Devika Rani ran the best studio in India, and the industry’s answer was to leave and start another one
Himanshu Rai died in 1940 and the board of Bombay Talkies handed the studio to his widow.
Bombay Talkies was the best-equipped film studio in the country, built at Malad in 1934 with German technicians and German cameras. Devika Rani was thirty-two, and no woman in India was running anything comparable in any industry.
Related to article: The Boss They Walked Out On · Source: Wikimedia Commons · India Post, Government of India · GODL-India
She held it for five years. What the trade did about it is the part worth knowing.
Not a discovery
She had not been found by anyone. Born at Waltair in 1908, daughter of the first Indian to be Surgeon-General of Madras and a grandniece of Rabindranath Tagore, she was sent to school in England at nine and stayed.
In London she trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Royal Academy of Music, studied architecture and textile design and spent a while apprenticed to Elizabeth Arden. She met Himanshu Rai in 1928, and he hired her to design his next film. They married the following year.
Related to article: The Boss They Walked Out On · Source: Wikimedia Commons · Nagaraju Raghavaraju · CC BY-SA 4.0
The film was edited in Germany, so she went too, joined UFA in Berlin, met Fritz Lang and G.W. Pabst, and worked on the set of Der blaue Engel while Marlene Dietrich was making it. She came into cinema through design and the cutting room, not through a screen test.
She was a trained technician who happened to photograph well, which the industry has never quite known what to do with.
The walkout
In 1943 Mukherjee left to set up Filmistan and took much of the studio with him, Ashok Kumar included. She stayed and could not hold the rest together.
In 1945 she married the Russian painter Svetoslav Roerich, sold her shares and left. She was thirty-seven. She moved to Manali and later to an estate outside Bangalore, filmed some wildlife footage, kept out of the trade entirely and did not come back for any of it.
Bombay Talkies did not last much longer. Ashok Kumar and Mukherjee came back and got one more big hit out of it with Mahal in 1949, and by 1953 the studio had been sold and closed. The lot at Malad stands derelict.
She lived another forty-nine years, more of her life outside cinema than in it, and died in Bangalore in 1994.
1969
The Government of India gave her the Padma Shri in 1958. In 1969 it instituted the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, the highest honour Indian cinema has, and made her the first recipient.
The founding award of the Indian film industry went, at the first attempt, to a woman who had walked out of it twenty-four years earlier and never once looked back.
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If you think you have remembered everything about this topic take this QUIZ
Results
#1. Apart from literature, what technical subjects did Devika Rani study in London?
#2. Which 1933 film featured Devika Rani in a famous 4-minute kissing scene?
#3. What was the name of the pioneering film studio Devika Rani co-founded in 1934?
#4. Who was the laboratory assistant promoted by Devika Rani to replace Najam-ul-Hussain, eventually becoming a legend?
#5. Which legendary actor, originally named Yusuf Khan, was discovered and renamed by Devika Rani?
#6. Devika Rani was the first-ever recipient of which prestigious Indian award in 1969?
#7. After retiring from films in 1945, whom did Devika Rani marry?
#8. Where did Devika Rani spend her reclusive later years after leaving the film industry?
Chapters of the Smita Patil Life Story
Why is Devika Rani called the First Lady of Indian Cinema?
She is called this because of her pioneering role in establishing Bombay Talkies, her status as a top star of the 1930s, and being the first recipient of the Dadasaheb Phalke Award.
Which film features the longest kiss in Indian cinema history?
The 1933 film Karma, starring Devika Rani and her husband Himanshu Rai, features a kissing scene reported to be four minutes long.
Did Devika Rani discover Dilip Kumar?
Yes. She spotted Yusuf Khan (Dilip Kumar) at Bombay Talkies, hired him, gave him his screen name, and cast him in his debut film Jwar Bhata (1944).
Who was Devika Rani’s second husband?
After the death of Himanshu Rai, she married the famous Russian painter Svetoslav Roerich in 1945 and moved to Bangalore.
What was Devika Rani’s connection to Rabindranath Tagore?
Devika Rani was the grand-niece of the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Her father, Col. M.N. Chaudhuri, was highly respected, and her mother was Tagore’s niece.
Read More: Rakesh Roshan: When K Became Destiny
Sources & References
South Asian Britain, University of Exeter — her training at RADA and the Royal Academy of Music, the Elizabeth Arden apprenticeship and her work at UFA in Berlin.
Cinemaazi (artist profile, Devika Rani) — the Bombay Talkies production years, Jwar Bhata and the casting of Dilip Kumar, and her retirement in 1945.
Directorate of Film Festivals, Government of India — the first Dadasaheb Phalke Award.
Padma Awards portal, Government of India — the Padma Shri of 1958.
