Seeing Nargis

“I didn’t ever regard her as very beautiful, but they may have noticed her vivacity."

When 14-year-old Fatema Rashid, daughter of renowned singer and producer Jaddanbai, was cast by director Mehboob Khan in the comedy-drama Taqdeer (1943), she was not chosen for her beauty or her screen presence. Yet, by the time she retired from Hindi cinema with Khan’s iconic Mother India (1957) as Nargis, she had become immortalized in public memory as a brilliant actor who enlivened Hindi cinema—and often solely carried films—with her graceful and elegant screen presence.

Khan and writer Aga Jaani Kashmiri happened to spot Nargis when they sought refuge from rain and water-logging at Jaddanbai’s home Chateau Marine in Bombay (now Mumbai). “… they decided this was the girl [for Taqdeer],” screenplay writer Ali Raza recalls in Kishwar Desai’s Darlingji: The True Love Story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt.“I didn’t ever regard her as very beautiful, but they may have noticed her vivacity. It was more eye judgement than a screen test."

Nargis, with a pointed chin, an oval face, and a slight gap between her front teeth, did not confirm to the standards of beauty prevailing in popular Hindi cinema at the time. In Nargis, a cinematographer recounts: “Some faces are good, and some are bad. Her face was good, but there were some defects in her nose. She has a long nose, so we had to take care of that nose.” But her eyes, and the cloud of hair that regularly framed her face, were imbued with a peculiar electricity that crackled on screen. Her strong and enigmatic screen presence has been remarked upon by several critics and historians.

For instance, acerbic and influential film critic Baburao Patel observes in a 1948 issue of his periodical Filmindia that Nargis has the “dignity of a princess” in Raj Kapoor’s directorial debut Aag. In the same issue, when asked by a reader who is most beautiful among film stars Kamini Kaushal, Begum Para and Nargis, the editor replies that he considers none among them beautiful, and adds that Nargis is a “bit attractive”.

In several issues in 1948 and 1949, Patel repeats different versions of this answer each time he is asked a question about Nargis’s beauty, sometimes commenting about a scrunched up body frame that supposedly detracts from her “femininity”. However, in his reviews, he is unswerving in regarding her as a competent actress and a superb tragedienne who excels in the “pathetic scenes”.

"...her restrained acting provided important counterweight to Raj Kapoor’s histrionics."

In Awara, Nargis plays a character that embodies the imaginary of the modern woman of independent India.

As she suits up as a lawyer in the defense of the embattled Kewal (Raj Kapoor), romps with him in swimwear, and falls to his feet in apology when he abruptly descends into violent rage, Rita becomes emblematic of the ways in which a conflicted modernity is cinematically imprinted on a woman’s body.

Majumdar adds that the interplay between Nargis’s origin story and her star image is implicitly played out in Anhonee (1952), in which she plays both Roop, a rich successful businessman’s heir, and Mohini, her courtesan half-sister.

Mohini, who has been established as the illicit other, is ultimately killed in the narrative. As she dies, the problematic elements associated with Nargis’s public persona are symbolically effaced: It is a moment of reckoning in the transformation in the iconicity associated with Nargis.

Nargis, the indomitable actress who was regarded as not-quite-beautiful in her youth, went on to become the first recipient of the National Award for Best Actress (then known as the Urvashi Award for Best Actress) for her last film Raat aur Din (1967). She is also the first actress to win Padma Shri, India’s fourth highest civilian honour.

After her death due to pancreatic cancer in 1981, a newspaper obituary attests that Nargis “transcended her social origins, her image of a sex symbol and her political career to become synonymous with motherhood and martyrdom”. While it is instructive that her "social origins" were continued to be considered as unacceptable, perhaps it is the mythos around Nargis as a film star who could not be considered commonly beautiful, but possessed of dignity and charm, that ensured the longevity of her favorable public image even after she ended her cinematic career.