Mother India (1957)

Mother India, the film, was the end result of a successful campaign by director Mehboob Khan to reclaim the title "Mother India" from the clutches of American author Katherine Mayo's critical work on Indian culture and society titled 'Mother India', released in 1927. Mayo's book was a scathing critique of India and its people and values and was intended to justify why Indians were not capable of self-rule at a time when all of India was firing and gearing up for freedom from British rule, which would happen 20 years later. Mahatma Gandhi called Mayo's a book, "report of a drain inspector sent out with the one purpose of opening and examining the drains of the country to be reported upon"

Soon after the independence of India in 1947, Mehboob Khan who had been intent on establishing right  Indian values on the big screen started work on remaking his own 1940 film, Aurat, by buying the production rights from the original production company. He intentionally called his film Mother India as a challenge to Mayo's work, in an attempt to eradicate the presence of Mayo's work from minds and history. An ethical or reverse astroturfing attempt that was a great success. If you google Mother India first several pages of search results are all related to Mother India, the movie or Yelp reviews of Mother India restaurants in various parts of the globe which are all Indian restaurants named paying homage to the iconic movie. Khan's Mother India was also influenced by movies based on Pearl S Buck novels - The Mother (1934) and The Good Earth (1931) and Russian films like Mother (1926) and Our Daily Bread (1934.)

The nationalistic pride of the new democratic nation is upheld high by the socialist and constructivist stylization of the movie. The iconic poster of Mother India with bold upward angles where the lead actor Nargis is seen holding up  the plough all by herself shows the determination of the rising new nation, the motherland, as Indians call their country (home country is feminine in all Indian languages) represented by the struggling but determined mother in the movie. The image is also reminiscent of Jesus on the cross, who if you ask me, was the first recorded socialist in (religious) history. The Soviet post-revolutionary posters dunked in constructivist ethos showcasing the rise of the proletariat came much later, but I am pretty sure all of these influences helped design the classic poster of Mother India.

This Mehboob Khan magnum opus usually features in top 10 list of Indian movies. It was India's first ever submission for the Academy Awards for the best foreign language film in 1958 and was chosen as one of the five nominations for that category. It also came close to winning the best foreign film Oscar losing out to Federico Fellini's Nights of Cabiria by a single vote.

The script by Wajahat Mirza & S. Ali Raza was deliberately written to show the emancipation, self reliance, empowerment and strength of Indian women.  The lead characters were portrayed by Nargiz, Raaj Kumar, Sunil Dutt and Rajendra Kumar with exemplary brilliance and the film became a turning point in their careers. Nargiz who was an established actor at the time fell in love with Sunil Dutt who played her son in the movie (they were the same age in real life) and went on marry to Dutt a year later. She won several national and international awards for her role in Mother India which was her last major film before she quit films post-marriage. For all the other three actors, Mother India kickstarted their careers and made them household names for years to come. 

The ending of Mother India culminates with the moral dilemma of the mother who is called to make the ultimate sacrifice that could be asked of any mother. To me, this ending is strangely reminiscent of the ending of another film four decades later featuring Nargiz and Sunil Dutt's actor son Sanjay Dutt - Vastav, where the mother commits to making the same ultimate sacrifice, a la Mother India v 2.0.

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Pakeezah (1972), Meena Kumari and Trains

Meena Kumari's character Sahibjaan in Pakeezah has an obsession with trains, just like me. Although the root cause of our obsessions are vastly different. She almost met (she was sleeping, so she didn't get a chance to meet in the conventional sense) a handsome stranger on an overnight train journey, who left a note of appreciation about her soft feet in Urdu. Even expletives sound like poems in Urdu, so can't blame the lady if she fell head over heels reading a poetic note about her heels. 

Ethereal Meena Kumari, staring out of the window of the train, right after she has read the mysterious note

My fascination with trains could've started in my childhood filled with multi-day, overnight train journeys that took our family to places known & cherished or unknown & magical. If you lived in India in the 20th century and loved/had to travel, there was no escaping the trains. That was probably why  connecting the story-dots in director Kamal Amrohi's story is the omnipresent Indian Railways.

Pakeezah, Meena Kumari's magnum opus created for her by her husband (later ex) Kamal Amrohi is a grand visual poem which took almost fifteen years in the making. The majority of the work happening during the years 1964 to 1971 and the movie was released a couple of months before Meena Kumari's death at 38 in March 1972.

Meena Kumari designed all her wonderfully pirouette-able and elegantly colorful dance costumes for the movie. The music and the songs which can single-handedly make or break a Bollywood musical was composed by Ghulam Muhammad and the lyrics were penned by some of the best Urdu poets of the era like Kaifi Azmi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Kamal Amrohi and Kaifi Bhopali. The cinematography and the production design must have cost a pretty penny.

It is a Muslim-social about a tawaif (a Muslim courtesan or dancing girl) who falls in love with a gentleman in a history-repeats type of situation where the same kind of doomed love affair happens to a mother and her daughter, with two different gentlemen, of course. Both the mother and the daughter are played by Meena Kumari, but there in no need for these characters to share screen time as mother dies after childbirth and the daughter is only shown after she is in her late teens as she takes on the role of the dancer-courtesan. Ashok Kumar plays the love interest in the first affair and Raj Kumar's impeccable Hindustani diction won him the role of the younger Meena Kumari's lover.

The tumultuous life of Meena Kumari, the actor, is evident on her face that ages a decade during the making and completion of the movie. Meena Kumari, while she does not look like she is 17, is convincingly young as the younger (daughter) courtesan when the film starts out. But the film which seems to have been shot chronologically shows a beaten, puffy actor ravaged by depression and ill-health, as it progresses past the half way mark.

The lovers - Raj Kumar and Meena Kumari, accidentally meet again, during a train journey towards the end of the movie

Pakeezah is a window into a bygone era and world where tawaifs and nawabs used to exist along with teak-paneled Indian railway coaches and horse-drawn tangas. Much of the actions of the characters cannot be explained or justified in the current context nor is the century old societal framework comprehensible while I am typing and gazing at the neighbor's Tesla parked on their driveway. It is a splendid period piece, elegantly crafted, a fitting final tribute to one of the greatest actors of Indian cinema - Meena Kumari, and totally woman-'owned'. 

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