The story of my mother, Shehnaz the actress who was almost cast as Anarkali in ‘Mughal-e-Azam’
n the early 1950s, not long after she had arrived in Bombay as a newly-married bride, my mother portrayed Anarkali in a theatrical production. The director, K Asif, happened to see the play and was so taken with her performance that he wanted to cast her as Anarkali in Mughal-e-Azam. Over 200 photos of her were taken on the movie set, including ones with the iconic feather grazing her face.
Ultimately, she had to decline the role owing to family pressure, as in those days women from respectable families did not act in “pictures”. The photos remained in an album which she sometimes opened whenever she felt like reminiscing about her life before migrating to Pakistan.
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She had vivid memories, but my mother did not view the past through rose-tinted glasses. Though she never spoke of it publicly, she carried an immense pain throughout her life. Once she felt I was old enough, she began to share her secret history with me, speaking with the utmost frankness, mother to daughter.
Her public life in Bombay was filled with the trappings of glamour. There were movie premieres with film stars like Dilip Kumar, Madhubala and Kamini Kaushal, photos at official functions with heads of state like Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and history-making individuals like Tenzing Norgay.
The glamorous mirage masked a terrible reality.
On the set of Mughal-e-Azam.
My mother was being violently abused, physically assaulted by her husband at the time. For the duration of the daily abuse, a period of seven years, she kept up appearances, accompanied her politician husband on campaign rallies, hosted elegant soirées with the pallu of her sari draped just so that the bruises would not be visible.
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She begged her family to intervene, only to be ignored time and time again.
After one particularly brutal beating, my uncles came and took her back home to Bhopal. However, her husband persuaded them to hand her back with a written apology and an undertaking that he would never hurt her again.
Needless to say, the abuse continued, until one day her gynaecologist, the eminent Dr VN Shirodkar, told her plainly that she would be dead within six months if she did not divorce her husband.
My mother took his advice, but the price she paid for going against that devious and influential monster was enormous. He was a barrister and a politician and she a woman with minimal education and no defences against his cunning. He took custody of both her young children, my step-siblings.
She spent the next 20 years desperately searching for them. When she was finally able to track them down and met them in their adult years, they had already been brainwashed against her by their father.
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The final manipulation came in the form of the threat that if they ever reconciled with their mother, he would disinherit them. It worked.
After the briefest of reunions, her long-lost children cut off all ties with my mother, breaking her all over again.
My mother cried herself to sleep every night of her life. No joy could fully overcome the pain of the separation from her children.
It was remarkable that she had the courage to keep on going in spite of her agony. Constantly harassed by the police in Bombay, she decided to take a break and visit Karachi for a family wedding, where she met and married my father, a love marriage across Shia/Sunni sectarian lines.
With Dilip Kumar
Bia carried herself with great poise in her new life in Pakistan, but never failed to journey to India every year for the next two decades in search of her children. Each time she would return newly heartbroken and dejected.
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Bia loved music as well as singing. Music for her was a kind of opiate. She had a gorgeous voice, had studied a little with an ustad in Bombay and was a great aficionado of the ghazal form.
Time and time again my memory goes back to dwell on the early years of my childhood, between the ages of six and nine, that were spent in Karachi with my mother as head of our household, while my father was a prisoner of war. She never let us feel the lack of a father.
Our rooms in the Services Club had no kitchen, so come evening it would be time to discover a new restaurant or revisit a favourite eatery. We would pile into the bright red Dodge, which she drove at race car speed with the top down and her hair flying in the wind. There were weekends on the beach at Hawke’s Bay and Sandspit and endless trips to bookstores.
I couldn’t have asked for a better childhood.
With Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
Recently, I have been drawn to reconstruct some of that time in a novel set in the Karachi of my girlhood in the 1970s. In the course of my research, I stumbled upon a video of Bia in the audience of a Zia Mohyeddin show. It was a surreal moment: there she was in her trademark chiffon sari, all smiles, and swaying in rapture at Mehdi Hasan singing Ranjish Hi Sahi.
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I remember being seven or eight years old and being taken to mehfils where Iqbal Bano or Farida Khanum or Mehdi Hasan or Habib Wali Mohammad were performing. As a little girl, I found all that boring, but the music must have penetrated my subconscious in a kind of osmosis, as it is now an indelible part of my being.
I recall Bia singing each night before going to bed; when she was putting me to sleep, it was a lullaby, but when she thought I was asleep, I would tiptoe out of my bedroom and hear her sing. Sometimes it would be a Noor Jehan ghazal, sometimes an old film classic like Mujh Ko Is Raat Ki Tanhai Mei Avaaz Na Dou. It is only now that I realise what was haunting her.
I myself have never spoken of this publicly before. But I feel it’s time. My mother passed away in 2012; before #Metoo and #Timesup, she and countless other women of her generation were vilified and deliberately estranged from their children as an act of revenge for asserting their independence.
I suspect my mother, who gave a full page interview in an Urdu paper under the headline “Begum Ali has Grave Grievances Against Men”, would have loved that so many powerful figures in the West have been knocked off their pedestal by this newly-empowered social media savvy generation of women.
Unfortunately in South Asia, although there are cracks and tremors the past and present pillars of patriarchy remain firmly entrenched. Case in point: my mother’s first husband, though long dead, remains firmly on his pedestal. He is revered in India as an author and Islamic scholar. His two oldest children, my step-brother and sister, worship his memory and resolutely deny my mother’s assertions of physical assault and emotional torture.
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If I had only denied my mother’s reality and accepted the version of events that their father fed them, that my mother was a woman of questionable morals who abandoned them at the tender ages of four and six, I would have been accepted by my step-siblings, but I refuse to accept the erasure of my mother’s being so easily.
Bia used to write Urdu poetry on little slips of paper that she kept in her ghazal collections. I’d be perusing Faiz or Nasir Kazmi and a nazm would come floating down like a feather.
After her death, I went through all her books and her poems were missing. All except for one. It reads:
Shani
tou pani hai
Chahé jis bar
tun mei bhar lo
Shani was her nickname. The double entendre of bartan (vessel) with bar (bridegroom) and tun (body) is so subtle and stunning. This tiny little poem contains the constrictions of a woman’s life so succinctly.
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Given the opportunity, I am sure my mother would have been as renowned for her creativity as she was for her looks and her grace.
Writing is a means by which we counteract erasure. After my mother’s death, I gave up both paternal and married surnames and adopted my middle name, Naz, as my surname, as well as takhallus.
Naz was given to me by her symbolically breaking off a piece of her own name, Shehnaz. Own in the larger sense that she had chosen it for herself at the ripe old age of five, after rejecting the family’s given name. Now and until death, I will proudly wear the mantle of this matronymic, forever my mother’s daughter, Sophia Naz.
All photos by the author.
This article first appeared on Dawn.
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..How my mother almost became Anarkali: poet Sophia Naz writes her mother Shehnaz’s biography
Why ‘Mughal-E-Azam’ director could not get the actor he wanted.
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Anarkali was a huge success. All of Bombay was abuzz with the intense emotion and longing that Shehnaz brought to the play, the beauty and sheer magnetism of her presence outshining the rest of the seasoned cast. However, while her husband had made a shrewd calculation in giving her permission to act in the play, assessing that the attendant publicity would be good for his own career and public profile, he had insisted that Shehnaz attend daily public events throughout the duration of the run.
The play was nearing the end of its three-week run and the days had been hectic. Today she was particularly exhausted. There was a knock on her dressing room door. She was used to throngs of admirers outside, bouquets or garlands in hand, waiting for autographs. The demands of such a frenzied schedule had taken their toll on her and she was in no mood to greet whoever it was outside her dressing room that day.
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The knocking grew louder and more insistent. And then she heard the voices of both Ehsan Rizvi and Vijay Dalmia, the theatre owner.
“Madam, please open the door. It’s Asif Saheb. He wishes to speak to you most urgently.” When Shehnaz finally opened the door, before her was a man with penetrating eyes, a pencil-moustache and tufts of distressed hair, puffing nervously on a cigarette. As soon as he saw her, he stubbed out the cigarette on the floor, sank to his knees beside it, flung his arms wide in supplication and shouted, “Anarkali! I have found you at last and now I will make you the most famous woman in India for you will bring her to life in Mughal-é-Azam!”
Shehnaz was stunned. She had not anticipated this turn of events. Of course she knew who K Asif was – all of Bombay knew of the epic extravaganza that the madcap director had been filming, seemingly forever. In the opinion of many, it was a project doomed to failure. She eventually recovered her composure and stammered her protest, “Asif Saheb, I can’t possibly act in a film!”
“Of course you can!” he boomed, “after all you have acted in a play, haven’t you? And acquitted yourself better than many veterans of the stage.”
“Yes, but films...that’s entirely different.”
She hesitated to add that it was not considered respectable in the echelons of the society that she belonged to. Asif was quick to grasp what she left unsaid. “Rest assured you’ll be treated like my sister. I won’t even let the shadow of a scandal fall upon you,” he placed a hand over his heart theatrically. The pleas and protestations continued until she gave in and agreed to appear for a screen test the following Monday at Mohan Studios.
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It was a particularly stultifying day in mid-June and she had opted for the lightest of silk chiffon sari in a dusty-rose hue. The year was 1952, she had been married for a little over a year and had cut her thick tresses fashionably short. She rose early to set her hair in rollers so that the curls framed her face just so. Throughout the photo session and screen test, Asif was solicitous and made sure she was comfortable. At the end of the shoot he smiled, “That was lovely, now I would like to shoot again, this time in full costume.”
Sohrab Rangoonwala, the production assistant protested, “Asif Saheb, that is impossible! There isn’t enough time to stitch such an elaborate costume!”
The director did not miss a beat. “Let her wear what she wore in the play,” he shrugged nonchalantly.
“Actually, that was not a costume,” Shehnaz interjected, “that was my Bhopali joda, the threads are all real silver and gold.”
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“Even better,” Asif crowed delightedly, “Nothing like the real thing!”
The elaborate Mughal arches of the sets were illusions but the woman on those sets was comfortable in her own familiar attire and radiated a regal yet subtle sensuality. Shehnaz recited the monologues she had memorised from the play. Asif was delighted with her impeccable Urdu and flawless diction. These two qualities alone made her perfect for the role of Anarkali.
The litmus test would be her photogenicity in the studio portraits. When he saw her close-ups with the iconic feather grazing her cheek, Asif was ecstatic at having struck gold after so many false starts.
Asif’s quest for the perfect leading lady for his magnum opus had taken many twists and turns. The project had started in 1946, before Partition, and in the beginning, he had cast Chandra Mohan, DK Sapru and Nargis in the roles of Akbar, Salim and Anarkali, respectively. The director had acquired a reputation as an eccentric, quixotic figure with an unpredictable temperament who was making the most expensive picture ever filmed in the Indian subcontinent, with a cast of thousands, and walked around with little more than chillar, loose change, in his pocket.
Just before his friend, the playwright Ehsan Rizvi, whom he hired later on as one of the writers in his production of Mughal-é-Azam, invited him to see Shehnaz play the role of Anarkali in the theatre, he had offered the role to Suraiya. However as soon as he witnessed Shehnaz’s performance, he was convinced that he had found the perfect vessel in which to pour his cinematic dream.
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He had shown the photographs taken on the set to his producer, Shapoorji Pallonji, and secured an appropriately princely sum to offer the Bhopali princess. He patted the wad of cash in his breast pocket, cleared his throat and knocked on Shehnaz’s door.
As luck would have it, that very morning Shehnaz’s brothers, the older Alim Mian and the younger Ghani Mian, had arrived in Bombay on an impromptu visit. They were on their way to a hockey match that featured their famous home team, the Bhopal Wanderers. They were having tea with her when Asif burst in waving the studio photos.
The timing could not have been worse.
“You will be the most famous actress in India!” Asif proclaimed breathlessly to the consternation of her brothers. Without further ado, he spread the photos on the coffee table. There, right under their noses was their sister, posing on a movie set!
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Alim Mian picked up one of the photographs and ripped it to shreds. “How dare you!” he bellowed at the stunned Asif. “Get out! Now!” Both the brothers advanced menacingly towards the terrified director.
He left without another word.
Shehnaz
Excerpted with permission from Shehnaz: A Tragic True Story Of Royalty, Glamour And Heartbreak, Sophia Naz, Vintage Books.
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