Mortality is possibly the lone non-negotiable, incontestable truth whose acceptance cuts across differences of religion, caste, ethnicity, philosophy and nation. The only other human experience that could claim to come near it is the seeming universal conspiracy to forget our own mortality. So it was that when the zestful icon of theatre and film Zohra Segal shed the mortal coil on July 10, a pang of surprise and sorrow was felt even by those who did not know the popular doyenne well, despite her having crossed her 102nd birthday. But then the irrepressible Zohra ‘Aapa’ was like that. With her, it was easier than usual to forget that everyone’s days are numbered, so palpable was her love for life. Often we hear the elderly regretting their longevity, as the passing days intermittently bring them news of their contemporaries dying. But the veteran artist, having seen death, loneliness and uncertainty up close during her long life, still embraced the idea of living with the passion of an exuberant 18-year-old.This was the age she confessed to feeling in the 1995 Doordarshan documentary “Zinda Itihaas” (Living Legend), which was screened at an event held this week in the Capital’s India Habitat Centre, where friends, family and admirers of Zohra Segal gathered to pay their tribute. The film, directed by Anwar Jamal, features the doyenne revisiting her ancestral Rampur home and talking about her eventful life with characteristic candour and objectivity.
She constantly pokes fun at her own penchant to think of herself as great and famous, as well as hailing from noble roots. She recalls her first meeting with Uday Shankar. Telling her interviewer, “You can’t imagine the kind of respect I had for him later,” she describes her reluctance to meet him backstage, after seeing him for the first time, performing in Europe — “I thought, yeh nachaiya !”
Never given to dwelling on the painful periods of her life, except in analysing the challenges they offered, she sums up the difficulty of a middle-aged actor attempting to rebuild her life after the death of her husband Kameshwar Segal. With a teenaged daughter and a younger son to look after, she knew she could not continue in Prithvi Theatre where she had worked from 1945 to ’59. First moving from Mumbai to Delhi, she went to London three years later and made a career for herself over a nearly unbroken stint of 25 years. If that sentence reveals nothing of the physical and emotional hardships she would have suffered in those years, Zohra herself puts the facts baldly in the documentary when she sums up the difficulty of finding work: “ Yeh meri shakl, figure bhi sexy nahin . (With this kind of face and without even a sexy figure!)”
With equal equanimity, she goes on to her role of Lady Chatterjee in “Jewel in the Crown” that finally helped her career turn a corner. “After that I didn’t have to look back,” she tells the interviewer. On her return to India in 1987 she had been part of two hit TV series in the U.K., “Tandoori Nights” and “Never Say Die”.
It is another matter that at 75, an age considered ripe for retirement, she started on another innings altogether, taking up numerous stage and film assignments. In the film, she talks of four important influences in her training. Uday Shankar taught her stage presence, she says, and body control she had learnt in Germany while studying dance in Dresden. Abhinaya she imbibed from her Kathakali training, while voice modulation she learnt from Prithviraj Kapoor.
After saying that age is a state of mind and in her mind she is 18, she shares with viewers her motto, “Come on girl, get on with it!”
Her niece Salima Raza and daughter Kiran Segal who were among the speakers at the event helped bring out the contrast of the celebrity and the mother figure. If one pointed out that Zohra’s greatness, apart from her artistic contribution, was the grace with which she handled her life, the other shared her bewilderment that one she called Ammi and often fought with was held in such reverence by the world. The closing comment by Sohail Hashmi that children of great artistes could be forgiven for considering them ordinary, but not the nation, was particularly significant for India.
