Rekha and Umrao Jaan: The story of women who learn to live with broken hearts

When Rekha was on her way to the top in the 1970s and early 1980s, film and gossip magazines liked to focus more on her personal life rather than her work. After many remarkable performances in the 1970s, Rekha truly came into her own when she played the titular character in Muzaffar Ali’s 1981 film Umrao Jaan. But despite the National Film Award-winning performance, a lot of conversation about the film and Rekha’s performance was still centered around her personal life and her alleged relationship with Amitabh Bachchan.
Set in the 1840s in Awadh, Umrao Jaan is the story of a girl named Amiran who is thrown to the wolves when she is sold to a brothel in Lucknow. Amiran gets a new name Umrao, and is given lessons in poetry, dance, and other art forms so she could entertain men as a courtesan. Rekha’s delicate dance moves, her adaa with poetry and her husky voice made her Umrao a picture of beauty but underneath all of that, the pathos was evident.
Director Muzaffar Ali has previously compared Rekha and Umrao’s journeys when he said that both these women draw from their past and have the courage to move on. “The striking feature of Rekha is that which draws from her past. Her eyes conveyed the experience of having been broken and then having pulled herself together… Life shakes up people, and if they have an art within them, then she gets more polished in the process,” he was quoted Yasser Usman in Rekha: The Untold Story. Here, he was talking about Rekha’s alleged relationship with Amitabh Bachchan. He was quoted in the same book saying, “She became a walking corpse. The fault is entirely Amitabh’s. He used to come and sit on our sets during the Delhi shooting of Umrao Jaan. That’s a fact.”
In the film, Rekha’s Umaro is left heartbroken when Farooq Shaikh’s Nawab walks away. (Photo: Express Archives)
Watching Umrao Jaan with the knowledge of whatever was being written about Rekha during those years presents her character in an almost semi-biographical light. In the film, Umrao falls in love with Farooq Shaikh’s Nawab Sultan and in a significant scene, the Nawab tells her that he is to be married to someone else. Umrao accepts it happily and is ready to be the other woman. At that moment, Nawab tells her that he has to break ties with her altogether, and that’s when her heart breaks. This scene carries the essence of the film, and from this point onwards, you accept that Umrao is probably not going to have the ending she hoped for. The traditional happy ending wasn’t meant for her but even the low bar that she had set for her herself wouldn’t be met anyone.
In a 1986 interview with the BBC, Rekha had shared that it was perhaps her personal life that bled into her performance as Umrao. “There was something about the film, that Umrao Jaan just got made. Maybe it just had to happen. I was going through a difficult phase in my personal life and it got reflected on my face,” she said.
Rekha won a National Film award for Umrao Jaan. (Photo: Express Archives)
Rekha was at her finest best with her dancing, and her dialogue delivery in the film, that too, with no training. She told BBC that she “never took any training for Umrao Jaan. I know it’s difficult to believe but I have never learned a word in Urdu.” The actor took weeks to finish the dubbing as she wanted to get her breath right, and the result was completely worth it. Although, Rekha was quoted saying in the same interview that she “did anything special to deserve a National Award for Umrao Jaan.”
Rekha’s arresting eyes in songs like ‘Inn Aankhon Ki Masti’, ‘Dil Cheez Kya Hai’, among others are still remembered her fans after four decades. The film was remade JP Dutta in 2006 with Aishwarya Rai but it never created the impression that was once left Rekha on celluloid. Rekha might believe that she did nothing special to “deserve” a National Award for the film but ardent film viewers can still see the melancholy that make her Umrao a timeless character.