National Film Awards 2023 | Waheeda Rehman: Hindi cinema’s all-weather queen

Waheeda Rehman and Guru Dutt in Pyaasa. Rehman’s roles include some of the most iconic, heralded films in our history. Kagaz ke Phool, Guide, Bees Saal Baad, Saheb Biwi aur Ghulam. (Image via Wikimedia Commons)

In an interview in the early 2000s, Waheeda Rehman recounted an episode from the sets of Solva Saal where she had a tiff with the director Raj Khosla (eventually replaced as the director of Guide). “I was only trying to understand the logic of wearing those clothes,” she explained her disagreement with provocative clothing. Rehman famously through her rise in the '60s, refused to wear sleeveless shirts. “Acting aur performance se jo mil skta tha, wahi chahiye tha,” she adds.

Rehman’s graceful grip on her principles echoes an era of Hindi cinema when women, thwarted by the predominant narratives of the day, the tendency to assign art to the men (even Guide is referred to as Dev Anand’s Guide) held their own in other ways. To a generation of cinema lovers, Rehman, who was deservedly conferred with the Dadasaheb Phalke Award on October 17, 2023, represents that everlasting softness and determined grace that cinema sought as an extension of its dreaminess. Because to the subject of the lines “jo bhi ho tum khuda ki kasam, lajawaab ho”, an award is merely testament to the epoch-defining perseverance that helped institutionalize a shapeless profession.

Rehman debuted opposite Guide co-star Dev Anand in the barnstorming CID (1957), a film whose producer the despairing Guru Dutt identified early in her, the making of something more delicate and in sombre. In Dutt’s Pyaasa (1957), a film as timeless as it is ultimately existential, Rehman plays the jaunty muse to a struggling, despondent poet. To become the subject of a man’s leering gaze is one thing but to become the subject of his despair, the vessel of his unblinking melancholy, is another. It’s a role for the ages and it established the actress as a mainstay.

Beyond the blinding highs of cinematic fandom, women of that era, however, had to battle blinkering perceptions about them. In another interview, the veteran actress recounted an episode where she walked out of a set because the hero – in this case Sanjeev Kapoor – regularly arrived late. Such provocations rarely make history, but they are essentially the ink that history’s broader strokes are made by.

Rehman’s roles include some of the most iconic, heralded films in our history. Kagaz ke Phool, Guide, Bees Saal Baad, Saheb Biwi aur Ghulam, the '60s was a whirlwind time for cinematic expression. In a tentative first, Rehman also led Khamoshi (1969), a moody psychological rumination about the idea of love’s asymmetry. The actress played Radha, a nurse who falls in love with her patients, only to disintegrate bit by bit, until she becomes the ruin that she sets out to rebuild. It’s a bewitching, one-woman show, the kind of ruminative spiral down the steep ladder of hope that challenges our ideas of love and longing. A film like Khamoshi would be impossible to make today, let alone adequately cast for the kind of stoic elegance it demands. Acting today is more about the glass-tapping nuisance of dialogue, the commotion that words cause rather than the unease silence breaks into. Khamoshi is an antidote to the Hindi cinema we know, a resounding critique of our ludicrously pompous ideas of companionship and reciprocity.

Rehman’s return to work, after nearly a decade’s break, was just as ecstatic, if short-lived, at the turn of the millennium. The sight of her slowly crumbling to A.R. Rahman’s ‘Luka Chuppi’ in Rang De Basanti is a cinematic antiquity. In Delhi-6, Rehman played the dispirited grandmother who returns from a foreign country to the walled lanes of old Delhi, her home, to realize she has in some ways outgrown it. “Yahan toh ab marne ka bhi mann nahi karta,” she says, in a scene, crushed by the cultural disparity, the unassailable inner frictions of a country bent on ripping itself apart at the heart. It is, you could say, eerily reminiscent of a reluctant queen’s return to the territory that she helped shape, only to confirm the reasons she has stayed away.

Compared to her peers Madhubala and Meena Kumari, Rehman was maybe subtle, unflattering in an obvious way. It’s probably what made her durable, to have the kind of longevity and recall that she continued to enjoy late into her career. Her contribution to Hindi cinema is unparalleled through what are easily the two greatest decades of Bollywood history.

Moreover, her conduct, her off-screen etiquette has helped craft an enduring image of an era that spawned as many cultural conflicts as it may have spawned storied careers. Rehman has been many things, of which the most important one, she might have actually played off-screen, as beauty’s agent of mindfulness. As that elegant riposte to our intoxicating ideas of fame, our fantasies of the flesh as the conveyor of bold sentiment. Though many actresses pulled down bigger walls, in a more tactile sense, Rehman is maybe the first one to lay down the bricks of a cinema for women, and by women. It’s only fitting that she will be crowned with the jewels she helped make.