On the night of Feb. 3, 1972, the prints of “Pakeezah” arrived at Bombay’s Maratha Mandir cinema in a palanquin pulled by four horses. Military bands played outside, police held back the thousands crowding the gates, and inside, the film’s star, Meena Kumari, sat beside her husband, director Kamal Amrohi, and gripped his wrist so hard through the screening that her nails drew blood. Amrohi’s son Tajdar was in the theater that night.
His father never pulled his arm away. Now, Film Heritage Foundation’s (FHF) 4K restoration of “Pakeezah,” carried out with the Amrohi family, is back in front of audiences. Thierry Frémaux presents its world premiere at Festival Lumière in Lyon on Wednesday.
It then plays a gala at the BFI London Film Festival’s BFI Imax on Oct. 18 that Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, the foundation’s director, will introduce with Tajdar Amrohi, his sister Rukhsar Amrohi and Kamal Amrohi’s grandson Bilal Amrohi. Dungarpur says he heard the Imax screening sold out “in no time.” The film is set in Lucknow as the age of the nawabs (Muslim nobles) fades. Kumari plays Sahibjaan, born in a graveyard to a courtesan who was spurned by her husband’s aristocratic family.
Raised in a brothel, Sahibjaan grows up to be the most celebrated courtesan of her day, though she longs for love and respectability. Then Salim, a forest officer played by Raaj Kumar, wanders into her train compartment by mistake while she is asleep. Taken with her feet, he leaves her a note in verse and slips away.
When they meet again, they fall in love, but the stigma attached to her profession stands between them. Few Indian films carry a backstory as heavy as this one. Amrohi was already married, with three children, when he married Kumari.
Rukhsar grew up with her mother in the family’s hometown of Amroha, in Uttar Pradesh, until she was 13, while her father lived in Bombay (now Mumbai) with Kumari, whom the children called Chhoti Ammi (little mother). Amrohi conceived “Pakeezah” in the mid-1950s around Kumari, his wife and muse, and shooting began in 1956, in black-and-white, before moving to Eastmancolor and then CinemaScope. The production stalled in 1964 when the couple separated, and Kumari’s health declined sharply over the following years.
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