More than 50 years after its release in 1972, Kamal Amrohi’s Pakeezah, starring Meena Kumari as a tawaif (courtesan), is still circulating. Not just circulating, but regenerating, creeping back onto the silver screen.
While Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s Film Heritage Foundation is premiering a restored Pakeezah at the Festival Lumière in Lyon and the BFI London Film Festival in October, Amrohi’s grandson, the actor and producer Bilal Amrohi, is cobbling together Kamal Aur Meena, a film that charts the long, tumultuous, and meandering 15 years it took to complete the iconic film — and the long, tumultuous, and meandering marriage of its director and lead actress.
Amrohi’s Pakeezah was always two stories knotted together, separable, but bleeding into one another.
First is the film itself. Sahibjaan (Kumari), a storied tawaif who chooses to love and be loved by a “respectable” man (Raaj Kumar), pursues that to its logical and thorny conclusion — marriage. A Muslim social and grand spectacle, the film, drenched in melancholy, often ranks among India’s finest films.
Second is the making of the film. When Amrohi married Meena Kumari, he was also married to Mehmoodie, with whom he had three children: two sons, Shandar and Tajdar, and a daughter, Rukhsaar Amrohi. The film put a strain on both marriages.
OBSESSION AND OPULENCE
A 15-year journey, Pakeezah began in 1956 as a black-and-white film, but the negatives were burnt. It was re-shot in Eastmancolor, then again in Cinemascope, and when the footage was found to be out of focus, reshot again. In between, the sets caught fire — twice. In the late 1950s, Meena Kumari’s star was also on the steep rise, and it was getting increasingly difficult to get her dates, as Vinod Mehta reports in Meena Kumari: The Classic Biography.
Soon, news reports about the lavish sets circulated. Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri even visited the Gulabi Mahal set. He didn’t recognise Meena Kumari. “Baba was with him,” Tajdar Amrohi says. “There is a dressing table next to the pond, where there were attar bottles. Shastri sahib took one bottle and smelled it thinking it would be fake — but it was real! Baba had got them from Lucknow, Kolkata, kahan kahan se (from all over). He sarcastically asked Baba, ‘Audience ko iski khushboo aayegi? (Will the audience be able to smell this?’) Baba responded, ‘Jab mujhe aa rahi hai, toh unko bhi aayegi (If I can smell it, then so can they’).”
These were extravagances which felt essential to Amrohi, who would sell land back home, in Amroha, to fund each new extravagance.
It would take two years and 20 embroiderers to make the carpet on which ‘Chalte Chalte’ would be performed. He borrowed the paandan Mehmoodie got from her family for her marriage. He would personally shop for walking sticks and for pillows on which the nawabs of the film would walk and rest. It was, after all, a milieu he was deeply familiar with. “Voh mere purkhon ke zindagi ka aks dikhaya gaya hai,” Rukhsaar says. “That was a mirror to the life of our ancestral relatives.”
Tajdar remembers his father buying plots of forest land in Ratnagiri, spending days with his crew padding it with cotton and jute, so he could burn it down for a scene. The timing was off, and the fire was lit before the cameras were ready. The path to the making of Pakeezah was littered with not just extravagance but also inconvenience. “Pakeezah mere gale ka phanda ban gaya hai (Pakeezah has become the noose around my neck),” Amrohi even wrote in one of his letters.
RUMOURS AND RUIN
The personal lives of those involved tinted the film’s destiny. Both Tajdar and Rukhsaar remember their father’s obsession in those decades. “Raaton ki neend, din ka chain (his sleep, his peace), all his money. I remember I asked him to buy me canvas shoes for school; he said, ‘Pakeezah ke baad’,” Tajdar notes.
When Kumari left Amrohi in 1964, the film, too, was shelved. Gossip crept in about the relationship. Was he a controlling husband? Was she a wayward wife? Narratives were formed and the film was kept alive in these vicious whispers, until in the late 1960s, the composer Khayyam, Sunil Dutt, and Nargis saw Pakeezah’s rushes and convinced Amrohi to complete the film. Nargis even spoke to Kumari, nudging her to return.
But Amrohi couldn’t pick up where he left off. For one, his cinematographer, Josef Wirsching, had passed away as had the music composer Ghulam Mohammed — who died in penury, his music considered out of fashion. Could Amrohi make the same film he wanted to make in the 1950s for the 1970s?
“When Meena ji agreed to come back, financiers, too, came back,” Tajdar notes. “But they had their conditions — change the music director, for example. Shankar-Jaikishan were the flavour of the season. But my father used to say ‘I could never do this crime. The original composer, Ghulam Mohammad, had died, how can I replace him?’”
BURQAS AND BOX-OFFICE
Rukhsaar remembers Ghulam Mohammad walking to Amrohi’s house early in the morning, and playing the tune for ‘Chalte Chalte.’ “Maachis ki dibbi par pat-pat karke sunaya (He played the song by tapping on his matchbox).” There was an abiding fondness attached to all the songs he had composed. But what of the changed public appetite? The 1970s was a decade of action and romantic films, and the music accompanying it had a different tempo.
Besides, Ashok Kumar, who was supposed to play the male lead, had also aged considerably and Kumari, her career on the wane, was in the grip of alcoholism, diagnosed with liver cirrhosis in 1968.
Somehow, Amrohi cobbled the project together, working with more than 14 cinematographers— including R. D. Mathur, the cinematographer of Mughal-e-Azam (1960) — and Naushad completed the musical score, keeping the original songs intact.
Kumar now played the father figure. When he was unavailable for a shoot date — the scene in the buggy with Kumari on his lap — Amrohi filled in. “Uss scene mein baba ke haath dikhaya gaya hai, unki godh mein hi Meena ji close-up de rahi thi (You can see my father’s hand in that scene. It was in his lap that Meena Kumari gave her close-up),” Rukhsaar recalls.
Dharmendra was briefly considered for the male lead. He even shot a few scenes, according to Rukhsaar, but the optics of it — Kumari’s husband directing the man she is allegedly having an affair with — soured. Amrohi roped in Raaj Kumar to play the hero instead.
The Rolodex kept flipping on the actors, but Kumari remained poised. As Amrohi once said, “Pakeezah is Meena Kumari”. On her first day back on set, Amrohi organised a grand reception and offered Kumari a peda (sweet), shooting footage of her return for a documentary.
They had to shoot two more songs — ‘Teer-e-Nazar Dekhenge’ and ‘Mausam Hai Aashiqana’. Having lost considerable weight, and weak from illness, Kumari was unable to shoot extensively or even dance. Amrohi used body doubles with covered faces and out of focus shots.
Over 250 days, spread over 15 years, Pakeezah finally took shape.
Rukhsaar remembers the first banner of the film being unfurled in Mahim. “Uss waqt itna excitement tha, raat mein puri family, do gaadiyon mein bhar ke voh banner dekhne gaye the. Choti ammi (Kumari) bhi thi. Public bhi khadi thi neeche (Excited, at night, our whole family, including Meena Kumari, went to look at the banner in two cars. Even the public was standing there),” she says.
Pakeezah premiered on 4 February 1972. The initial response was discouraging. The Times of India called it “a lavish waste”, while Filmfare gave it one star. The Urdu press, according to Vinod Mehta, was more sympathetic to the concept and milieu and was “fulsome in its praise”.
But something quickly shifted.
“Thode din baad, music hit hua. Aur Desai sahib, jo distributor hai, unhone baba ko call kiya ‘Burqe aane shuru ho gaye!’ Aur agar burqe aa rahe hai toh samajh lo hit ho gayi hai, (After a few days, the music became a hit, and Desai, the film’s distributor, called dad to say, ‘The burqas have started coming!’ If the burqas have arrived, so has the film),” Rukhsaar says.
The film’s collections soared. But within two months, on 31 March, Kumari died. Pakeezah would be the last of her films to release when she was alive — her swan song, and the one that would become emblematic of her legacy, ‘The Tragedy Queen’.
LETTERS AND LEGACY
It is this story that Bilal Amrohi wants to capture. “A man who wants to gift the greatest work as an ode to his lover, but he gets so consumed by it and it gets so poisonous over the years that he forgets why he was doing it — it swallows their lives,” he says.
Bilal first saw Pakeezah only around 2018-19. “There was a mood for remakes in the industry, and I was doing the rounds, trying to get this remake greenlit,” he says. Everyone seemed intimidated, “If you can’t better the legacy, then don’t touch it.”
In the interim, he met Dungarpur, who was trying to get his passion project of restoring Pakeezah off the ground. “I remember watching Pakeezah with my maternal grandmother, Usha Devi of Dumraon, in the zamindari (feudal) way — of booking a cinema hall and watching it together. That was the film that made me embark on filmmaking,” Dungarpur says.
He showed Bilal his restoration work on Sholay. “That blew my mind,” Bilal says, “It encouraged me to revive the restoration.” He also pivoted, away from the remake, to stage the story of its making, using more than 500 letters they both wrote to each other, preserved by Rukhsaar. “It is their story in their voice, without making it sweeter or softer,” Bilal says.
MYTH AND MEMORY
Meanwhile Dungarpur went about restoring Pakeezah. The original negatives were not there, nor were dupes or master positives. “I only had an IP from NFAI (National Film Archive of India). Ramnord Lab had a negative, which was damaged,” he says.
Faded colours, scratches, and mould on the material tested Dungarpur’s resolve. The restoration work was done at the L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Bologna.
The version currently circulating, whose rights are held by Shemaroo, is poor quality — not meant to be screened but watched on televisions and phones. Can we smell the attar? Can we see the embroidery on the carpet? Besides, it seems to have been digitised carelessly, exaggerating colours, removing grain, turning the image limp. “Grains in a film are like veins in the body, it is where the blood flows. If you remove all of it, it is all flat,” Dungarpur says.
The bright pink anarkali that Kumari wears during her mujra (dance) in “Inhi Logon Ne”, for example, might not have been that bright. “It is a reddish pink,” Dungarpur says. He relied on the photographer Damodar Kamat’s photographs from the set. He tried to get it confirmed by trying to track down the tailor in Mahim who made the outfit, but that was a dead end. Rukhsaar worked with Dungarpur on various iterations to get the shade right. Nobody who worked on the film is alive today.
In the absence of incontrovertible fact, memories serve as evidence. But people kept wanting to establish ownership over these memories — biopics of Meena Kumari were announced, one to be directed by Tigmanshu Dhulia and another by Manish Malhotra, both abandoned. Legal troubles loomed over anyone who wanted to tell this story. At the helm, the Amrohi family wanted to set the record straight.
It is in this context that these memories are marshalled — to stage Pakeezah as a film, as a myth and as a response. The two people in the eye of this storm are no longer with us. Some letters, some memories, some fantasies are all that remain of them. Kamal Amrohi and Meena Kumari, together, crafted one of the most memorable characters of Indian cinema. Without intending to, they became one themselves.