In a delightful scene from an early Guru Dutt production, a 17-year-old girl has travelled from Madras to meet a film production company which wants her to sign a three-film acting contract. With her mother by her side, she is surrounded by film industry men and the director insists that while she is a good choice for the good-hearted vamp in his movie, she will have to change her name as it’s “too long”.
“My parents have given me this name and I like it. I won’t change it,” the teenager replies. To which the director argues that it’s “common practice for actors to have screen names” and cites the cases of Yusuf Khan becoming Dilip Kumar, Mahjabeen Bano becoming Meena Kumari, Mumtaz Jahan becoming Madhubala and Fatima becoming Nargis. “Everyone has changed their names,” the man says with logical finality.
“I am not everyone,” says the girl to a stunned, short-lived silence.
This ‘scene’ took place in 1955 in the office of Guru Dutt Films Private Limited on the first floor of Famous Studio in Mahalaxmi in Bombay some three months after Guru Dutt, the director of the just-released Mr and Mrs 55, first met the girl at a function in Hyderabad celebrating the success of the Telugu film Rojulu Marayi in which she had a dancing role. The director insisting on the name change was Raj Khosla who was making the Dev Anand-starring CID. And the girl with all that chutzpah was Waheeda Rehman.
Much of what we get to know in the anecdotes in Nasreen Munni Kabir’s conversations with the actress in interviews undertaken between December 2012 and November 2013 is well known. The author herself in her 1996 book, Guru Dutt: A Life in Cinema, had Waheeda recounting how in the haunting song sequence of ‘Aaj Sajan Mohe Ang Lagaa Lo’ in Pyaasa, Guru Dutt had explained to her that the hero standing on the terrace “is a different sort”. As Waheeda told Nasreen Kabir in the earlier book, “He then said, …‘Imagine if your father were alive. Imagine your father is standing on the terrace. You don’t know why you’re afraid to go to him, but you are. There is a force pulling you to him. You’re dying to go up to him and hug him.’ At that point, I really started missing my father. Guru Dutt noticed that my expression had changed. He said, ‘Murthy, lights on, roll the camera.’”
Speaking almost 20 years later about the same incident in this book, Waheeda is less detailed in her retelling. But we do get new insights into someone who knows the cinematic language intimately both from the inside and outside. She tells Munni Kabir candidly how she always preferred directors who explained the need for a retake (Guru Dutt, Satyajit Ray, Asit Sen, Vijay Anand, Basu Bhattacharya and A Subba Rao). For the others, “If you asked the director why— was there something lacking in the performance? What went wrong?—no one would give me a clear answer.”
Waheeda credits director Vijay Anand with the critical and popular success of Guide. “The characters in Guide behave like grown-ups. They believe in mature relationships. Rosie leaves her husband and leaves Raju as well. Their relationship actually starts out of sympathy and only gradually develops into love.” And as she admits, “There’s a bit of me in Shanti (Kaagaz ke Phool) Gulaabo (Pyaasa) and Rosie (Guide). But I think I am most like Rosie. She’s a straightforward woman who knows her own mind. She stands by what she believes in.” We also get to know that Satyajit Ray had asked her to read the novel by R K Narayan as he was considering adapting it and casting her as Rosie.
When Munni Kabir points to the elephant in the room—“Everyone assumed that [Guru Dutt and she] were in love with each other”—Waheeda brilliantly turns the subject around and points to something far deeper: “You must know all directors want their leading lady to look special. I think a director has to be a little in love with his leading actress so he will project her as the most beautiful woman in the world.”
Waheeda betrays no old-fashionedness that many of us associate with ‘old screen legends’. She admits finding Indian films too verbose. “There’s too much talking. I have told my writers and directors many times: ‘Saab, this whole scene is a repeat. Why don’t you cut it down?’ But they don’t listen to me.”
And it is her silences, her potrayals, her look on the screen —whether as the hair-unfurled, non-speaking Gulaabo on the terrace in Pyaasa or the bathed-in-moonlight Jameela in Chaudhvin Ka Chand —that remain rapturous audio-visual creations of cinema. To hear her speak in this book can only force us to rewatch the Waheeda Rehman that still holds us in a trance.