Page 44 - Seniors Today - Vol1 Issue 3

Once Upon A Time | The Arts
A scandal and a flop
Ira Dubey and Joy Sengupta in Lillette Dubey’s play about Devika Rani
Deepa Gahlot muses on the stunning Devika Rani, who set Indian movie screens
afire with a kiss back in 1933
Devika Rani is in focus at present due to
Lillette Dubey’s play based on her life. The
actress-producer, the great-grand-niece of
Rabindranath Tagore, was known for her
stunning beauty. She was the first female
superstar of Indian cinema, at a time when
educated women from cultured families did
not work in films. Along with her husband
Himanshu Rai, she established Bombay Talkies
in 1934--India’s first professionally run studio,
that she continued to manage after Rai’s death
(in 1940), the first woman to head a studio.
Looking back then, at her debut film Karma
(1933), that has gone down in movie history as
the film that had a four-minute kiss.
Karma was produced by Rai just two years
after the advent of the talkie (Alam Ara 1931),
and he had the foresight to make an English
version for western audiences—his fourth
international production, after the silent films,
The Light Of Asia, Shiraz and A Throw of Dice
(1929).
Directed by J. L. Freer-Hunt, the bilingual film
(Fate aka Song Of The Serpent in English) the
film had a crew made up of both Indians and
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Westerners. It premiered in England (with a
special screening arranged for the royal family)
and was a critical and commercial success,
perhaps because it had just the kind of exotica—
beautiful locations and exquisite costumes— the
West would appreciate. Not surprisingly, the
simplistic love story was rejected by Indian
audiences back home when the Hindi version
was released a year later.
Devika Rani played the Maharani of Sitapur,
who is in love with the prince (Himanshu Rai)
of the neighbouring kingdom of Jahanagar. His
father, the elderly maharaja (played by Dewan
Sharar who was also the film’s co-writer with
Rupert Browning) disapproves of the maharani,
because of her modern ideas on education and
healthcare for all. The prince, however, defies
his father to woo her.
The Maharaja of Jahanagar loves to hunt, but
there are no tigers on his land so the maharani
decides to hold a tiger hunt in her kingdom and
invite the king to participate, hoping this will
make him change his mind about her. The idea
doesn’t go down well with the good people of
Sitapur whose religious views forbid them from