Seen But Never Known: The sorrow that made Meena Kumari eternal

IRA MATHUR

چاند تنہا ہے آسمان تنہا دل ملا ہے کہاں کہاں تنہا بجھ گئی آس چھپ گیا تارا تھرتھراتا رہا دھواں تنہا زندگی کیا اسی کو کہتے ہیں جسم تنہا ہے اور جان تنہا ہم سفر کوئی گر ملے بھی کہیں دونوں چلتے رہے تنہا تنہا جلتی بجھتی سی روشنی کے پرے سمٹا سمٹا سا ایک مکاں تنہا راہ دیکھا کرے گا صدیوں تک چھوڑ جائیں گے یہ جہاں تنہا”—Indian actress Meena Kumari writing in Urdu in her collection of poetry titled Tanha Chand

The moon is alone, and so is the sky.

Hearts meet, yet remain solitary.

Hopes extinguished, stars hidden—

The smoke trembles alone.

If this is life, then let it be known:

The body is alone, and so is the soul.

Even when a companion walks beside you,

Both remain, in truth, alone.

Beyond the flickering light,

There waits a house curled in upon itself.

It will wait for centuries.

We will leave this world, and it will wait—alone.

“Tanha Chand” (The Lonely Moon) is both the title of the Indian actress and poet Meena Kumari’s posthumously published poetry collection and a recurring image in her work, symbolising solitude, distance, and an unreachable inner world.

I was six when my grandmother took me to see Pakeezah, a 1972 film about a courtesan doomed by love and circumstance, and I remember knowing—intuitively—this was not an ordinary outing. My grandmother, Shahnur Jehan Begum, was a serious pianist, devoted to her practice and an aesthetic of control and quiet. She found Bollywood grating: loud, shallow, sentimental, too predictable in its flourishes. Its soundtracks, its tropes, and its worn emotional cycles felt not just exaggerated but tedious. Three hours of an Indian film was torture to her. So when she told me we were going to see a film by Meena Kumari, I paid close attention.

What unsettled her, I saw on her face long before I could name it. Even then, I thought how much Meena Kumari’s emotion and look—that same voluptuous, tragic face—resembled my grandmother’s. Not the woman in starched cream linen who taught piano with elegance and rigour and herself wrote Urdu couplets, but the woman she might have been—vulnerable, perhaps undone in love, yet still managing to carry herself through a world that offered no room for collapse. My grandmother said nothing, but the haunted look she carried never left me.

Meena Kumari was born Mahjabeen Bano in 1933 in Bombay, the daughter of Ali Bux, a poet and harmonium player, and Iqbal Begum, a former actress in the Parsi theatre tradition. The family was poor, often desperate. At the age of four, she began working in films under the name Baby Meena. Her earnings supported the household. She never went to school. By the time she was a teenager, she was a lead actress. She had learned to survive by offering up her face and voice in the service of emotions she was still learning to understand.

Kumari matured into one of the most celebrated performers of her generation. In Baiju Bawra (1952), she won the first Filmfare Award for Best Actress. Over the next two decades, Kumari’s name became synonymous with pathos: Parineeta, Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, Dil Apna Aur Preet Parai, Daera. Her roles were marked by women waiting for love, women losing it, and women mourning the price of it.

She was admired for her grace, her timing, her ability to weep as though she had just remembered something too painful to say. Yet the characters she played seemed less like inventions and more like exposure. She wasn’t pretending to be sad. She knew where to place sorrow because she lived with it.

In 1952, she married director Kamal Amrohi, who was more than a decade older. Their relationship began in romance and ended in surveillance. He loved her talent, but not her autonomy. He set limits on her movement, assigned men to watch her on set, managed her time. Pakeezah was their shared project—his vision, her body. It began in hope and paused in cold silence for over a decade.

When filming resumed in the late 1960s, her health had deteriorated. Years of emotional strain and drinking had caught up. Her face was no longer youthful. There was a puffiness to it, but also a strange translucence—as though some part of her had already slipped beyond the frame. She could no longer perform the elaborate dance sequences required for a courtesan’s role, so a body double was used. Her face was edited in with care, but her physical presence could no longer carry movement. And yet in the close-ups, there was no substitute. The fatigue, the effort, the refusal to collapse—these were entirely hers.

The film’s plot was age-old: a courtesan, Sahibjaan, raised in constraint, falls in love with a man whose world cannot contain her. She is adored, never accepted. It is a love story steeped in failure. What gives it its power is not the arc, but the repetition—the ritual beauty of it, the sadness pressed into each gesture. The sets were opulent, the music lingering, the colour saturated. But the heart of Pakeezah is Kumari’s stillness. It became a cult classic because it captured something timeless on the screen: a dying woman playing herself with unbearable beauty, essaying the impossibility of being both loved and free.

Adored by India, yet perhaps the loneliest actress there, she wrote under the name of Naaz—verses that were brief, private, brutally truthful and unguarded—to leave evidence of a shredded heart. For her, the only comfort was that it had been recorded. Her beauty never served her. It was the reason people watched her and the reason they didn’t listen. Alone, hungover, under the influence of grief-soaked alcohol, she wrote exquisite verses in Urdu. They remain the most direct form of her voice in its raw grief wrapped in her otherworldly talent.

At the premiere of Pakeezah, Meena Kumari arrived in a wheelchair. Her body had failed her, but her face held composure. A few weeks later, she died—alone in a hospital, her liver too damaged to recover. She was 38.

After her death, it was Gulzar—the poet, lyricist, and filmmaker, and one of the few in the industry who respected her mind who compiled her fragments into a book titled Tanha Chand (The Lonely Moon), published posthumously. The poems were scribbled on whatever she had at hand: cigarette boxes, cinema ticket stubs, receipts, the margins of old scripts. They were reminders to herself. Truths she could not say aloud. Incomplete, sometimes barely legible, but unmistakably hers.

Her epitaph, which she requested herself, reads:

“She ended life with a broken fiddle,

with a broken song,

with a broken heart,

but not a single regret.”

Kumari’s life was consumed, her body controlled, her sorrow made into a plot. Yet decades later, the ache of her presence continues to reach women everywhere. Those who have been looked at but not seen.

This, then, must be art.

Not the veil or the frame. Not the dance or the lines. But the courage to be seen—a paper trail of a woman exhausted, vanishing yet luminous.

In each image, in each Meena Kumari celluloid song, the voice reaches from elsewhere—distant, composed, aching. The viewer feels it now, as does the reader of her poetry, perhaps too late, and perhaps that was always her intent. To leave behind not comfort, but ache.

In her performances, as in her poetry, she made herself known. She has been vindicated. The world’s ache continues—and still, it has no language for what it did to women like her. What it did to women like my grandmother, who died calling out the name of the man who betrayed her, saying she loved him. I see now, years after seeing Pakeezah, it was not weakness but the mystery of how pain carries the deepest part of the soul.

Tanha Chand is available online via Rekhta and in print through select South Asian publishers. It is also occasionally reissued in limited runs by Gulzar’s literary collaborators.

Ira Mathur is a Guardian Media columnist and winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction. Visit www.irasroom.org . Email [email protected] for author inquiries.