Begum Akhtar’s life was the stuff of bestsellers. She and her twin sister, Zohra, were born in Faizabad on 7 October 1914, to Mushtari Bai and a lawyer father. But the latter abandoned his wife and daughters in a few years. Unable to bear the pain of being thus deserted, the twins swallowed poison. Zohra died but Bibi (Akhtar) survived. Knowing no other profession, her mother soon initiated Bibi into singing.
The camera then moves to a palace in Faizabad, slowly taking in the grandeur of the place, before zeroing in on the grandson of a royal patron of the singer who recounts how the singer insisted on returning the land his grandfather had gifted her.
And then the camera withdraws from the palace, going backwards and out of its grand sphere… you now have the voice of the singer herself, from a radio recording narrating how she ran away from her first teacher who would insist on teaching her at three in the morning.
A mere child, she preferred to be out in the open, under the mango trees, amongst the birds and the bees. Through this brilliant juxtaposition of two sequences Dandriyal shows what little Bibi had to undergo to become the much-loved tawaaif of Faizabad.
The tawaaifs were empowered, independent women observes Saleem Kidwai, a historian whose unabashed love for the singer has made him collect the tiniest of Akhtar memorabilia that he can find.
But classical singer Shruti Sadolikar points out that it was not always so. In the beginning, at private mehfils, tawaaifs were not allowed to sit and had to stand through their entire performance.
And when poetess Sarojini Naidu asked her to stage a show, in aid of the victims of a Bihar earthquake, the stigma of the kotha got wiped out forever.
With each passing year, her “screeching” became so increasingly popular that Megaphone Recording Co. had to import new machinery to meet the demands for her record, Deewana banana hai, toh deewana bana de. Soon the silver screen beckoned, both in Calcutta and Bombay. Mehboob Khan and Satyajit Ray were two stalwarts in whose films she appeared, apart from several others, before an Oxford-returned advocate courted her into matrimony.
Becoming the wife of Ishtiaq Ahmed Abbasi finally got rid of the Bai tag as she now became known as Begum Akhtar. But that entailed a price, as she had to stop singing. When this began telling on her health, on her doctor’s advice, she made a comeback with a recording at All India Radio (she was the only artiste allowed to smoke on its premises).
Studded with pathos-ridden songs that are played out against rich tones, Zikr Us Parivash Ka… is exquisitely filmed by cinematographer Ranjan Palit. Capturing the languid pace of the period, the beautifully lit scenes of this documentary make it a veritable collector’s item.
Zikr Us Parivash Ka… a documentary on Begum Akhtar
Directed by Nirmal Chander Dandriyal
Screened at Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sanghralaya, Mumbai
(This story is from The Quint’s archives and was first published on 21 March 2016. It’s being republished to mark the birth anniversary of Begum Akhtar.)
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