KUMARI NAAZ ,HINDI ACTRESS , TRIED FOR SUICIDE TWO TIMES BELOW AGE 10 , BORN AUGUST 20,1944

KUMARI NAAZ ,HINDI ACTRESS ,

TRIED FOR SUICIDE TWO TIMES BELOW AGE 10 , BORN AUGUST 20,1944

Baby Naaz: The star that could have been
On her 73rd birth anniversary today (20 August), we look back at the troubled life of the talented actress Baby Naaz aka Salma Baig.
A young Baby Naaz in Boot Polish (1954) and later as a young lady.

SONAL PANDYA

By the time she was 10, Kumari Naaz (born as Salma Baig and also called Baby Naaz) was already a star. She was one of the child artistes in RK Films’ Boot Polish (1954). She earned rave reviews for her earnest natural performance from The New York Times and a special distinction (along with co-actor Rattan Kumar) from Cannes Film Festival in 1955, where the film was shown in competition.

However, in an interview with magazine Stardust (year unknown), the actress spoke of a rather unhappy childhood. Naaz tried to commit suicide twice when she was merely 10 years old. Her attempts to jump in a well, were quashed by an observant ayah (nanny).



In the interview, the actress had recounted her emotional state at the time, “My ayah used to tell me stories about how people ended their lives by jumping into this well. So, one day when I was all alone at home, I ran to the well. Somehow, my ayah who spotted me, ran after me and brought me home. She was the only one who cared for me.”

The young girl debuted on stage when she was four, and in films when she was eight. Her father, Mirza Dawood Baig, was an unsuccessful story writer and somehow over time, Naaz became the only earning member of the family.


WITH RATTAN KUMAR IN BOOT POLISH (1954)

In the same interview, she said, “I wanted to study, but unfortunately I had no time to breathe and had to forget about school. I left studies, for my mother didn’t stop accepting films on my behalf and my father stopped working. My mother was too used to making money out of me and didn’t want to forgo this easy life. She wanted me to work for her comforts and I was both too young and in awe of my parents to refuse!”

She became the highest paid child artiste and worked in around 120 films. But her reality was that she was being neglected by her parents who were constantly fighting with each other. Sometimes, after coming home from the day's shoot, she would fall asleep without having dinner. By the time she turned 12, her parents separated and Kumari Naaz had to stay with her mother, who remarried when Naaz was 16 years old.



With a troubled family life, Kumari Naaz could never graduate to the big league. There was no one to manage her career and her mother accepted any and every role that came by. Raj Kapoor wanted to send Kumari Naaz to a Swiss finishing school for five years, intending to launch her under his banner after she returned. But Kumari Naaz recalled that her mother had wanted to go along with her to Switzerland too, and turned down the offer when she realised that would not be possible.

Besides her iconic role as Belu in Boot Polish (1954), film buffs may remember Kumari Naaz as the younger version of Parvati in Devdas (1955), as Raaj Kumar’s younger sister Munni in Dil Apna Aur Preet Parai (1960) and a young dancer in Mujhe Jeene Do (1963). She tried her hands at lead roles too, with Lambe Haath (1960) opposite Mehmood, and Char Dervesh (1964) opposite the dashing Feroz Khan.


Kumari Naaz was a strong actress who, from a young age, not only handled emotional and comedic scenes with ease, but also danced effortlessly in front of the camera. However, despite all her talents, she kept playing supporting characters even in the later films of the 1970s. She married actor Subbiraj (cousin of Raj Kapoor) in 1965 and continued working. The two had acted together in Mera Ghar Mere Bachchay (1960) and Dekha Pyar Tumhara (1963).


Not many are aware that she transitioned into a second career as a dubbing artiste. Before Sridevi started using her own voice, Kumari Naaz dubbed for her in the early Hindi hits of the 1980s. It was a far cry from the status she enjoyed during her early years in Hindi cinema.

The number of child actors sustaining their careers in cinema is low. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were those like Nargis that made it big and others like Daisy Irani and Kumari Naaz that didn’t. Kumari Naaz stopped acting by the 1980s and was diagnosed with tumours in the liver during the 1990s. Despite undergoing different kinds of treatments, she passed away on 19 October 1995.






Sridevi was widely appreciated for her performance in her 2012 comeback film English Vinglish, in which she plays a housewife who takes up English lessons to stand up to her family. But there was also a meta quality to Gauri Shinde’s poignant movie: this was a role close to home for Sridevi, who had made a career out of learning to master the art of speaking in a foreign tongue.

Sridevi’s vast repertoire spanned 50 years and several hundred films in at least five languages. But the industry in which she would reach staggering heights was built on a language she was least versed with. Sridevi made her Hindi film debut in the 1979 film Solva Saavan after a successful career in Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu films, but it wasn’t until a decade later that she started dubbing for her own roles, starting with Chandni (1989).

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By then, though she had made a name for herself in the Hindi cinema, the voice that accompanied most of her power-packed performances belonged to the highly talented Baby Naaz. Though not quite a baby anymore, Naaz, whose high-pitched sing-song voice was the trademark of Sridevi’s early performances, continued to be known by her stage name from her days as a child artist.

For a performer with rare talent and a filmography of more than a hundred movies, Naaz remains woefully under-recognised. Old interviews, blogs and news reports piece together a life of hardship, neglect and lost opportunities.

Baby Naaz was born Salma Baig in Mumbai in August 1944. She started performing on the stage when she was four. By the age of 10, she had become a staple in Hindi films and had even received international acclaim for her performances. For her turn as an orphan who is forced to beg on the streets with her brother in Boot Polish (1954), Naaz received a special mention at the Cannes Film Festival.

After powerful supporting roles in films like Bimal Roy’s Devdas (1955), Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Musafir (1957), Lajwanti (1958) and Guru Dutt’s Kagaz Ke Phool (1959), the child artist seemed headed towards stardom.


Boot Polish (1954).
But Naaz could not recreate her early success as an adult. Though she continued doing supporting roles in later years, the second phase of her career saw find greater success as a dubbing artist, where she lent her voice to several new actresses, most famously Sridevi.

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In an undated interview to the Stardust magazine, Naaz shed light on a traumatic and unhappy childhood, one in which she was forced into the spotlight and turned into the primary breadwinner of her family before she even turned five. Her father had tried but failed to make a career as a screenwriter. It was her mother , Naaz said, who pushed her into show business. She described her mother as overly ambitious, and blamed her for her failure to sustain her success in her adulthood. “I will never be able to forgive my mother nor forget her greed for money,” the actress told Stardust.


Himmatwala (1983).
In that interview, Naaz recalled how she had tried committing suicide twice by jumping into a well near her house. She was rescued both times by her ayah, she said. Pushed into the spotlight too early, she had to miss out on an education to keep the kitchen fires burning at home. When she would return after a full day of shooting (she claimed that she would be working four shifts at a time), she would find her parents fighting bitterly, leaving them with no time to give her food. She recalled going to bed hungry countless times. Deprived of a normal childhood, Naaz thought she had only one way to escape: through suicide.

Naaz also held her mother responsible for her inability to sustain her fame in the film industry. She had no experienced manager to help her make strategic choices. Her mother, she said, accepted every role that came their way, good and terrible. She had one last chance to make it big, when Raj Kapoor offered to send her to a film school in Switzerland, but her mother refused, Naaz claimed, for she did not know how to manage without her income back in India.

It was with her husband and actor Subbiraj Kumar that she says she found love and acceptance. According to some accounts, it was Kumar who urged Naaz to give dubbing a shot. The two married in 1965 and even appeared in a few films together. But in her later years till her death in October 1995, the closest she came to her early days of stardom was as the voice of Sridevi.

On Saturday, even the most famous embodiment of Naaz’s voice faded away.

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