Bhanu Athaiya

On 11 April 1983, in Los Angeles, the 55th Academy Awards ceremony got underway. Hosted by stars like Liza Minnelli, Dudley Moore and Richard Pryor, that evening a varied cast of directors, actors and other movie-makers were awarded for their efforts over the past year.

Present were those responsible for making the biopic Gandhi, directed by Richard Attenborough. Attenborough himself won Best Director and the actor who played Gandhi, Ben Kinglsey, won Best Actor - it was a collective triumph.

Amongst those who’d worked on Gandhi was an Indian costume designer called Bhanu Athaiya. She was awarded Best Costume Design and became the first ever Indian person to win an Oscar.

Her costumes in Gandhi – a film that realistically depicts the life of the leader of India’s nonviolent independence movement – had to capture Gandhi’s appearance across five decades of his life. 

 And not just Gandhi’s look, but that of all the other people who move in and out of the film.

Making costumes for Gandhi involved not only technical expertise, but deep knowledge of Indian history and cultural context. As she told the British weekly, Eastern Eye, 

“Richard Attenborough was making a complex film and needed someone who knew India inside out.” 

With her talent for accurate research and cinematic flair – already put to work over a long career in Indian cinema – Bhanu Athaiya was well equipped for the task.  

But who was the woman who had won India’s first Oscar? She was born on 29 April 1929 in Kolhapur in Maharashtra of British India.

She encountered creativity early on – her father, Annasaheb, was a self-taught artist and photographer who had worked on the films of Indian film-maker Baburao Painter. It came as no surprise, then, when Athaiya enrolled at the JJ School of Art in Mumbai and became an artist. 

Not long after, she became a member of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group and exhibited with them – their only female member. A collective of modern artists, they combined techniques from Indian art history with Post-Impressionism, Cubism and Expressionism.

Then, while still at art school, Athaiya started working as a freelance fashion illustrator for women’s magazines like “Eve’s Weekly” and “Fashion & Beauty.”  

It was after the editor at “Eve’s Weekly” opened a boutique and suggested Bhanu design dresses that she discovered her talent for designing clothes.

Soon after, movie stars began to approach Athaiya and she began to design costumes for films.

The first movie she worked on was the crime thriller, C.I.D., by Guru Dutt. Subsequently, she worked on many Dutt films, including Pyaasa (1957), Chaudhvin Ka Chand (1960) and Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (1962).

Establishing herself as one of the leading costume designers in Bollywood, she loved making clothes for films, as it allowed her to craft both period pieces and contemporary stories. 

There was a timelessness to her work that contrasted with fashion, which, as she noted, “will come and go.”

Over the decades, she worked with many of India’s leading directors, including Yash Chopra, B.R. Chopra, Raj Kapoor, Vijay Anand, Raj Khosla, and Ashutosh Gowariker. For her work, Athaiya received many awards, including two of India’s prestigious National Film Awards, in 1991 and 2002.