16th JULY 2015 DR. SUSHILA RANI BABURAO PATEL
Debashree Mukherjee
It is August 14, 1947, the eve of India’s Independence. The streets of South Bombay are relatively riot-free and a slightly delirious energy hangs in the humid monsoon air. Out of nowhere, a glamorous green Hudson careens down the street and you see three beautiful women leaning out of the car, ‘lustily singing Vande Mataram’.[i] They are gorgeous; you feel giddy just looking at them and you try to memorize this moment of being young, alive, safe, and in Bombay in August 1947. The three women are famous film actresses of the day: Begum Para, Protima Dasgupta, and Sushila Rani Patel.
Dr. Sushila Rani Patel died of a heart attack on Thursday, July 24th, 2014. She was 96 years old and still singing.
Sushila Rani was born in 1918 into a culturally-inclined Konkani family. Her father, Anand Rao Tombat was a criminal lawyer who also took a keen interest in art, cinema, theatre, literature and philosophy. Sushila Rani credited her father for her flair for writing. Her mother, Kamladevi Tombat, gave her the gift of music – a gift that grew in its riches with every passing year. At the age of seven, Sushila started her formal training in classical music and studied with such greats as Pandita Mogubai Kurdikar and Ustad Alladiya Khan Saheb. In an interview she proudly recalled that Mogubai Kurdikar used to ‘[call] me ek patti - which means one take. She recited one taan and I would repeat it correctly.’ [ii] Sushila Rani received a Sangeet Natak Akademi award in 2002 after decades of concerts, radio programmes, festivals, and recordings.
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| Sushila Rani plays the tanpura during riyaaz. Image courtesy Sushila Rani Patel. |
Naushad, the acclaimed music director, once said of Sushila Rani: ‘When I think of her, all I can think of is sheer worship, a person who has worshipped music. For her music is not a hobby and hence she left no strings untouched. Age did not mar her voice. The depth, the pathos, the free flow continues to grow. She is a standing example for our generation. A person who will not be satisfied with success, but only with perfection.' [iii] And yet, music was not the sum of Sushila Rani’s many accomplishments. She had post-graduate degrees in Science as well as Law and she became an Advocate of the Bombay High Court in her 60s. In this piece I want to briefly discuss her life and career in the 1940s, a period of great excitement for a burgeoning Bombay film industry, and a time when Sushila Rani was most closely affiliated with movies as a film journalist, heroine, and wife of Baburao Patel.
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| Portrait of Sushila Rani and Baburao Patel. Currently at Girnar. |
Baburao Patel was the self-taught, ambitious, and highly charismatic editor of the magazine filmindia. Launched in 1935, filmindia rapidly achieved an unprecedented cult status. By 1937, filmindia had become a force to reckon with, reportedly selling thousands of copies a month in India and abroad. The magazine created a sensation with its canny mix of rumor and review, observation and opinion. Baburao Patel’s knack for self-publicity and his irreverent writing style made the magazine a hit and turned him into a veritable star. The evergreen actor, Dev Anand, has said: ‘…when I first came to Bombay looking for a break in the movies, somewhere within me lurked a desire to meet the man and have a look at this magician who meant the Indian movie industry to me. [Baburao Patel] made and unmade stars. He established or destroyed a film with just a stroke of his pen. That much power he wielded then.’[iv] Baburao Patel was a celebrity, on par with the brightest stars on the silver screen, and young college students carried his magazine around as status symbols.
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| Cover of one of the first issues of filmindia in 1935. Image courtesy NFAI, Pune. |
Sushila Rani met Baburao Patel quite by chance, on January 15, 1942. She was visiting Bombay and had gone to the trendy Wayside Inn (Kalaghoda) for dinner with a friend. [v] They were both avid readers of filmindia and immediately recognized Baburao Patel sitting at a table near them. When Baburao Patel crossed their table on the way to the men’s room, he literally glared at Sushila Rani’s male dinner companion. That was when they were both certain that this was indeed Baburao Patel, film critic extraordinaire and flamboyant ladies man. Undeterred by the glare, Sushila Rani’s friend went up and invited Patel to their table. And that was that. Sushila Rani recalled in an interview that:‘ “He said yes I am Baburao Patel. I edit filmindia magazine,” and he congratulated me on my looks. He then asked “Would you like to meet me again.” I said yes.’ Baburao landed up at Sushila Rani’s house the very next morning and drove her to see the filmindia offices. While chatting over lunch, Sushila Rani mentioned that she was a trained classical vocalist. Baburao, a consummate charmer, expressed his surprise that so beautiful a girl had so many talents and requested that she sing a little bit for him. Sushila Rani selected the bhajan, ‘Ghunghat ke pat khol’, popularized by her contemporary Jyothika Roy. Baburao lost his heart. Sushila Rani was 24 years old. Baburao was 38, married, and father to three grown-up children.
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| Sushila Rani c. 1940s. Image courtesy Sushila Rani Patel. |
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| Cover of filmindia magazine showcasing Sushila Rani's debut film, Draupadi (1944). Image courtesy NFAI, Pune. |
On another August 14th, this time in the year 2008, I finally located Sushila Rani and Baburao Patel’s famous Pali Hill bungalow – Girnar. I had visited several such film pilgrimage sites before, only to turn back disappointed. Girnar too, looked deserted. It was an aging bungalow which might have looked desolate if my eyes weren’t tinted over with a romantic glaze. The main door was wide open but there was no sign or sound of life. Hesitant to simply barge in, I shouted into the darkness – ‘Excuse me! Koi hai?’. A middle-aged woman emerged from inside and I told her I was a student doing research on Bombay cinema. I handed her an official-looking visiting card that I had printed that very morning outside the Malad West station. She returned within minutes and said, ‘Madam is willing to meet you.’ As I took off my shoes and followed the secretary up a winding staircase lined with portraits of Baburao and Sushila Rani I felt a little disoriented, uncertain about my location within time and reality. It was as if I had walked right into a period film that I had been watching for the last two years.
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| The legendary Girnar Bungalow, 2008. |
I walked down a narrow partitioned corridor and entered a dining hall. Seated at the dining table was a fragile old woman in a flaming orange nightie. It was only 11.30am but her face was impeccably rouged and powdered, and her neck and arms decked out with gold jewelry. This was Sushila Rani. And she turned to look at me. I walked up to her and beamed stupidly for a second. Then I handed her a small bunch of roses I had picked up on the local train. She invited me to sit and asked two singularly absurd but touching questions: ‘Do you know me? Have you heard offilmindia?’ Later that afternoon, Sushila Rani sang ‘Ghunghat ke pat khol’ for me, the song that first stole Baburao’s heart. Her 89-year-old voice was as enchanting as ever.
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| Sushila Rani poses as the helpful 'assistant'. Image courtesy Sushila Rani Patel. |
In June 1942 Sushila Rani joined filmindia as a sub-editor and unofficial ‘Jane of all trades’. She continued to edit and write with Baburao till 1981, by which time filmindia (1935-1961) had morphed into the more political Mother India (1961-1981). During my own research, I had often wondered whether it was really possible that no women, apart from actresses, had worked in the early film industry or its satellite industries. The more I studied the celebrity male film critics who held forth on Hindustani cinema, the more I wondered what role, if any, women played in this discursive field. It was only upon meeting with Sushila Rani that I was able to ask these questions to someone who had lived through those days. She was very modest but after a few pointed questions I learnt that under pseudonyms such as ‘Judas’ and ‘Hyacinth,’ Sushila Rani herself had generated much of the content for the 50-page magazine. It was a two-person enterprise with occasional guest writers such as KA Abbas and RK Karanjia. Here are some excerpts from the 2008 interview:
SR: ‘…my salary was Rs. 200 per month! My parents were glad that I was working. My father had taken ill and it was good that I had a job. My father had once come for a holiday. He had met Baburao Patel and thought he was a godfather to me… he never imagined that he would become his son-in-law! The trap was laid and I didn’t realize it (laughs). So you be careful. With men, you have to be careful.
‘So I started working. But I didn’t want to marry him. I wanted to leave him because it was very difficult. He had a very bad temper and I realized that I might have made a mistake. But in our work we were very very complementary. We got along very well. I would do all the proofs of filmindia, write some sections.. He would write the selling section ‘The Editor’s Mail’; that was the selling section and letters would come from all corners of the world… from Fiji, from Africa, from America, and every village, in all handwritings. So many letters would come that it wasn’t possible to reply to each one so he used to tell me to read the letters and select the good questions. That was a big job.
DM: ‘And which were the sections that you wrote?
SR: ‘I wrote ‘Pictures in Making’, ‘At Home and Abroad’, ‘State of the Nation’, ‘Round the World in 30 Days’… then sometimes interviews, short stories… I was always a part of the writing as well, not merely proofing. I write very well…. There was a section called ‘You’ll hardly Believe’ [in ‘Bombay Calling’ by Judas], where I used to give the feedback. I had to read a lot of papers for gossip. But the gossip was not so awful as today… the writing was not in the fashion of today. People from the film industry would come to meet us and they would talk… So I used to collect this kind of information and then we would write it together as ‘You’ll hardly believe that…’.
DM: ‘Tell me a little more about your marriage and life with Baburao.
SR: ‘After I joined filmindia I started living in Bombay and then the affair became deeper, naturally. Finally I decided to marry him. Fifteen days prior to my marriage I said yes. There was another person who was interested. He’s no more so I don’t like to talk about him. And Baburao Patel wouldn’t let me… he saw to it that the person did not get my letters. So then this person thought that I was not interested in him. [vi] Then I married Baburao Patel, at the filmindia office. For the first year or two everything went off well, but then I realized that he was also… how do you say it?... very conscious of ladies. There were women even after me, and people used to wonder how he could be interested in them. They were not educated and they were not beautiful. But still he was interested. So married life was mixed up with all this. Then he brought his first wife here and I had to stay with the first wife under the same roof till she passed away. I didn’t expect all this. I was too young, too innocent, too naïve and he was a very seasoned person with lots of affairs. He knew the world. So that’s why I used the word “trap”… I didn’t realize what I was getting into.’
All too often, women’s contributions to the Bombay film industry get buried under the more visible work of their husbands and lovers. Sushila Rani’s work for filmindia has tremendous historical significance as the magazine and its contents are widely used as primary sources by Indian film historians today. Her active participation in the magazine also explains some very detailed and intimate interviews with actresses from the 1940s, only possible because the interviewer was a woman. [vii] Very few women worked as journalists in those days and these pioneers have been mostly forgotten. I must mention here the laudable efforts by Sabeena Gadihoke to document the career of India’s first woman photojournalist, Homai Vyarawalla.
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| Sushila Rani with her friends, well-wishers, and disciples at a Shiv Sangeetanjali festival at Girnar. |
By presenting Sushila Rani’s own account of her work and life with Baburao Patel I hope to have added another dimension to the way we understand the authorship of filmindia magazine. Despite the marital troubles she mentions above, theirs remained a solid partnership till the very end. After Baburao’s death, Sushila Rani set up the Sushila Rani Baburao Patel Trust which has supported many early-career musical talents, and she continued to celebrate Baburao’s birthday every year with great fanfare.
Ever since that first meeting in August 2008, I tried to maintain contact with Sushila Rani, fascinated by her life and dynamism. I felt particularly grateful to have one real human connection to ground my rather abstract relation to the pre-Independence decades. I spent several afternoons studying filmindia in the Girnar library. Often, Sushila Ma’am would invite me to have lunch with her upstairs and regale me with risqué film anecdotes. A friend and I even shot some documentary footage with her that summer. Sushila Rani remained a warm, open, generous person till the end. She was unfailingly delighted by new people and maintained a genuine curiosity about contemporary Bombay cinema. If you look at back issues of Filmfare you’ll be sure to find ‘Letters to the Editor’ by Sushila Rani Patel where she congratulates some new actor or director on their good work. Such an engagement with the people and events around her was typical of Sushila Rani. I often wonder how she did it, how she nurtured such an enviable joie de vivre.
The last time I met Sushila Rani was in 2013. She looked as beautiful as ever and still taught music lessons, though her hearing had really worsened. I urged her, as I often had before, to pen her memoirs. Her life had spanned some of the most iconic events in the history of the modern South Asian subcontinent. Significantly, she was witness to almost the entirety of the first hundred years of Indian cinema. What delightful and profound connections she would have made between the intersecting historical and cinematic events of the twentieth century! Even though Sushila Rani will never narrate that story anew, her voice continues to speak to generations of movie enthusiasts from the pages of filmindia and the multiple archives of Hindi film music.
[i] Begum Para interview. Outlook Magazine, May 28, 1997.
[ii] From the filmindia website. http://www.film-india.org/frm_HomePage.aspx. Accessed July 26, 2014.
[iii] April 4, 1990
[iv] Mother India, December 1979, p. 27
[v] The same Wayside Inn that Arun Kolatkar would frequent a few decades later. Someone should write a cultural history of Bombay through lived and iconic public spaces such as the Wayside Inn.
[vi] Some sources claim that Sushila Rani had an affair with Guru Dutt and he was so betrayed by her marriage to Baburao that he based Mala Sinha’s character in Pyaasa (1957) on Sushila Rani. However, in an interview I recorded in 2008, Sushila Rani mentions that her younger sister had been Guru Dutt’s colleague at Uday Shankar’s academy in Almora and it was that couple that had been in love. The sister died a premature death due to a congenital heart defect.
[vii] See ‘Hyacinth’s’ interviews with Neena, Naseem Banu, and Pramilla for example.
Archive for ‘Hindi film history’
MARCH 19, 2013
Two more Noor Jehan films…
Thank goodness for Tom, Muz, and Pacifist and the Edu Productions team!
They have just made available two more Noor Jehan films, one a Pakistani film from 1959 called Koel; and 1947’s Mirza Sahiban starring Noor Jehan and Trilok Kapoor (fun to see him in a hero role, na?). Karan Bali over at Upperstall has reviewed Koel (link is included in listing) and although he feels it is a less than stellar movie the songs are worth the price (which by the way is FREE). Pacifist’s opinion of Mirza Sahiban is that it’s a much better film than the later Shammi Kapoor outing by the same name, which is actually not that hard but makes me look forward to seeing it.
Download them from the links on the Edu Productions page, enjoy, and give props to the team for their hard work and generosity!
JANUARY 23, 2013
Guest post: Parshuram, a forgotten gem
My friend and film encyclopedia Arunkumar Deshmukh contacted me a few days ago with the news that he had met family members of “yesteryears” actor and singer Parshuram. He was offering to write a guest post about this largely forgotten but long-time contributor to Indian cinema, who began his career in 1937, in V. Shantaram’sDuniya Na Maane (and Kunku, the Marathi version) and worked steadily for three more decades plus.
Naturally I jumped at this generosity! A big thank you to the family of Parshuram, and of course to Arunji.
SEPTEMBER 3, 2012
Labor of love
It’s Labor Day here in the US and Canada, and let me tell you something: I have really labored for you guys. I recently got my hands on a very fragile and worn copy of Baburao and Sushila Rani Patel’s 1952 book called “Stars of the Indian Screen.” It features 36 actors and actresses, with a short biography of each accompanied by a gorgeous colored plate like the ones above. And though the book is credited as written by Sushila Rani Patel and edited by Baburao, the bios have Baburao’s trademark snark all over them, by which I mean they are awesome.
AUGUST 7, 2012
Guest Post: Vrajendra Gaur
I enjoy celebrating the “behind the scenes” contributors to Hindi cinema history as much as I do the actors (and dancers). One such person is Vrajendra Gaur, who wrote dialogues and screenplays for such favorites of mine asHowrah Bridge, China Town, Teen Deviyan, Kati Patang, and Sharmilee. His career spanned the 1940s through the 1970s, ending with The Great Gambler in 1979. Recently his son Suneel Gaur reached out to me asking if I wanted to see a photograph of his father with Rajesh Khanna; of course I did, and of course I pestered him for more. There is always more, and indeed that is the case here. And I must just add that I think the photograph above left, of Mr. Gaur with Dilip Kumar, is one of the sweetest pictures I have ever seen. They look so young, so full of promise, and like fast friends indeed.
The prolific writer-lyricist-director-author-poet-journalist died 32 years ago on August 7th 1980, and his sons Suneel and Rajesh Gaur pay tribute to their father on his death anniversary (and all of the photographs are courtesy of them too).
JUNE 22, 2012
Miss Frontier Mail (1936)
It seems fitting that this is the post to celebrate my five years of blogging! I never dreamed on June 22, 2007 when I created Memsaabstory that it would become such a big part of my life and be the catalyst for so much learning and so many wonderful and rewarding friendships. I never dreamed that people would embrace the insanity that leads me to do things like this and this and this (and this, okay I’m stopping now), and I certainly had no idea how generously people would share their treasures with me. This is one such gift.
Miss Frontier Mail is utterly charming, made with the usual Wadia enthusiasm and attention to loony detail. The “Indian Pearl White” is certainly the focus, but she is more than ably supported by gangsters who balk at being dastardly, a fearsome spy-movie “Boss” precursor and his go-getter female assistant, futuristic gadgets, thrilling fights and chases, a banana-loving buffoon and so much more. It often feels very much like a silent movie, starting off with only music and no dialogue until seven or eight minutes in; title pages are interspersed throughout, the acting is exaggerated, and you can often hear the camera whirring. Like the Frontier Mail train itself, it picks up speed quickly and we’re off on a rollicking good ride as Fearless Nadia battles comic-book villains between dainty sips of tea in her fabulous Art Deco house. It is a literal and figurative rush of trains, motorcars, motorcycles and even an airplane!
MAY 26, 2012
Kaliya Mardan (1919)
This Dadasaheb Phalke silent film may be the first start-to-finish ADORABLE movie ever made. I in no way mean that condescendingly: I loved every frame of this and was wowed by some of the special effects (the much talked-about battle between young Krishna and the Kaliya serpent at the end particularly). Phalke’s seven-year-old daughter Mandakini plays young Shree Krishna as a hyperactive mischief-maker who gleefully torments the local villagers with the help of his friends, and she is brilliant—when she’s onscreen, you don’t want to look at anybody else. It is also absolutely hilarious in places, worthy company for the likes of Buster Keaton.
APRIL 23, 2012
Kismet (1943)
Oh my.
I love you, Kismet. I can see why, for 32 years until Sholay, you held the record for longest run at the box office. I love your story, I love ten-year-old Mehmood, I love VH Desai (whom Saadat Hasan Manto called “God’s Clown”), I simply adore Ashok Kumar in all his youthful kind-hearted con-man glory. I love your unwed pregnant girl, your runaway son; I even love your songs, which is sometimes hard for me with movies as aged as you are. I can’t wait to see you with subtitles (thanks Raja!) but even without them you are enthralling, you dear old progressive masala template of a film, you.
FEBRUARY 26, 2012
The Jungle Princess (1942)
As one of the first—and still one of the few—women to specialize in onscreen kick-assery, it’s no secret that Fearless Nadia is one of my idols (and I’m not alone in that by any means). So when she is set down in the heart of the Dark Continent with ooga-booga natives, pith-helmeted villains, handsome big game hunter John Cawas, and a loyal and clever lion named Shankar, the little African heart of this Memsaab goes pitter-patter. It’s also The Big Muscle Tussle month over at this site, where I am a rather unproductive member but whose other more participatory writers I cannot recommend highly enough.
There is quite a lot of muscle on display in this, and not all of it belongs to Nadia!
FEBRUARY 16, 2012
From the archives: even more more
This week has been quite harrowing: my sweet little Callie had four seizures on Sunday and was admitted to the hospital for three days while doctors tried to figure out what was going on. The good news is that she appears to be in really good health, especially given her age and puppy mill past, except of course for the seizures (“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”). The veterinary neurologist (#firstworldproblems) has diagnosed her with idiopathic
epilepsy encephalitis, which I think means they have no idea what’s wrong but have to say something because I’ve essentially just donated a new wing to the hospital. She’s now on
two anti-convulsant medications a boatload of medications and home, staggering around like a drunken sailor and twitchy. It takes a little time for the meds to kick in (or to get the right dosage), but I am very hopeful that these partial seizures will stop soon.
UPDATE: She has been re-diagnosed with encephalitis (GME—autoimmune encephalitis). This makes me very sad, but it is treatable with a LOT of meds (including injections which I get to learn how to give) and very careful management. Luckily the neurologist I have is one of the best in the world at treating this, so I remain hopeful.
I do know for sure that both Gilda and I are very very happy to have her back with us, bobbling head and all. But I have not had the time nor the inclination to watch any films so you’ll just have to make do with more gorgeousFilmindia scans. I know, I know: they are no kind of substitute for my deeply analytic and scholarly reviews, but there you have it! Try to manage.
FEBRUARY 13, 2012
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