On the night of Feb. 3, 1972, the prints of “Pakeezah” arrived at Bombay’s Maratha Mandir cinema in a palanquin pulled by four horses. Military bands played outside, police held back the thousands crowding the gates, and inside, the film’s star, Meena Kumari, sat beside her husband, director Kamal Amrohi, and gripped his wrist so hard through the screening that her nails drew blood.
Amrohi’s son Tajdar was in the theater that night. His father never pulled his arm away.
“He just gave a smile, and she also smiled in an embarrassment, you can say,” Tajdar Amrohi says. “And it seems that even after 54 years, I feel as if that incident took place yesterday.”
Kumari died on March 31, 1972, weeks after the film opened. Now, Film Heritage Foundation’s (FHF) 4K restoration of “Pakeezah,” carried out with the Amrohi family, is back in front of audiences. Thierry Frémaux presents its world premiere at Festival Lumière in Lyon on Wednesday. It then plays a gala at the BFI London Film Festival’s BFI Imax on Oct. 18 that Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, the foundation’s director, will introduce with Tajdar Amrohi, his sister Rukhsar Amrohi and Kamal Amrohi’s grandson Bilal Amrohi. Dungarpur says he heard the Imax screening sold out “in no time.”
The film is set in Lucknow as the age of the nawabs (Muslim nobles) fades. Kumari plays Sahibjaan, born in a graveyard to a courtesan who was spurned by her husband’s aristocratic family. Raised in a brothel, Sahibjaan grows up to be the most celebrated courtesan of her day, though she longs for love and respectability. Then Salim, a forest officer played by Raaj Kumar, wanders into her train compartment by mistake while she is asleep. Taken with her feet, he leaves her a note in verse and slips away. When they meet again, they fall in love, but the stigma attached to her profession stands between them.
Few Indian films carry a backstory as heavy as this one. Amrohi was already married, with three children, when he married Kumari. Rukhsar grew up with her mother in the family’s hometown of Amroha, in Uttar Pradesh, until she was 13, while her father lived in Bombay (now Mumbai) with Kumari, whom the children called Chhoti Ammi (little mother). Amrohi conceived “Pakeezah” in the mid-1950s around Kumari, his wife and muse, and shooting began in 1956, in black-and-white, before moving to Eastmancolor and then CinemaScope. The production stalled in 1964 when the couple separated, and Kumari’s health declined sharply over the following years. The film’s German cinematographer, Josef Wirsching, who had come with Himansu Rai and Devika Rani from Bombay Talkies, died partway through. Composer Ghulam Mohammed died in 1968 after writing the songs, leaving Naushad to complete the background score.
Through all of it, Amrohi refused to let the film go.
“His relations, his health, his wealth – he put everything into ‘Pakeezah,’” his daughter Rukhsar Amrohi says.
She remembers that every household request, from new decor to things for himself, got the same answer: after “Pakeezah.” His kurtas (tunics), which usually arrived from Lucknow a dozen at a time every six months, wore thin during the shoot. When she pressed him to reorder, he told her that people came to see him, not his clothes.
“I’ll order all of this after ‘Pakeezah’ – not 12, I’ll get 24 – but let my ‘Pakeezah’ get into theaters,” she recalls him saying.
Tajdar Amrohi says that by the time the film was ready for release, his father didn’t have a penny to keep for himself and was deep in debt. Financiers, Rukhsar says, pushed him to drop Ghulam Mohammed’s music as old-fashioned and credit Laxmikant-Pyarelal or Shankar-Jaikishan instead. He refused, whether or not that meant the film got made.
The family’s own life bent around the production. When Kumari left and the shoot stopped, Amrohi sent Rukhsar and her mother back to Amroha. He didn’t want anyone to say that his first wife and daughter had arrived and driven Kumari out. He later wrote to Rukhsar asking her to raise her small hands in prayer that he would finish the picture. He had expected to complete it in a year, and it now felt like a noose around his neck.
“Isn’t that a sacrifice?” she says.
When shooting resumed, the haveli (mansion) set on Stage 3 at Filmistan Studio in Goregaon was modeled on the Amrohis’ ancestral home in Amroha. Rukhsar went to the set every day because her father wanted her there. She also traveled with the unit to Mysore for the outdoor shoot of the song “Mausam Hai Aashiqana” and the elephant attack sequence. Her mother’s paandaan (a box for paan, or betel leaf), part of her wedding trousseau, was lent at Amrohi’s request. It appears in the Gulabi Mahal (Pink Palace) scenes beside the actor Nadira. It now sits in the drawing room of the Amroha house, which Rukhsar restored and filled with her father’s furniture, photographs and belongings. Locals, she says, began calling it Kamal Amrohi’s museum.
The siblings are protective of how their father’s marriage is remembered. Tajdar Amrohi is adamant that the couple never divorced, and says that Kumari had asked Amrohi to promise he never would, calling him Chandan, her pet name for him. He also pushes back on the widely told account that actors Sunil Dutt and Nargis and composer Khayyam persuaded Kumari to return to the film in 1969. Dutt deserves credit for going to her, he says, but many others in the industry, Ashok Kumar among them, had urged the same.
“Frankly speaking, if Meena ji herself hadn’t wanted to complete this film, she wouldn’t have,” he says.
Nor, he says, did “Pakeezah” become a hit because its star died weeks after release, a reading his sister also rejects. If that were how it worked, he argues, “Every producer-director would pray that once the film is complete, one of their main artists leaves the world, and the film will be a hit. That’s not how it is. A good thing is good, and a bad thing is bad and won’t run.”
Tajdar Amrohi was at St. Elizabeth Nursing Home on Malabar Hill when Kumari died, and says it was the first time he had ever seen tears in his father’s eyes. Amrohi died in 1993 and is buried beside her. His son sees that as a kind of divine verdict on decades of gossip about the pair.
“Just as Shah Jahan immortalized Mumtaz Mahal by building the Taj Mahal, Kamal sahab [sir] immortalized Chhoti Ammi, Meena ji, across the whole world by making ‘Pakeezah,’” he says.
For Rukhsar Amrohi, who also calls Kumari Chhoti Ammi, the film is a token of the couple’s love, made by her father out of his love for Kumari. “‘Pakeezah’ is the love child of our Baba [father] and Chhoti Ammi,” she says.
For Dungarpur, the film goes back to his own childhood. He was 3 when it was released, and his grandmother, Usha Rani, the Maharani (queen) of Dumraon in Bihar, was obsessed with it. She played its LP and later took him to see it on rerelease. He founded FHF in her memory in 2014 and had wanted to restore “Pakeezah” ever since.
“It’s one of my most beautiful memories of restoration, and the most important film in my life,” he says. “She was the driving force on seeing this restoration.”
The job turned out to be among the hardest the foundation has taken on. When the FHF team examined the film’s original camera negative at a Mumbai lab, it had melted, with no images left on the celluloid.
“Meena ji went into a coma two days before her death, and the negative of ‘Pakeezah’ had also gone into a coma,” Tajdar Amrohi says.
The team rebuilt the film from an interpositive, a CinemaScope print and a color reversal internegative held at the National Film Archive of India, which Dungarpur credits to archivist P.K. Nair. The sound negative had also survived. The two-year restoration was carried out at L’Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna, with the soundtrack remixed in 5.1.
The on-and-off shoot left its own scars. Day-for-night sequences didn’t match from one stretch of the film to the next. The opticals, meaning the fades and shot changes, drifted in and out of focus. Padma Khanna and other doubles performed some of the dances instead of Kumari, which made the continuity puzzle harder.
Color was the biggest test. The available versions had faded badly, and accounts differed on whether Kumari’s costume in “Inhi Logon Ne” was pink or red. Original color photographs were scarce, since continuity stills were usually shot in black-and-white to save money. FHF found a few, and Rukhsar Amrohi, who had been on set, came to Dungarpur’s studio to check them. She told him the lyric itself mentions a dupatta (scarf) dyed pink, so red couldn’t be right, and pushed for a deep magenta. That is what made it to the screen.
“You have to make sure that you don’t do something which he had not done, or you enhance it to that level, but keep it exactly his vision, the way he had conceived the film,” Dungarpur says.
He points viewers to the tracking shot at the end of the “Chalte Chalte” song where the camera glides over a fountain. For him it shows what the film’s camera team pulled off before zoom lenses were in common use. The film also has an anniversary this month: Dungarpur notes that Oct. 8 marked the 100th birthday of its male lead, Raaj Kumar, who replaced an aging Ashok Kumar as Salim.
FHF has run into missing negatives before. Dungarpur says the restored “Sholay” had the same problem. So did the foundation’s work on “English, August,” which was rebuilt from a single print, and Shaji N. Karun’s Cannes winner “Piravi,” for which only subtitled prints survive.
“So much money is spent on the production, so much money is spent, but there’s very little money spent on preserving these elements,” he says. “And that’s been quite a tragic story of India’s cinematic history.”
The foundation has had a busy 12 months on the festival circuit. It took “In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones” to Berlin, “Amma Ariyan” to Cannes and “English, August” to Venice, with stops including New York, Toronto, Shanghai, Singapore and the Festival of Three Continents. Dungarpur says FHF deliberately programs Indian commercial landmarks such as “Sholay,” “Pakeezah” and “Amar Akbar Anthony” next to independent titles. That way, Western audiences who would otherwise never see them get the chance. “Pakeezah” is set to travel to the Smithsonian and the Academy Museum, and its producers plan a wide release in India.
FHF’s next restorations are Shyam Benegal’s “Bhoomika” and “Mandi,” John Abraham’s “Agraharathil Kazhuthai” (“Donkey in a Brahmin Village”) and Aribam Syam Sharma’s “Imagi Ningthem” (“My Son, My Precious”). The Abraham film will be the foundation’s first Tamil-language restoration. With Criterion, FHF is restoring Bimal Roy’s “Bandini,” “Devdas” and “Madhumati” as well as Satyajit Ray’s “Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne,” and it plans to take on “Piravi.”
Tajdar Amrohi still regrets that “Pakeezah” won no awards. When he once complained about it to his father, the director just smiled.
“You haven’t noticed one thing,” he told his son. “All these people who are coming to watch the picture – that is my award.”