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. |
It was in 2006 that I started research on the ‘Early Talkie’ period of the Bombay film industry - the 1930s-1940s. Given the loss of hundreds of films from this pre-Independence period, my research depended in great part on film magazines of the time. filmindia magazine had proved to be an immensely valuable source with its passionate editorials, gossip columns, studio news, film reviews, and trade information. As I perused the magazine month by month, year after year, I started to encounter one name with more regularity than others – Sushila Rani. In the early 1940s, Sushila Rani was all over filmindia; on the cover, in puzzle competitions, in reviews, special articles, stand-alone photo plates, and soon even in bylines. Baburao Patel was aggressively promoting his lady love and even launched her as an actress with the films Draupadi (1944) and Gwalan (1946). Both the films bombed at the box-office, prompting us to draw parallels with Charles Foster Kane’s misguided and ostentatious efforts to launch Susan Alexander as an opera singer. However, Sushila Rani’s was no mean talent. The films are not available today for assessment but we have the songs and they tell a different story. Both films were directed by Baburao 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.
[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.
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