Revisiting Pakeezah, Hindi cinema’s great tragedy of desire and entrapment
Years in the making, Pakeezah is a haunting collaboration between a dying star and the artists around her. As a new restoration screens at LFF, writer and filmmaker Nasheed Qamar Faruqi explores one of Indian cinema’s most emotionally devastating dramas.
An intense romantic melodrama capturing a world in crisis, Pakeezah (1972) is a film that succeeds against the odds, and perhaps even against the grain of its screenwriter-director-producer Kamal Amrohi. Painfully caught between desire and social convention, its protagonist is Sahibjaan, a Lucknow courtesan played by Meena Kumari, the Hindi film star who was married to Amrohi. The film’s legendary status is rooted in her central performance, colourful visuals, memorable songs, pointed dialogue and influential choreography. Pakeezah (“the pure one”) captures how cinema is a collaborative medium, even when it carries the mark of an authorial director. Kumari’s untimely death, shortly before its release, gave the film a special aura, helping to make it a box-office hit. More than 50 years later, its power and influence continue to be felt.
Sahibjaan is the daughter of an ill-fated tawaif (courtesan), Nargis (also played by Kumari), and her sharif husband Shahbuddin (Ashok Kumar). Rejected by Shahbuddin’s family, Nargis gives birth in a graveyard and dies shortly afterwards. Raised by her aunt Nawabjaan (Veena) to become an accomplished courtesan, Sahibjaan finds herself caught between the claims of respectability and the marketplace when a long-delayed letter prompts her father to reclaim her. A chance encounter with Salim (Raaj Kumar), a forest ranger, offers the prospect of romantic escape, but the film repeatedly contrasts their idealised love with the desires of men who seek to buy and possess her, like a bird in a cage.
Pakeezah is preoccupied with literature. Tawaifs were highly educated, refined artists and cultural experts. Even sleeping rough in a graveyard, Nargis counts several books among her few possessions. The camera lingers as she pens Shahbuddin a letter in elegant prose. Kumari was herself a poet and brought a literary sensibility to the roles of both mother and daughter, playing with words and images and with gazes that imply a cultivated interiority.
Amrohi came from a family of writers, and his script is literary too. When Salim first encounters Sahibjaan asleep in a railway carriage beside a copy of Ghalib’s Divan. The book is open at the poet’s famous 96th ghazal, which Salim quotes before being enraptured by the sight of her feet:
Having dressed up as a beggar I, Ghalib,
Watch the show of generous folk
It is a poem about disguise and appearance in love, about being more than you seem, rather like Sahibjaan who is both more and less than Salim takes her for. It is also about the act of looking, which both we and Salim are engaged in. Later, in a typically literal play on Nargis’s name, Amrohi closes the film with lines from Muhammad Iqbal:
The narcissus/Nargis cries for a thousand years at her lightlessness
It takes great difficulty for the world to produce One with sight
He is not casual about establishing Pakeezah’s literary credentials, drawing too on the poetry of Mir Taqi Mir through the film’s songs. Its cultural status owes much to Amrohi’s writing. The dialogue is heightened and naturalistic at once, capturing the flow of everyday Urdu, both demotic and formal, laced with metaphor and knowing. Words and meanings are often as potent as loaded guns. Viewers will recognise from Mughal-e-Azam (1960), for which Amrohi wrote the dialogue, the portentous voiceovers and overbearing patriarchs that recur here.
The songs are central to Pakeezah’s achievement and contribute to its mixed authorship. Often cited as the film’s biggest draw alongside Kumari’s performance, they feature lyrics by major poets including Kaifi Azmi and Majrooh Sultanpuri. Songs such as ‘Chalte Chalte’ and ‘Inhin Logon Ne’ have long enjoyed lives beyond the film itself. Their popularity can obscure how effectively they carry narrative and emotional meaning within it. The music is enhanced by the strength of the dance at the heart of Kumari’s performance. Choreographed by Kathak master Lachhu Maharaj, the dance sequences use gesture and expression to narrate as much as to entertain.
Shot by Josef Wirsching, who had also photographed Amrohi’s Mahal (1949), Pakeezah remains striking for the richness of its colour and design. The fantastical sets and staging are as memorable as the performances themselves. The costumes, designed by Kumari, are distinguished by their acute use of colour to express emotion and psychology. Black and white, orange, red, green, gold and brown become tools for charting Sahibjaan’s shifting relations to those around her.
By the time it was released, Pakeezah had been in production for more than a decade, halted by the breakdown of Kumari and Amrohi’s marriage. Kumari left the production only to return years later while seriously ill (she had been given drink to manage her sleeplessness and became alcoholic). Her subsequent death was the tragic end for an actor who, since childhood, had been exploited as a source of income by those around her. There are poignant parallels with Sahibjaan who dances for customers as they lob heavy bags of coins at her aunt.
Kumari’s relationship with Amrohi shaped Pakeezah’s making. The push and pull of that relationship seems embedded in the film’s obsessions with desire, death and entrapment. Amrohi’s ambivalent desire for Kumari is all over Pakeezah. The gaze sometimes resists seeing her fully; at other times it places her overwhelmingly at the centre of the frame. But the film is also, and perhaps most memorably, a document of her resistance and skill.
Its most moving moments express a protagonist who refuses to be trapped by her circumstances, railing against an inevitable fate from which she remains traumatised and disbelieving. Pakeezah is a portrait of a woman in torment, crafted by Kumari with a depth and subtlety that draw on all her art and experience. Much discussion of the film remains fixated on how visibly she aged during its prolonged production. More interesting is the way lived experience registers in the performance itself. As much as the songs, it is this spectral echo of reality that audiences responded to in 1972 and continue to respond to today.
We watched Pakeezah as children. Our mother wanted us to improve our Urdu by watching films, and perhaps Pakeezah did just that. The name Shahbuddin is burned into my consciousness; my sister and I used to reel Nawabjaan’s fateful lines off to unsuspecting friends. I remain haunted by the hoot of a train, the chime of anklets, weaponised language and loaded guns, broken glass and the edge of reason. Pakeezah’s costumes and graphic use of white and red are equally indelible.
The film has been widely influential. Part of a long tradition of stories about tawaifs stretching back to the 1899 novel Umrao Jan Ada, it helped shape how women and courtesans are imagined in South Asian cinema. Its influence cuts both ways. What troubles me is how Pakeezah turbo-charged the image of the Muslim woman as eroticised victim, a trope that has since been layered with fantasies of harems and odalisques, visible most recently in works such as the Netflix series Heeramandi (2024), whose director Sanjay Leela Bhansali cites Amrohi’s film as an influence.
Maybe it is time to watch Kumari’s complex and intelligent performance for more than its surface. With care, we can appreciate how Pakeezah is both staged and lived spectacle at once. It gives us a story anxious about the place of desire in a world riven between continuity and change. Kumari gives us nothing less than a portrait, wrought over several years, of a woman and artist in search of integrity and integration.
With thanks to Nasreen Rehman.