Why ‘Umrao Jaan’ is the Quintessential Rekha Film

It’s the year 1840. Women are bedecking Amiran, a young girl, in gold earrings, a maang tikka, and a jhoomar. She’s getting engaged, but her joy is short-lived. Her father had testified against a man. Once released from jail, he gets his revenge by kidnapping Amiran and selling her to a madam in Lucknow, miles away from home. That’s not before a begum refuses to buy her because she’s “too dark.” Amiran grows up to become the beautiful Umrao Jaan, a famous courtesan who can dance, sing, and write ghazals that best men. 

The role would win actor Rekha her first and only National Award. But more than anything, the character fit Rekha like a glove, not least because it mirrored her own life. Here was a woman so mesmerizingly beautiful, yet brilliant in her incisive observations. Here was a woman renamed, forced to entertain others from a young age far away from home — yet who would defy the odds to emerge victorious. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine where her character ends and Rekha the person begins. That’s partly what makes Umrao Jaan, the recently restored 1981 film, the seminal Rekha film — and why it has “somehow lived through time, through generations.”