While reading up on our Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Kamini Kaushal, who incidentally was also Filmfare’s first cover girl, I was struck by what an extraordinary life she has had. Back then, when it was considered socially unacceptable for girls from ‘good’ families to act in films, she went on to carve a decisive career for herself despite being married at an early age.
Incidentally, her father, Shiv Ram Kashyap, was a leading botanist of his time. She completed her BA (Hons) in English from Kinnaird College in Lahore. Her first film itself, Neecha Nagar (1946), won the Golden Palm at Cannes. Her elder sister’s untimely death made her marry her brother-in-law, BS Sood, chief engineer at the Bombay Port Trust, for the sake of her two little nieces.
Dilip Kumar was said to be besotted by her but she couldn’t return his affections as she was bound by vows of matrimony. But despite the extraordinary circumstances, the chemistry was very much alive on screen. She went to give hits like Shaheed (1948), Nadiya Ke Paar (1949), Shabnam (1949) and Arzoo (1950) with him. It helped that he played the pining lover in all.
She was also part of Dev Anand’s first commercial hit, Ziddi (1948), playing his love interest in the film. Interestingly, she was considered the bigger star then and her name came before his in the posters. She also acted with Raj Kapoor in Jail Yatra (1947), as also in his directorial debut Aag (1948), thus cementing her place as the first A-list heroine, who did films with the Dilip-Raj-Dev troika.
Her only Filmfare Award was for Biraj Bahu (1954), directed by Bimal Roy. The film, based on a novel by Saratchandra Chatterjee, depicted her as a dutiful wife who remains truthful to her husband through thick and thin. In the ’60s, she took to playing character roles. Manoj Kumar considered her as one of his idols and she took to playing his mother in film after film, starting from Shaheed (1965) to Dus Numbari (1976).
She took to developing TV content for children in the ’80s and also developed an interest in puppet theatre, her strongest passion. Her last outing in a Hindi film was in Chennai Express (2013), where she played Shah Rukh Khan’s grandmother. Time might have moved on but it reminds us that she was every inch the star, once the arc lights were on…