Waheeda Rehman: Veteran actor who has broken barriers, transcended screen

The Dadasaheb Phalke award is but the latest honour bestowed upon Waheeda Rehman. The actress, long beloved for her understated elegance and her oeuvre of time-honoured films, is familiar with superlatives, but she remains, artlessly modest.

“I am overwhelmed by the response my films still get. If you talk about me now, it’s because of these films that have gone on to acquire the status of classics,” Rehman had revealed during an earlier interview. She had however fobbed off any talk of there being a method to creating great art. “When we worked together on five films, neither Guru Duttji nor I realised that we were making something memorable. Goldie saab (director Vijay Anand) didn’t know Guide was going to become a classic. If a filmmaker starts thinking, ‘Main teer maaroonga’ (I will hit the bull’s eye) he will never be able to craft a classic.”

To Rehman’s credit, she didn’t leave it all to happenstance. In her 60-year-long career, she made several bold professional choices that have shaped her histrionic legacy. Right at the time of her introduction to Hindi cinema, she was offered two films by Guru Dutt – CID in which she played a negative role and Pyaasa in which she was the leading lady. Rehman didn’t make the calculations of a conventional neophyte, taking up the grey-shaded role as a challenge. Fortuitously, she made a splash with her hit ‘Kahin pe nigahein kahin pe nishana’ in her debut CID (1956). Pyaasa, which followed in 1957, escalated her to stardom, but even five successful years later, she gamely played the second lead to Meena Kumari in Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (1962). In a film that was all about the winter of discontent, she was the breath of spring air.

Inarguably, Rehman reached her zenith as a performer with her brave decision to play Rosie in Guide (1965). In this adaptation of R K Narayan’s novel, Waheeda played a vibrant young danseuse who leaves her old and neglectful husband to live-in with a tourist guide (played by Dev Anand who also produced the film) and pursue her passion for dance. Some of Waheeda’s producers were aghast at her decision to play an adulteress. Was she not committing career hara-kiri, they cautioned her, but Rehman recognised the depth of histrionic opportunity her character afforded.

Rehman’s performance as Rosie charts her progress from passion to disappointment to self-realisation is one of the most memorable in the annals of Hindi cinema. Her exultation in hard-won freedom is evocatively captured by director Vijay Anand in the song ‘Aaj phir jeene ki tamanna hai’ which has Rehman blithely tossing an earthen pot from a cart, metaphorically breaking all societal constraints.

Rehman’s sensitivity towards her characters could be partly be attributed to her losing her father at an early age and her mother soon after she entered films. Her ability to inhabit her roles stemmed from her early training with mentor Guru Dutt, a cinematic genius. Rehman’s first film appearance was in a dance number in the Telugu film, Rojulu Maraayi. But on a nondescript day in Hyderabad circa 1955, the teenaged Waheeda Rehman, accompanied by her mother, embarked on a meeting with filmmaker, Guru Dutt, which was to transform her life. “I had never heard of him earlier and at our first meeting, we hardly spoke,” Rehman reveals. “Five months later, his office asked us to travel to Bombay for a screen test and I was signed on for a three-year contract.”

The three-year contract on a monthly salary extended to almost eight years as Waheeda Rehman became an inextricably linked to Guru Dutt’s film legacy. Her great strength in classics like Chaudhvin Ka Chand (1960) and Kagaz Ke Phool (1959) is her understated manner of expression, both in voice and physicality. The actress says, “Guru Duttji would explain the scene and then leave it to the artist. ‘Don’t copy me, I perform like a man would,’ he would caution but I always preferred to underplay. Guru Duttji too never believed in excess.”

Their collaboration was cut short by Guru Dutt’s death by suicide in 1964. By now a bright star in Hindi cinema, Waheeda Rehman went on to work Satyajit Ray and also won rave notices for her roles as a danseuse who is left intrigued by the appeal of true love in Mujhe Jeene Do (1963) and Teesri Kasam (1966). Three years later, she went fathoms deep to play the role of a nurse who risks crossing boundaries while caring for a mental patient in Khamoshi (1969).

After Rehman’s marriage to actor and businessman Kamaljeet in 1974 (she had been paired opposite him in Shagoon a decade earlier), Waheeda Rehman moved to Bangalore and migrated playing character roles, often cast alongside her avowed admirer Amitabh Bachchan (Kabhi Kabhie, Adalat, Trishul, Namak Halal, Coolie). Quiet dignity and an ineffable warmth characterised her later performances.

Recent years have seen the widowed actress ensconced in Mumbai surrounded by her children and close friends like actresses Asha Parekh and Helen. While the accolades keep coming the actress who dug into the very soul of her characters has kept her own soul carefully intact and rooted in reality.

(Dinesh Raheja is an author, columnist and the former editor of Movie Magazine)