi, Sahib Jaan in tow. En route, a man enters their compartment by mistake. Since the train has already left the station, he’s forced to remain until the next stop. The women are asleep, but the man, Salim (Rajkumar) is entranced by Sahib Jaan’s half-veiled face and hennaed feet he spies under the coverlet.
He leaves a note for her: “Aap ke paaon dekhe. Bahut haseen hain. Inhe zameen par nahin utaariyega. Maile ho jaaenge.” – Aap ka ek humsafar.” (“I have seen your feet, they are beautiful. Please do not put them on the ground for they will be sullied.” – Your fellow traveller.)
When the train stops, the man leaves, taking with him a coloured feather that Sahib Jaan uses as a bookmark. When Sahib Jaan wakes up, she’s entranced by the note that she later hides in a hair ornament that she has specially made. She reads and re-reads the note, cherishing it as a token of a man who might truly love her.
But her future is preordained – her aunt is determined that she will be the most accomplished tawaa’if in Delhi. She buys a beautiful haveli that will serve as an ornamental setting for Sahib Jaan’s beauty - the aptly named Gulab Mahal from the impoverished Gauhar Jaan (Nadira).
Here, she will live as Gauhar Jaan's niece (to prevent Shahabuddin from tracing her), and learn from her – to dance, to entertain, and to please men. Men like a dissolute nawab (Kamal Kapoor) who lusts after Sahib Jaan at first sight, and who's quick to mark her as his own.
Gauhar Jaan ensures that Sahib Jaan is sent along with the nawab for a trip on his luxurious barge. However, just when Sahib Jaan has finished her song, the barge is wrecked by a herd of elephants. The nawab dies, and Sahib Jaan is left to make her way back as best she can. She stumbles upon a forest officer’s tent.
Inside, she sees a very familiar object – her bookmark. She reads through the absent man’s diary – and discovers a description of herself and the stranger’s experience on the train that fateful night that gladdens her heart.
When she hears someone approaching, Sahib Jaan pretends to be asleep. When Salim, for it is he, arrives, he finds an unexpected but very welcome visitor. It is a beautiful scene. Sahib Jaan panics and the audience enters her thoughts as she prays fervently for him to go away but also wishes to get a glimpse of him. Eventually, however, they talk and express their mutual affection. Sahib Jaan is happier than she has ever been.
Will her happiness continue? Salim, though Sahib Jaan does not know it then, is her father’s nephew. And he must fight long and hard to get his family to accept her.
Her feet may not be sullied, but will surely be bloodied in her quest for love and acceptance.
Pakeezah was Kamal Amrohi’s labour of love, an ode to his wife. Every line he wrote, every scene he designed was with Meena Kumari in mind. And the actor poured her heart and soul into Pakeezah – she’s both mother and daughter, the tragic Nargis and the beautiful Sahib Jaan, the latter seemingly destined to follow in the footsteps of the former – both literally and figuratively. But while the mother flees to a graveyard to escape both the confines of the kotha and the ridicule of society, the daughter has a far happier ending – her doli leaves the kotha and she is a bride at the end of her journey.
Meena Kumari’s voice has rarely been used with such efficacy as it was here. Playing the titular role of the ‘Pure One’, Meena Kumari utilised her lyrical voice to its maximum to reveal the hidden depths of sorrow at the duality of her life. The heavy Urdu dialogues, full of pathos, tugged at your heartstrings because of the way she modulated her voice.
Her understated performance lent dignity to the ‘fallen’ character she portrays on screen. She was simply unparalleled as a courtesan who seeks her own destiny. Ill as she was during the latter part of the filming, and a decade older, she still infused her character with feeling.
Watch her in the scene where, waiting to wed Salim, the maulvi asks her her name. Before she can say anything, Salim says, "Pakeezah", the pure one. Sahibjaan reels back in shock and disbelief. In the previous scene, she has been tormented by the taunts of passers-by who refer to her as a tawaa'if.
Meena designed her own costumes for the film, both the rich embroidered flowing tunics she wears during her performances as well as the simple white kurtas she’s seen in, elsewhere. [According to Tajdar Amrohi, it is at her insistence that the earlier portions already filmed were reshot in colour.] Ailing by the time the film neared completion, Meena could scarcely stand, let alone dance; Padma Khanna stepped in for the climactic song, Teer nazar dekhenge. Similarly, Chalo dildaar chalo was shot without once showing the actor’s face.
Rajkumar was not the original choice for Salim. When Amrohi began shooting, Ashok Kumar was to play the lead. When the film was shelved and then resurrected, the role made the rounds of several actors, including Dharmendra (who had actually shot the baraat scene). But Rajkumar did full justice to his role here. On the face of it, he seems like an archetype – the ‘ideal’ hero, the personification of chivalry. But the characterisation is far more nuanced. When Sahib Jaan runs away from him, he is hurt and bewildered. And he lashes out – uncharacteristically, perhaps, but realistically, given the context. [The woman he's fought with his family for, has seemingly rejected him.] It is not an act becoming of the compassionate man he’s shown to be – he informs Sahib Jaan of his marriage to another woman, inviting her instead to perform at the ceremony – but it is all too human.
He respects the women in his household, and holds his uncle and grandfather in great esteem, but is not bound by the latter's antiquated ideas of honour. Unlike his uncle, he has the courage to rebel against what he sees as unwarranted interference in his personal life. And even when he comes to learn that the woman he loves is a tawaa'if, his love for her overcomes societal opprobrium.
Ashok Kumar was his usual competent self, but both Veena and Nadira – as Nawab Jaan and Gauhar Jaan respectively – were excellent.
Veena is as imperious as ever, and the scene where she first meets Shahabuddin after many years is a masterclass in both dialogue and acting. "Achha, toh aap le jaane aaye hain. Kisi qabristaan ne ab iske janaaze ki farmaaish kii hogi aap se."
The sarcasm is withering.
And Nadira as Gauhar, quietly conniving to keep Sahib Jaan's admirers happy; she has known penury and she is now willing to do anything to keep herself afloat. She says much without saying anything at all.
Then, there's Bibban (Vijaylaxmi), Sahib Jaan's ailing friend. When the latter holds on to the letter from the stranger as a talisman, Bibban tells her: "Yeh paigham tumhaare liye nahin hain... us waqt tumhaare paaon mein ghunghroo nahin bandhe honge." It's a stark reminder of Sahib Jaan's reality.
The film had indeed received a lukewarm response when it was released, and it was Meena Kumari’s death that renewed interest in the film. However, the film’s cult status goes far beyond the obvious.
Pakeezah played out like an allegory, with Amrohi using visual metaphors to express Sahib Jaan’s circumstances – the most famous being the train; its whistle almost forms the leitmotif of the film. Sahib Jaan’s ghungroos, a torn kite, a caged bird, etc., are more usual tropes, but, in my opinion, well-used here.
The characterisation was true to life; according to Tajdar Amrohi, the director’s son, the character of the elderly Nawab, played by Sapru, was based on Amrohi’s father.
In an interview, Amrohi had said that he deliberately set the film in an earlier period (than the 70s in which it was released), and spared no expense in bringing Lucknow to life. The haveli in the film was an exact replica of the director’s ancestral home in Amroha. The milieu and the characters were an authentic representation of North Indian Muslim culture, manners and society in a particular era.
Amrohi was also insistent on authenticity in other
aspects, many of which the audience would never hear about, nor care, if they
did. For instance, the attar that is poured into the water in which
Sahib Jaan washes her hair, was real. As were the attar bottles on her
dressing table. He commissioned traditional period jewellery and paid attention
to the minutest details of the costuming.
With Amrohi writing the screenplay and Urdu dialogues, Pakeezah was definitely poetry in motion. But it is the simple Urdu of the common man, not the stylized Urdu of, say, Mughal-e-Azam. (Amrohi was one of the writers on that film as well.) Amrohi also used silences well. The most significant use of silence is during the Thare rahiyo sequence where the level of intrigue and suspense is built up without a word being spoken.
The sets were luxurious and opulent, but Amrohi also filmed nature beautifully, travelling frequently to outdoor locations until he got the look he wanted. Josef Wirsching, the cinematographer, captured frames like paintings.
Amrohi took six months to erect the Bazaar-e-husn set in Bombay to film Inhi logon ne; in the background, one can see 16 tawaa’ifs dancing in different kothas. Wirsching’s camera captured the pirouetting dancers, the flowing veils and the lighted kothas with masterly craftsmanship. After his demise, several other cinematographers pitched in to help complete the film.
Similarly, the music is a treat – both visual and
auditory. Ghulam Mohammed composed many stellar tunes for the film; the
director chose six. [The other nine songs were later released in an album
titled Pakeezah Rang Barang. This comprised: Ye kis ki aankhon ka noor ho
tum [Mohammed Rafi]; Hatkar tere qadmon se [Mohammed
Rafi, Shamshad Begum]; Leke
angdaaii [Suman Kalyanpur]; Kothe se bada [Shamshad
Begum]; Pyaare babul
[Lata Mangeshkar]; Tanhaaii
sunaya karti hain [Lata Mangeshkar]; Bandhan baandho
[Shobha Gurtu]; and a solo version of Chalo dildaar chalo [Lata
Mangeshkar]The lyrics by Amrohi himself, along with Kaifi Azmi, Kaif Bhopali
and Majrooh Sultanpuri complemented these tunes. After Mohammed’s untimely
death, Naushad stepped in to complete the background score. Fellow blogger Richard has written a lovely post on the background songs and music in this film.
I am not saying that Pakeezah is a ‘perfect’ film; Amrohi’s pace is languid and the first half meanders without going anywhere. Tighter editing could have helped curtail the self-indulgence. The time it took to film – nearly 15 years – meant that for half the film. Meena Kumari was no longer the young and beautiful as she was in the scenes shot earlier. By this time, she was too old to be playing the seventeen-year-old Sahib Jaan. It is a mark of her talent that despite age and illness, she still manages to make the character work.
All the beauty and grandeur are also in service of the idea that marriage must be the ultimate goal of a woman’s life. Hence, the emphasis on keeping Sahib Jaan ‘pure’ – she cannot be physically soiled if she is to be a ‘respectable’ woman. This completely obscures the fact that tawaa’ifs were educated, cultured, poets, musicians and dancers themselves, fiercely independent women whose financial independence meant that they need not be subservient to men in the highly patriarchal society in which they lived. The fabulous sets and the beautiful costumes celebrate the tawaa’if’s world but the underlying message, paradoxically, is that women must escape this world and confine themselves behind the purdah if they are to be deemed respectable.
However, Shweta Sachdev Jha, an academic, postulates that the central theme of the film is the "inherent purity of the tawaa’if", no matter how debased her individual circumstances.* That is an interesting point of view, one that Amrohi may have ascribed to: the last scene shows a woman watching as Salim whisks Sahib Jaan away; she’s never seen before in the film. According to Tajdar Amrohi, the director meant that woman to represent ‘hope and future for the courtesans’.
Another point in Amrohi’s favour is that the film’s very conceit shows that he’s telling the story of a ‘pure’ woman. In other words, it is not a narrative device to ensure that the woman stays ‘pure’ because that’s the only way she can have a happy ending. Pakeezah is deeply compassionate towards the tawaa’ifs, if only in showing the men who frequent the kothas as decadent and debased.
Flawed or not, Pakeezah remains one of my favourite films; it's sheer poetry on celluloid.
*Shweta Sachdeva Jha, "Frames of Cinematic History: The Tawaif in Umrao Jaan and Pakeezah" in Narratives of Indian Cinema.
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