A star in love

The poet saw

Beauty

The sculptor carved her Image

They named her Venus

We call her Madhubala

- Advertisement for Sharabi (1964), the last of Madhubala’s films to be released in her lifetime, quoted by Khatija Akbar in her book about the late actress

Madhubala (14 February 1933-23 February 1969), was “… the most beautiful of all the heroines in the fairyland of films, with her natural looks, always as fresh as morning dew, sans heavy make-up, false eyelashes, contact lenses or scanty dresses fashioned by designers to impart artificial glamour that would titillate male curiosity…” in the words of the late Dev Anand, Indian cinema’s ‘ever green’ hero in his autobiography ‘Romancing with Life’. She is still hailed as the most ravishing beauty ever to have graced Indian cinema. Born into a conservative Pathan Muslim family in Delhi she was named Mumtaz Jehan Begum Dehlavi at birth. ‘Madhubala’ was the screen name given her by the film industry. Her birth on St. Valentine’s day is often remarked on by those who cherish her memory as symbolic of her life both on screen and in the real world because her ‘heart’ played an abnormally decisive role in it. Khatija Akbar, in her biography of the star ‘I Want to Live’-The Story of Madhubala, (the main source for this article) writes: “Her very birth - on St. Valentine’s day, with a congenital heart disease – lends a mystical touch to the image of a woman who was always a victim of her heart”.

As a versatile actor she was the leading lady in most of the seventy-two films she starred in (in sixty-six of them in fact), some of them based on romances that see no happy ending like Mughal-e-Azam, some celebrating dreamland love sagas where the lovers finally make it after overcoming all obstacles like Barsaat-ki-Raat, and some committed to hilarious comedy like Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi; it seems that in her off-screen life, however, her moments of happiness were far less frequent than those of unhappiness, for she was dogged by ill health all her life, and her real life romance with legendary actor Dilip Kumar (Yusuf Khan) ended in heartbreak coupled with unwarranted ignominy. She was suffering from a heart disorder known as a ‘hole in the heart’ (ventricular septal defect) for which there was no known medical remedy then; her trips to Russia and England in this connection were in vain. Her marriage to eccentric singer actor Kishore Kumar subsequent to her estrangement with Dilip Kumar was a loveless one and a source of much suffering for her. Commenting on her own life, she revealed to a Filmfare journalist assigned to do a feature on her (as quoted by Khatija Akbar):

The sum total of my life is bitter experience which is coiled tight like a spring within my heart and when released hurts excruciatingly. It is true that one learns something from every experience but when the experience is evil, the shock is so great that one feels as though one can never recover from it. I am very emotional. I have always lived my life with my heart. For that I have suffered more than is necessary. I have been hurt.

Nevertheless, the Madhubala-Dilip Kumar affair, though carried on discreetly, out of the limelight, without disturbing too much the actress’s conservative, extremely strict disciplinarian father Ataullah Khan who always made sure that he himself or one or two of her sisters chaperoned her into and out of the studios, was in itself a fascinating story of love. Reminiscing about the affair between Madhubala and Dilip Kumar, Madhur Bhushan, Madhubala’s youngest sister born in 1950 says: “They were made for each other”. But the affair came to an acrimonious end in 1956-7. There was apparently no important reason for the breakup other than, perhaps, that the three characters involved – Dilip, Madhubala, and her father – were Pathans, who, in popular tradition, are credited with an unbending nature.

Strangely, this most famous star couple of the Indian silver screen co-starred in only four films (out of the seventy-two Madhubala acted in): Tarana (1951), Sangdil (1952), Amar (1954), and Mughal-e-Azam (1960).The first has a happy ending while the other three end in different forms of tragedy. The making of the last film took almost ten years. The four movies together, in effect, span the whole of the period of her adult acting career except for Mahal (1949). The inexorable movement from exquisite happiness to abject misery depicted in the dreamworld of cinema through these four films parallels a similar succession of events in her personal life dominated by her romantic relationship with Dilip Kumar. Mahal, which she did at just sixteen with thirty-eight year old veteran actor Ashok Kumar made her a star overnight, but the later Tarana (she did sixteen other films as heroine between Mahal and Tarana) marked the beginning of her masterful portrayal of a love-struck heroine. In the latter movie Madhubala, who was eighteen, was cast against Dilip Kumar, full ten years her senior in age. However, in their affair, it was Madhubala who took the initiative. While on the sets of Tarana she sent her hair-dresser with a rose for Dilip Kumar telling the woman to ask him to accept the flower only if he loved her. Dilip Kumar, amused by such a gesture from his young co-star, accepted the rose as if in play.

It was the case that young Madhubala used to play occasional pranks on her work colleagues. But she was not playing this time; she was actually falling in love with the man. A vivacious young woman who got on well with her fellow artistes she was a bit of a flirt, but her flirtation was meant as innocent fun. She was just a child among her senior colleagues, except Dilip Kumar. Out of the studios, Ashok Kumar said, he always treated her as a ‘kid’. Initially, Madhubala showed some interest in Premnath, but her real love was for Dilip Kumar alone. From her Tarana days up to her death, she loved no man but Dilip Kumar, according to Kaneez Fatima, another of Madhubala’s sisters.

In Tarana, a plane, in which a doctor returning to India after studies in England is travelling, crash-lands in a remote rural area. The doctor (Moti, played by Dilip Kumar) finds shelter in the house of a villager, a blind widower who lives alone with his beautiful young daughter (Tarana, played by Madhubala), who was an unsophisticated but uninhibited village beauty. A discrete affair starts between Moti and Tarana. Moti is able to restore the old man’s sight through surgery. A clandestine meeting between the two lovers unexpectedly leads to a misunderstanding and Moti is beaten up and left for dead. He is found by his family and taken back home. Later, however, after the usual denouement in such a story, he comes back and claims his love. It is a simple love story without any serious message. Madhubala was still establishing her reputation as a talented actor whose performance was natural without a trace of overacting. The experience of actually falling in love with her hero probably made her kind of natural acting even more realistic.

Sangdil tells a different type of story. It is a rough adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s classic novel Jane Eyre. Shankar and Kamla (in the film Dilip Kumar and Madhubala respectively) are childhood lovers who get separated and reunite later as young adults in different circumstances, Kamla as a pujaaran (priestess) and Shankar as a thakur. But when they finally meet for a permanent union,Shankar is blind, having lost his sight in a fire, and Kamla becomes his partner. Her role in the film represented the ideal Indian woman of the time, demure, modest and dutiful, which in her own life, in a way, interfered with her ability to maintain a sufficiently independent relationship with Dilip Kumar. Madhubala had a natural love of acting, singing and dancing. She started her career as a child actor at age nine in 1942 in Basant which became an immediate hit. Her headstrong, hot- tempered father having lost his job in the Imperial Tobacco Company in Delhi had to daily accompany his daughter to the studio instead of finding work for himself. Very soon the little girl assumed the role of the main breadwinner of her large family including her five sisters and father and mother. The conservative disciplinarian Ataullah Khan strictly regulated her career and life. He objected to her affair with Yusuf (Dilip Kumar), and ultimately contributed to their final parting of ways. Madhubala was devoted to her father and family. Her refusal to give up seeing her father any longer as Dilip demanded as a condition of marriage was largely instrumental in putting an end to their relationship. The late Shammi Kapoor who knew Madhubala and her circumstances well, and was fond of her as a friend, also believed that she had to leave her family some day; her not doing so had tragic consequences. But perhaps she was only playing the role of the normal Indian woman.

As she became older and more experienced she understood the value of a more self-assertive and independent attitude as a woman. In a Filmfare feature years later Madhubala said: “As times change, values also appear to alter. Hugging the old values to my heart and unable to adapt myself to people and conditions around me, I have given cause for resentment to many and I myself have experienced much pain.” Amar, which critics thought was clearly ahead of its times in terms of its central theme, gave Madhubala a chance to portray the most complicated role of a mature woman in love that she had had to handle up to that point in her career. Here she is caught up in a tripartite relationship that eventually leads her to a painful sacrifice. Amarnath (Dilip Kumar) is a successful, highly regarded advocate who is involved in an affair with an educated, socially conscious young woman called Anju (Madhubala) who lives with her father in a palatial house. Sonia (Nimmi) is a poor young village girl, a milkmaid, whom Amarnath rapes, succumbing to a momentary impulse. The girl gets pregnant and the disgraced family wants to kill her. When at the end Amarnath confesses to having molested the milkmaid, and accepts responsibility for the crime, Anju leaves her penitent lover allowing him to marry in recompense the woman he had wronged.

In real life, however, when her relationship with Dilip Kumar broke up, Madhubala found it difficult to deal with the devastating frustration she experienced with the same sense of equanimity and courage she portrayed in that film. Khatija Akbar writes: “While Dilip Kumar appeared to emerge relatively unscathed, for Madhubala it was the beginning of the end; the festering wounds she carried never healed. Emotional to a fault, guileless in the bargain, she was not equipped to deal with the shock of the break-up.”

It was in Mughal-e-Azam, her magnum opus, that her screen life almost totally overlapped her real life experience of her romantic entanglement with Dilip Kumar. The film was done after the rift between them. They fulfilled their contract on the film as estranged former lovers. Like Anarkali in the film she found herself stranded between two strong-willed men. The legend of Anarkali is probably not history, but fiction. However, it is good material for creative treatment. It had already been the subject of a number of films by the time director K. Asif decided to make yet another film on it. Prince Salim, son of Akbar the Great, who later succeeded his father as Jahangir Khan, falls in love with the most beautiful dancing girl in the imperial court. Naturally , the Emperor opposes the young prince’s affair with a slave girl. As a result the young man even goes to war against his father. Later, Akbar defeats him in battle and passes the death sentence on him for rebellion. Anarkali, hearing this, emerges from hiding and offers herself for punishment in order to save the prince. Salim is saved, and Anarkali is sentenced to be walled to death (but in this film, Akbar secretly lets her go away to live in another territory). Commentators have said that Madhubala, while playing Anarkali, was living her own real life on the screen. Her superb performance has been unanimously praised by the viewers. In one scene Prince Salim is required to give Anarkali a slap on the cheek. Dilip Kumar delivered this slap with more force than necessary as if in real anger. Madhubala left the set in a huff. The director tried to pacify her saying “This shows that he still loves you”. When Madhubala participated in the memorable love scenes in Mughal-e-Azam with Dilip Kumar, she was not in speaking terms with him, following the breakup. The excellence of her performance, despite apparent lack of personal warmth towards her co-star, is testimony to her professionalism.

Madhubala’s inimitable realism and Dilip Kumar’s passionate intensity in the movies they did together were, no doubt, partly due to their real life experience as lovers. It is as if their private interactions which they tried to keep under wraps from public gaze were played out on the big screen for all the world to see. Anarkali’s bold and defiant public expression of her love for the prince before the Emperor after her release from the dungeon in the dance song “Pyar Kiya To Darna Kya” in Mughal-e-Azam, which is its theme song, comes to mind.

Considering the staid way that the affair progressed over six or seven years, the way it all ended was a shock indeed. Publicity and scandal had been carefully avoided. Madhubala had to endure some troublous attention from film journalists, perhaps a bit more than her fair share of it as a popular star, mainly on account of her stern father who prevented them, quite rightfully, from barging in on her sets while she was at work , which made them murderously angry with her. But this had nothing to with the affair. The fact that despite her father’s opposition the lovers carried on within discrete limits shows that he did not grudge her some privacy and independence as a young woman. It seems, however, that he had no intention of allowing her to marry Dilip Kumar.

On her part, Madhubala had been determined (before the breakup) to marry no other man than Yusuf (Dilip). In an interview with Filmfare she was bold enough to declare: “Nobody in the world has any right to interfere with one’s choice of a husband. I would marry only the man with whom I am very much in love”. Probably she was sure that her father would relent for the sake of her happiness. This was in 1955, and she was only twenty-two. The tragic irony is that the end of her relationship came barely a year later.

Dilip Kumar too had responded positively to Madhubala’s new independent spirit. He got his elder sister to go to Ataullah Khan and ask him to allow Madhubala to marry him, but he refused. When Madhubala had to withdraw from Naya Daur, where earlier she had been signed on to co-star Dilip, because her father objected to his daughter being taken for outdoor shooting in a distant location which he thought was not safe for her, Vyjayanthimala was made to replace her on the film by the producer. Still Dilip wanted to marry Madhubala. He even decided to give all the profits of the film Ganga Jamuna which he produced to Ataullah Khan so that he could marry Madhubala and she could stop working. This proposal was also rejected. Then, Dilip Kumar repeatedly urged Madhubala, in the presence of their senior friend Om Prakash as witness, to marry him that very day in his house where a qazi was waiting to perform the nuptials; but he insisted on one condition: she was to leave her father and not see him again! He said if she didn’t agree to this, he would leave her and never come back again. Madhubala’s reply was that leaving her father was impossible. So Dilip walked out of her life. Though Madhubala later made overtures through a friend to revive the relationship, Dilip Kumar didn’t change his decision.

The Naya Daur case, in 1956, made a revival of the relationship impossible. Ataullah Khan took his daughter away from the film, but refused to return the Rs 30000 B.R. Chopra the producer had initially paid her as advance. Chopra filed a criminal case against father and daughter for breach of contract and cheating, which in fact was thoroughly unfair. When the case was taken up the prosecution was heard to the utter humiliation of the accused. Dilip Kumar gave evidence against them. In the course of being cross examined, he said, “I love Madhubala and will continue to love until the day she dies”, cruelly reversing the conventional lover’s pledge. Meanwhile the accused had a good defence, which they were hopeful of presenting in the next session. Unfortunately, Chopra unilaterally withdrew the case before it was taken up for hearing again, because his film Naya Daur which he did with Dilip and Vyjayanthimala in the lead turned out to be a huge success, and he was no longer interested in recovering the money he lost on account of Madhubala’s father not returning the 30,000 rupees he had paid at the beginning. Madhubala and her father came to an empty courtroom on the day set for the second hearing. Denied a chance to redeem her honour by giving her side of the story, she wept. Her father taunted her: “You say he (Dilip Kumar) loves you. Is this love?”

About ten years after this, in 1966, Madhubala recovered enough of her health to almost complete a new film called Chaalaak , which Raj Kapoor was directing. When Dilip went to see her, she asked for his advice on some matter. She said to him “Would you do another picture with me if I get alright”. Feeling extremely sorry for her, he replied, “Of course, I will do a picture with you. You are going to be alright, you are perfectly alright…”.

For a few days before her death, Madhubala was heard murmuring “God, I don’t want to die. God, let me live…”. But finally, she died. The day she died (23 February 1969) Dilip Kumar was shooting in Madras for A. Bhim Sen’s Gopi. He had felt restless the whole day that day. He heard the news about her death on arriving in Bombay in the evening. When he went to pay his last respects to the woman he had loved and most probably still loved, the funeral was over.