Umrao Jan Ada; The Broken poetess

A friend reminded me of my childhood favorite today.yesterday i watched umrao jaan again. muzaffar ali’s film about the legendary courtesan amiran, aka umrao jaan ‘ada.’ more relevant, one of rekha’s best performances ever.I would go so far as to say that as the hindi film industry goes, this is probably the most complete film i’ve seen.

As a child, My aunt loved this movie and we would view it during balmy summer night.

I have watched quite a few p



eriod films yet nothing matches Umao jan Ada.Period films tend to be opulent, excessive and trite… or plain silly.Many such come to mind…Devdas, for all its ‘splendour’ was bereft of any feeling. It did not move me, it did not stay with me… why,I could not stay with it and walked away after a while.It seemed to try to hard like a man vowing you which made it unauthentic.
Parineeta was a favorite for a while, It was winsome but when I saw it on the small screen,It lost half its kashish and the melodrama in the end had always put me off a bit.

Lagaan was too long and too futile a movie for me.Paheli lacked feeling and seemed all too blithe in every department. Mughal-e-azam i have not been able to sit through — but partly due to logisitical problems — still, what i saw didn’t wrench the heart.

Maybe it is the players as well. Ashwariya Rai is superficial, Rani mukherjee lacks ‘dard,’ Madhubala, while exquisite, shows that she is ‘acting.’ Vidaya Balan and saif acted well, but between them, there seemed little want — and then the wall breaks.

But umrao? Rekha’s voice, its quality and tone and her eyes all speak umrao’s heart and urdu adds to the magic,every word spoken furthers the story and every song sung needs to be there.



Muzaffar Ali made an epic. Apart form that, his sensitivities to the culture and the period were very intense. He hails from Lukhnow himself, so he knows what he is talking about in the movie.
And he had Rekha! Rekha posses a intensity which her neither her peers nor her predecessors possessed.She was the truly BIG heroine, the kind with larger than life charisma.The kind of leading ladies MGM used to put on the screen;Like Greta Garbo. She captures the screen.When it comes to  sheer onscreen presence, she’s unparalleled… she is a fierce, raw, flinty performer with unbridled honesty. Her acting isn’t gimmicky.

But more than anything, I never once could separate rekha from Umrao.There is an amazing heartache in her in this role,An alienation.She is a poetess rather than a courtesan.She dances on broken glass.

Raswa’s Umrao Jan is a dark tale.It speaks of betrayal and disillusionment.Its really very Dickensian.Great expectations in Lucknow.

Set among the elite Muslim society in mid-nineteenth century northern India, Umrao Jaan portrays a romanticized version of a tawaif, a kind of courtesan who has something in common with Japan’s geishas.  Tawaifs were accomplished in the high arts of kathak (north Indian classical dance), poetry, and music. The film’s Umrao Jaan, sold to a brothel as a young girl, excels at all three, and becomes the most sought-after and famous tawaif in the region.  But in spite of all her accomplishments, Umrao is never happy, and while she can find some measure of escape in crafting her much-admired poetry, she longs to extricate herself from the world of the tawaif.

She works her way through a brief series of lover/patrons, hoping each one will be her ticket out of the degredation of brothel.Needless to say, freedom is not Umrao’s lot, and after each attempt at escape - literal and metaphorical - she finds herself right back where she started :Umrao Jaan the famous courtesan, performing for the benefit and the pleasure of others.  

It is Rekha’s ineffable Rekha-ness that makes her so perfect for this role, as she somehow manages to appear tired and worldly while remaining delicate and other-worldly.  She carries Umrao’s transition from innocence to disillusionment in her body and in her face.Umrao never loses her grace, but, as Rekha conveys, she does lose her idealism.She sings both of succumbing completely to love (“What is a heart?  Take my life”) and also of her own particular power (“Thousands are intoxicated by the power of these eyes”).

Early on she muses that it is “circumstances” rather than “destiny” that made her a tawaif, and circumstances can change. Later on, she seems nearly broken, and the sadness just grows in Rekha’s eyes on each iteration of her Sisyphean attempts to redefine her circumstances.

A couple of shots of the Rekha version are really touching-especially the part where Umrao teaches her brother to speak, and the same brother grows up and throws her out of the house. Rekha’s acting at that point is memorable.Her eyes spoke all the  dissolution and despair,words couldn’t.

I dont want to be her psychoanalyst but perhaps there was something in Umrao’s story which struck Rekha in her deepest self.She once remarked that “After reading the script, I had a strange feeling that I had Umrao in me.A child star brought into show biz by her actress mother due to financial problems and abandoned by her biological father.She has spoken of her teenage days in Bombay, forced to act and wear crazy clothes when she should have been in school.

She also drank from the bitter cup of love of by spineless men…who profess to love you but are doomed to ultimately leave you. Yups She must have understood Umrao.

Lee Strassburg ( The method acting teacher) believed all acting was really exposing the subconscious trauma’s and self and great performances are elicited when  the boundary between Performer and character are blurred.This happens in Umaro..You dont see Rekha anywhere rather you see an 18th century courtesan-used by the worlds..abandoned by those she loved…beautiful but ultimately damned.

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Just look at this last song, When Umrao finds her birthplace and remebers her home.In probably the most beautiful lyrics, she sings of her helplessness.It was such an enigmatic end…..Umrao back in a looted broken Lucknow at the place from where she had been running all her life.No hysterics …No drama.Just silence among the ruins.