Finding Meena… and failing

Forget Meena Kumari, the colossal legend of yesteryear, Vinod Mehta would have done his own reputation as a fine writer immense good if he had not given in to temptation. The temptation to bring out a new edition of his 1972 biography of the veteran Hindi film actress. Originally published by Jaico, and now by Harper Collins, the book does little justice to the great artiste.

At the outset, dedicating the book to Meena Kumari, the author says “wish I had known you”, and that says it all… why the effort lacks any depth, or does so little to help the reader understand the complex character and acting prowess of the late screen goddess… the Chhoti Bahu of Guru Dutt’s Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam and Sahab Jaan of Kamal Amrohi’s Pakeezah.

Instead, we get a poor caricature of the actress whom Mehta keeps calling, to my great irritation, “my heroine”, through the entire book. What somewhat redeems this atrocious narrative, in which he largely appears cocky at best and flippant and ignorant at worst, is the shy at honesty in the introduction to the new edition. Here, Mehta admits that when Meena died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1972, he was a struggling ad copywriter “going nowhere. With false bravado which comes easily to a person who has achieved little, I accepted the commission and duly delivered the finished manuscript” in a few months. Priced Rs 5, the biography was published a few weeks later. Mehta himself was “embarrassed at the effort” because the subject of his biography was not available for interviews, and Dharmendra — “the man who had callously used and discarded her”, and who could have provided valuable insight — ditched him after granting several appointments.

After this admission comes the typical Mehta self-praise: After all, the book was “not as bad” as he had thought and had “managed to capture some fleeting essence of the controversial actress”!

But if you admire that exceptionally talented actress as much as I do, you will find some nuggets in the book. There are interesting passages on how she met and doted on an older Kamal Amrohi, how he nursed her through a hospitalisation, their astonishingly long telephone calls through the night, the marriage and the unfair demands Amrohi made of his wife. When she refused to stop acting because her family needed the income, he laid down crazy conditions such as returning home by 6.30 p.m., commuting at all times only in her own car and not allowing anyone in her make-up room! Some things don’t change, do they?

Meena, of course, flouted all three conditions with gay abandon, and was once sighted taking a spin in Pradeep Kumar’s new Chrysler — she loved cars — by one of Amrohi’s sidekicks, and was promptly confronted by her husband. The marriage soon deteriorated and they separated after a while.

Other interesting titbits refer to how Meena shunned vulgar ostentation and parties and “the synthetic bonhomie of the film world. Most people considered her a snob, only intimates knew she was genuinely bored by such occasions”, how she would appear at important meetings such as Filmfare award functions — she won the Best Actress award four times — or premiers looking resplendent in exotic white sarees.

Chhoti Bahu

Thankfully, Mehta dwells at some length on Meena as the Chhoti Bahu in Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam , easily her career’s best performance. Wondering why she accepted this role which was “so remote from her experience, so damaging to her public image, so impossible”, he says that despite being a firmly established diva, Meena was then 32, she was nervous about the role as she drove to work the first day. Chhoti Bahu is a devout Hindu Bengali wife yearning for the love of her decadent zamindar husband (played brilliantly by Rehman), who is a regular at kothas every evening. To hold him back at home, with great reluctance she tries alcohol, and slowly gets addicted to it. Ironically, it was addiction to alcohol, complemented by acute loneliness and heartbreaks that finally killed her in real life.

Mehta observes that in “every frame of the film she fills the screen with her presence”. Her restrained acting, the raw sex appeal she exudes even though fully clothed, in Geeta Dutt’s immortal song “ Na jao saiyya chhuda ke baiya ”, the longing, the pathos and the final tragedy… all of this came to her at a price. Mehta quotes her diary: “This woman (Chhoti Bahu) is troubling me a great deal. All day long — and a good part of the night — it is nothing else but Chhoti Bahu’s smiles, hopes, tribulations… Oh! I am sick of it!”

Mehta describes her in the film as a “woman of sharp, mature, mysterious persona”. In his book Ten Years with Guru Dutt , the film’s director, Abrar Alvi, describes the scene where Bhootnath (played by Guru Dutt) first meets Chhoti Bahu. “The shot included an empty bed, symbolic of her life, and other furniture that created the right ambience. But my shot-taking was falling short of my visualisation.” Meena Kumari, who had a broad face, looked awful in close shots; changing the camera angle, using the trolley, raising the camera… nothing worked. It took Guru Dutt’s knowledge of cameras, photography and his brilliant creativity to get on screen the Chhoti Bahu we all saw and loved… beautiful, exotic, beseeching, heartbreaking!

Perhaps this is unfair criticism, but it is this kind of insight that Mehta’s book totally lacks. True, it was a hurried effort of a young writer, whose brilliant writing skills were yet to be honed. But what prevented him from putting in a little effort to redo certain passages in the republished version is a mystery.

Saving grace

The saving grace of this biography is Mehta’s admission in his introduction to the new edition: “It would be a brave, possibly foolish man who would write a book on Meena Kumari without the necessary escape clause”. And that escape clause — give me a break — was that it was impossible to find even one “undisputed fact” about the woman, everything connected with her life had four versions. So, the author tells us, cleverly covering his own back and his poor effort, “lots of people will complain ‘No, no, he’s got it all wrong. It is not pineapple juice she liked but orange juice.’” Such flippancy, and that too regarding one of the greatest actresses Bollywood has produced, is unpardonable.

My verdict: Instead of picking up this book… spend your time and money in watching Meena’s great films… Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam, Pakeezah, Dil Apna aur Preet Parayi and even the older Kohinoor or Azad , which belong more to Dilip Kumar than Meena Kumari. In all these films, Meena’s brilliance as an actress, the mesmerising beauty of her dark, liquid eyes, the dard and kasak (pain and longing) in her mellifluous voice... and much more… come through.

The problem is that when you write a book like Lucknow Boy (Mehta’s wonderful memoir), readers raise both the bar and their expectations.

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