By: Ms. Vatsala Gurunath

Meena Kumari, the female counterpart of the famous tragedy hero, Dilip Kumar. She is the traditional tragedienne of Bollywood. Audiences loved to weep with her and she was weeping eternally.

Meena Kumari shot into stardom in the early fifties with the release of Baiju Bawra (1952). The daughter of a Parsee theatre actor, Mahajabeen acted in her first film at the age of six. She took on the name Meena Kumari for Vijay Bhatt's immensely popular musical Baiju Bawra. Her evocative portrayal of the perennially suffering Indian woman struck a responsive chord in millions of women. She was never really able to shake off this image of a tragedienne, and at times this severely impeded her in the exercise of the full range of her histrionic talents.

Her studied reserve, chaste diction and most of all extraordinary voice, that struck the right balance between the erotic and the pathetic, ensured her place in the hearts of the Indian movie-going public.

Meena Kumari redefined the Indian woman as the resilient sufferer who was the epitome of goodness and sacrifices but was always in pain. She is actually the embodiment of the woman as essence rather than flesh. In a career spanning three decades, she chiselled the contours of two role models and created some kind of an ideal in the mind of the viewer. This was the image of the devoted woman as wife and the sacrificing woman as mother.

The first role she almost perfected was in the Guru Dutt classic Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam (1962) as the protagonist, Chhoti Bahu. Fighting for her rights in the 19th century feudal milieu of Bengal, Chhoti Bahu was the epitome of the Bharathiya pativrata patni (devoted wife).

 Earlier, in Bimal Roy's Parineeta (1953), too, Meena Kumari had essayed a similar, all-consuming, unswerving devotion to the husband. She has always been the docile and in all means the stereotyped bharathiya nari, who will worship her pati, the parameshwar. Meenakumari, also created a prototype for the sixties Savitri (a typically faithful wife). For if the mythological Savitri could confront the angel of death for her husband's well- being, this celluloid Savitri could even compromise her religious sanctimony for the observance of a greater duty. That of the woman as wife She was also a poet in her own right, and was able to lend to the characters she played a certain poetic tenderness and intensity. A collection of her poems in Urdu under the pen name Naaz was published after her death.

The talented actress died after a brief illness and poverty. A tragic end to the glorious reign of a tragedienne.

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