Kishwar Desai chronicles the charmed life of Devika Rani

Surbhi Goel

The book is an engaging flashback into the charmed life of Devika Rani and her colleagues and cohorts. Kishwar Desai has taken a rather courageous dive into this world of Indian cinema during its early years, drawing upon information and stories emanating out of the correspondences and private papers of Devika Rani, which included those of her first husband, Himansu Rai. The couple had pioneered setting up of Bombay Talkies, the famed film production company which played an instrumental part in formation of the Bombay film industry.

However, the writer’s enthusiasm for the life and world of Devika Rani is bettered by the well-researched complex weave that has been created. Fiction flows lucidly while combining intersecting stories and multi-perspective accounts which have been curated from letters, newspaper reportage, memoirs, private papers, minutes of meetings at the Bombay Talkies, film reviews, articles, films and photographs. The book is a unique archive of information within itself, with further potentialities of various kinds of readings. The dramatic arc of the book is a careful selection of billets-doux and passionate rendezvous between Devika Rani and the Russian painter Svetoslav Roerich, whom she married in 1945.

The pioneer of Indian cinema pours her fears, love, pain, dilemmas, longings with alacrity and gives an unadorned, unfiltered and rather brutal glimpse of the magical world of filmmaking. Yet, the book also offers a rare piecing together of details on entrepreneurship, struggles, doldrums, crowd support, seduction, politics, social conditions, caste, and gender politics of the early Indian cinema. Desai has expressed in the preface that she endeavoured to set the record straight with this book, but in fact, she may have done more than that. She has offered a glimpse into the world of Devika Rani with rare directness, which is at once very personal, yet very relatable. She has discovered the breathing, feeling, walking Devika Rani beneath the words and visuals. Often compared to Greta Garbo, for the reclusive and mystical life that she led, Devika comes alive as an entertainer, page after page in the book. Even when the sizeable part of the beginning is devoted to the exploits of Himansu Rai, the anticipation for the entry of Devika Rani in the narrative is palpable.

The many forays of Himansu Rai, his courage, dalliances, manipulations, triumphs and ultimate unravelling tell the tale of multitude of young Indian men trying to negotiate the limitations of the colonial system with a cultivated sense of disregard for societal norms and familial expectations. Likewise, the many forays of Devika Rani tell the tale of Indian women trying to negotiate the limitations of a patriarchal system, with a natural sense of disregard for norms, while protecting the natural insouciance, sense of loyalty and purity.

Devika is the eternal kindred spirit who must make her way by being an ‘iron rose’ through the normative system where a woman of many talents is obliged to condemn herself to mediocrity. She refused to embrace this predicament and paid the price with brutal judgments, betrayals and misunderstandings thrown at her. She lived her life ‘as a religion’, while pioneering film arts alongside Himansu Rai, breaking the glass ceiling, quietly but resolutely. The acute details of her management of Bombay Talkies, after Rai’s death, makes for a thrilling account of intrigues, industrial sabotage and brutal competitiveness, which electrified the Bombay film industry in the 1940s.

Devika Rani was an unparalleled muse, desired and loved, admired and envied. Yet, her most beautiful attribute was her ability to love and be loyal. Despite the many abuses and betrayals that she suffered at the hands of Himansu Rai, she was truly his soul mate, guarding his legacy even after his demise. The intrigues which marked Bombay Talkies during the life of Rai expose the patriarchal biases of men who occupy a place in the ‘famed’ gallery of reformers (Manto being one of them). Devika’s association with the Roerichs, eventual marriage into the family, how she was warmly embraced by them and being an inspiration for Svetoslav Roerich’s most rewarding phase of painting, married life in Kullu and later at the Tataguni Estate, is life less ordinary.

The writer may have thrown the gauntlet to the readers with the reference to the alluring famed kiss in the title of the book, but the tender frisson of that filmic scene, its reportage, place in the cinematic history is not limited to that moment alone. Devika Rani’s life, entwined with those of many others, and the entire cultural memory feels like the never-ending kiss for the readers.