Mahima Nagaraju
As black and white silent films gave way to thrilling talkies in the 1930s, a glamorous heroine entered the film industry with an English talkie, Karma. Devika Rani’s beauty, style and skill made her a household name and earned her the title of The First Lady of Indian Cinema. She went on to live a full life, co-founding one of India’s major studios, courting love and scandal, becoming the first to receive the Dadasaheb Phalke Award and much more. The Auroville Theatre Group's Call Me Devika, set to be staged at Ranga Shankara on Thursday, intends to tell her story.
Playwright and lead actor Rupam Mishra first came across the actor’s name at an exhibit of Russian painter Nicholas Roerich’s work, where an acquaintance casually mentioned that the artist’s son, Svetoslav Roerich, was married to an Indian actress. A little digging had her completely fascinated. The play covers the first half of Rani’s life, beginning with her and her first husband, Himanshu Rai, setting up Bombay Talkies.
“Being from an affluent family, she could have easily stayed in London and had a luxurious life. But, she came back to India and thought, ‘How can we promote cinema here?’ She learnt the craft from other countries and brought it to India to see how stories could come up.”
Mishra was bothered by the fact that Rani’s contributions to cinema seemed to have been brushed aside when compared to her male counterparts, and wrote the play to set the record straight. “With a male-dominated film industry and society, a lot of autobiographies of actors don’t even mention her, even though they mention Bombay Talkies,” she says. Bombay Talkies launched some of the big names in the industry, including Madhubala, Raj Kapoor and Mumtaz. Bollywood heartthrob Dilip Kumar was launched by Rani herself. Making his debut with Jwar Bhata (1944), he went on to star in hits like Mughal-e-Azam (1960). “To know a woman was behind such an established actor was an eye-opener,” says Mishra.
To capture this life that was extremely rooted in films, director Jill Navarre explains that the play has incorporated multimedia elements, saying, “We are very lucky to have a great amount of videos of that time period, so the audience get to see not just what’s happening on our stage, but we intercut it with video footage of some of the movies that we’re referring to.”
Writing the play involved a lot of research, from a time with scarce or contradictory stories swirling around the actor, with Mishra using her imagination to fill in the gaps. “The play is a piece of fiction inspired by true events,” says Mishra, explaining, “There was a scandal that Rai was married to another woman before meeting Rani. But many sources said he was not married, he had a girlfriend or that he was divorced. But this was crucial to understanding their chemistry.”
Another anecdote explored is the story of Rani eloping with an actor named Najm-ul-Hassan while being married to Rai. This led to the birth of another great Hindi film actor – Ashok Kumar, who was a lab assistant picked by Rai to replace the leading man. The play makes sure to leave the audience on a happy note. In filmy fashion, Rani finds true love at the end of the play with Svetoslav Roerich, whom she was married to for nearly 50 years, living in Bengaluru. “The ending seems to be a way of saying, as a mature woman, this love that she found was the one that stuck,” notes Navarre.
(Call Me Devika will be staged at Ranga Shankara, JP Nagar, on Oct 30 and at Jagriti Theatre, Whitefield, on Oct 31. Tickets on bookmyshow.com)
