I've sent this photo to my wife saying that it was my new girlfriend and she said that she didn’t mind because she was dating George Clooney. I’m having a slight fit of India fever these days, I think it started when I tried to watch “Rang de Basanti” the other day. The CD got stalled 15 minutes into the film but I still had time to be impressed by the lines in Hindi at the beginning, which say:

“If your blood does not boil with rage,
Then water is flowing in your veins

Of what use is it to be young
If one does not serve one’s motherland ?”

which brought to me the melancholy reflection that I could almost understand the language ( I knew many of the words, and could feel the poetic power of the Hindi version, but I still needed the English subtitles to makes sense of the whole) . Then the next day I happened on a special issue of India Today on “The Changing India” on the occasion of the country’s 60th anniversary of independence. There was a photo of a very cute little girl amidst other children, in a village in a forgotten corner of West Bengal, where people rely only on solar power for their daily life. It’s funny how the repertoire of images for nationalist pride is always the same everywhere: small children lined up in the school courtyard in a remote village, stern soldiers in a parade, a successful woman entrepreneur, the unsung heroes – a doctor in a slum, a fireman. White-coated young people seriously at work in a biotechnology laboratory. That little girl’s impish smile was very moving, in that predictable catalogue.

Then the next evening, I saw a young man taking on a Manna Dey song at one of those song contests. There was also a young man of striking appearance from Faisalabad in Pakistan, thin, with sunken eyes and a haunted expression who sang another old classical song with enormous virtuosity. He looked exactly like the poet in residence in a Mughal court, or what we’d imagine such a personnage to look like.

All that worked me up a bit and I fell to thinking of Rajput forts, of Dilip Kumar singing “Madhuban me Radhika naache re” in – was it "Baiju Bawra" ? And of course, of Madhubala as Anarkali defying Emperor Akbar with those lines in "Mughal E Azam":

Parda nahin jab koi khuda se,
bandon se parda karna kya
Jab pyaar kiya to darna kya

(When there is no veil between one and God,
then why veil oneself from His followers ?
When one is in love, why be afraid ?)

Aaaahh La Madhubala ! That's her photo, at the top. The Maiden of Honey ( Madhubala)....dead at 36. Why does God take away all the classy gals from us ? We’re not worthy having them in our midst or what ? Romy Schneider. Madhubala. Thank God Monica Vitti’s still alive.

I heard that they’ve coloured Mughal E Azam. In the original version, only three of the song scenes are in colour, if I do remember. I remember seeing it from a crappy VHS tape. I’d like to have a look at the new version. What a movie that was…..it is based on the story of Anarkali, a popular tale in India and Pakistan . It is said that prince Salim ( the future Mughal Emperor Jahangir) fell violently in love with a household slave known as Nadira, also known as Anarkali ( Pomegranate blossom). Emperor Akbar , Salim’s father, was stiffly opposed to the union, on the grounds that a slave could not become Empress of India. Salim then rose in arms against his father, but was defeated. The Emperor ordered that his son be put to death on the charge of rebellion, but Anarkali offered her life in his place. She then asked to be allowed to spend one night with Salim, before being slain. Thus , after a night with the Prince, she was walled up alive, in a wall of a bazaar in Lahore, which is since then known as the Anarkali bazaar.

Mughal E Azam’s production started in 1950, a few years after the tragic Partition of India, which saw half of India’s Muslim population move to the new state of Pakistan ( and millions of Hindus move in the opposite direction). India’s Muslims were a decapitated community, most of their elite having moved to Pakistan – they were at the lowest point of their history, not that they’ve made much progress since then: in a recently published report commissioned by the Indian Government, they have been found to be significantly poorer than the rest of the Indian population and widely discriminated against.

It was probably not a coincidence that at this low point in their history, so soon after the horror of Partition,
film director K.Asif embarked on this pharaonic project to recapture on screen , the splendour of the Mughal court under Akbar : it was surely an exercise in nostalgia and in historical revalidation. One can’t help thinking of Gone with the Wind, with its similar ethos of the loser recreating the lost world of his glory. Of course, Gone with the Wind is more grounded in history ( there is no historical record of Anarkali’s story ) yet both films succeed because, beyond the historical reconstruction, they are well told love stories, with magnetic female characters who carry the movie with furious conviction.

However, while Vivien Leigh’s commitment to Gone with the Wind was strictly professional and had nothing to do with her personal history ( she, together with two others of the four main characters in the story, was actually British (1), while Clark Gable was from Ohio ! ), in the case of Madhubala, the relation between her life and that of Anarkali is profound, complex and fascinating.

Madhubala, whose real name was Mumtaz Begum Jehan Dehlavi, was the fifth child of a poor Pathan family of eleven children . Her father was a coach driver. When she was small , a Muslim holy man predicted that she would know fame and fortune, but that her life would be short and full of misery. Strangely, her father then decided to take her to Bombay to make an actress, and eventually a star out of her. One would have thought that he would rather have tried to avoid letting the first part of the prediction come true, lest the second also be realised. After some initial difficulties, she became a child star, then grew up to become a beautiful young girl
and an increasingly successful actress. At the age of 18, she played for the first time with film star Dilip Kumar and , according to an aprocryphal story, she sent him a love letter inside a flower. A romance then followed which met the strong opposition of Madhubala’s father , who feared his daughter’s marriage and eventual retirement from the film world – she was the sole breadwinner of the family.

Matters came to a head after six years of clandestine romance when Madhubala and Dilip Kumar had to travel to Bhopal for the shooting of a film. Ataullah Khan, Madhubala’s father, objected to his daughter going there on the grounds that it would give further occasion for Dilip Kumar to make love to his daughter ( “making love” in the old sense of the term: “to indulge in courtship” like in the Chinese tan lian ai: “to talk love” ). An obedient Madhubala thus stayed home, the film director threw her a lawsuit and Dilip Kumar ended up giving testimonial against his lover. There’s no business like show business. After this, the couple broke up and one can say that Madhubala’s imperious, exploitative father had “won”.

However, unbeknowst to all, at the age of 20, Madhubala had been diagnosed with a fatal heart ailment – a hole in the heart, which could not be cured by surgery in those days. She kept news of her disease secret and during the next years, would sometimes spit blood in hiding.

Some time after their split, Madhubala and Dilip Kumar were cast to play the roles of Anarkali and Prince Salim in Mughal E Azam ( the Great Mughal) , the greatest, biggest superproduction in the history of Indian cinema. A mega production on the scale of Hollywood’s great epics of the past, Mughal E Azam took 14 years to realise, including more than 500 days of actual shooting. Director K. Asif spent no stone unturned to make this film a glorious recreation of Mughal splendour. Traditional artisans from all over India were brought together to make the accessories as realistic as ever. In his mania for perfection, Asif made Madhubala work in often punishing conditions, for example making her wear real, heavy iron chains in the scene where she is condemned to death.

Thus the estranged Madhubala and Dilip Kumar found themselves playing the role of India’s most famous tragic lovers. Did they reflect on the bitter irony of their situation ? Despite being a well known actress, Madhubala was after all almost a real life slave: her rapacious father had not not only destroyed her love life, but he had forced her to play in every film offer which came, just to make money. Thus, despite her great talent, she had not had the chance to choose good films for her advancement, and some critics were saying that she was more a pretty face than a real actress. She was thoroughly exploited. Dilip Kumar, on the other hand, was a big star on his way to become probably the greatest actor in the history of Indian Cinema. He was thus, like Prince Salim, a Crown Prince.

It is said that during the time of relationship with Madhubala, Dilip Kumar had tried to have her revolt against her father. But in the end, her father was able to destroy their romance by pitting them one against the other in court. In Anarkali’s story, Prince Salim raises the flag of revolt against the Emperor and is defeated in battle.

Another strange coincidence was that both Madhubala and Dilip Kumar were Pashtuns. Dilip Kumar’s real name was Mohamad Yusuf Khan and he was actually from Peshawar, in the heart of Pashtun country. Both had taken on Hindu noms de scène to improve their market appeal. Both came from poor families – Dilip Kumar had been spotted by a scout talent while he was setting up a canteen business. A desire for adventure had brought them in the margins of the world of Bollywood, where good luck shone on them.

The Mughals , whose glory Mughal E Azam tries to recreate, were also adventurers, and they too came from the Afghan region. Babur, the grandfather of Emperor Akbar and thus the great grandfather of Prince Salim had tumbled down from Kabul to wrest India from the Lodi Dynasty after a lifetime of daredevil exploits against his Central Asian relatives.

I admit it all seems like I’m stretching the point a bit too much. One has to see the film to catch its melancholy mood, its supressed longing. It’s not a little bit cruel to watch it knowing that these are two people who are really in love with each other. And to know too that while, in the film, Anarkali is walled alive, in real life Madhubala spent the nine years after the shooting confined in bed, dying slowly from a hole in her heart – both literally and figuratively.

Curiously, the “mirror” effect between her life and this film is sharpened by the fact that one finds several allusions to mirrors within the Anarkali story/film. According to one version of the Anarkali legend, Emperor Akbar found out about the liaison between his son and Anarkali one day when he saw, in the reflection given by a mirror, Anarkali secretly smiling at the Prince. The famous dance scene was shot in the Sheesh Mahal ( Palace of Crystals), a hall in the Lahore fort studded with small coloured mirrors ( below is a photo of a ceiling of the Sheesh Mahal).

If I do remember well from an extract I saw the other day on a television in an electronics shop, the camera uses mirrors to great effect throughout the dance scene. Sometimes, the image of Anarkali is split into a multitude of little images. Everything sparkles throughout that scene. Then the Emperor smashes a mirror, or something of glass, and the illusion is shattered.

In a scene at the beginning of the film, we see an ambitious noblewoman ( the “villain”) put on a crown while looking at herself in a mirror, and she says to herself : “The one who wants to wear the crown should be fearless”. I’ve also read, while “googling” this film, that Prithviraj Kapoor, the actor who played the role of Emperor Akbar, used to spend long moments in front of a body-size mirror, looking at himself in full regalia, in order to get into the skin of his character.

Nine years later, as poor Madhubala lay dying, she watched herself over and over – more than 500 times it is said - as Anarkali through the mirror of the television screen, as she endlessly replayed the dance scene on the video.

It is an awful , beautiful story, like a small red mirror fallen from the walls of the Sheesh Mahal, which dazzles the eye as it reflects the sunlight – it sends the sunrays racing across the walls of the Mahal, lighting up the other mirrors , and one keeps turning it faster and faster between one’s fingers until it suddenly cuts one of them – the deep red of the blood splashes over the mirror and the light is gone.

As if all of the above was not enough – now this is weird – our poor Madhubala who was immortalised on the screen as Anarkali, the tragic lover, and whose own life was one of painful, unrequited love – well she was born on 14 February 1933 : on Saint Valentine’s day.

Poor dear. They say she was a cheerful, happy-go-lucky lass, who learned driving at 12, played the role of vamps in the early 40’s, when over Indian actress were still doing the shrinking violet number, and was prone to fits of giggling whenever she was in an embarassing situation. I hate to see a hearty baby go down.

(1) Strangely enough Vivien Leigh, the woman who became immortal as Scarlett O’Hara, the archetypal aristocratic Southern White, was herself “borderline white” – She came from a family of British settlers in India, with probably a mixed Armenian – Indian Parsi ancestry on her mother’s side.

Note: the first photo comes from Bollywood Picture Gallery.com and the little black and white photo of Madhubala is from Bollywood501.com. The photo of the ceiling of the Sheesh Mahal comes from Orientalarchitecture.com. The stills of Mughal E Azam are from Bollyvista.com. The lyrics from the Mughal E Azam song are from a specialised website.