Bollywood’s role in dreams ? giving rise to them, nurturing them and fulfilling many or dashing many more is unquestioned. Few who got in could ever give substantial shape to anything else. For both Nargis and Sunil Dutt, their fame and initial recognition came from the big screen, but they also moved on to carve spaces for themselves in the much larger nation-building process. And yet Mr and Mrs Dutt: Memories of our Parents highlights neither role for these two remarkable people.
Instead it is a very personal tribute by their two daughters, Namrata and Priya, with some inputs by brother Sanjay, to look at the inner lives of their parents. It is a memoir, but is remarkable for not just having a very personal, conversational tone, even almost shutting out the rest of the world, but also for a wealth of rare photographs. Indeed it is almost a closure for the scions.
The book briefly traces the lives of Fatima and Balraj ? yes, both their names were changed by others later. The contrasts are there ? he a simple lad from Punjab, a struggler in Bombay, she from a cosmopolitan background, brought up to perform on the big stage from very early in life, and, therefore, without a childhood. Indeed, though she was elder to him by just five days, he entered the film industry as she bid adieu to it. His cinematic peaks would come more than a decade later, while she was already a legend. They had contrasting personalities, as amply reflected in the book. Yet the book brings out the love and life they shared together, where the external pressures, and those must have been considerable, never seem to have affected their relationship. Indeed, they both called each other Jio inprivate!
What is perhaps remarkable is that they managed to keep their children insulated from the tinsel world right through their childhood. ?Mom was the entire focus of our lives. The house resounded with her voice, shouting at us, telling us to come inside for dinner if we were playing outdoors and screaming at us till we finished our homework. ? We lived a happy, contented and normal life. None of us knew her as the actress Nargis and she never talked about her identity as a star.? In fact, the book brings out facets the average person would never imagine them doing ? mortgaging their house to repay debt incurred for the production of Reshma aur Shera, Nargis darning socks and school uniforms as they couldn?t afford new ones, their setting up the Ajanta Arts Welfare Troupe in 1962 to boost the morale of the soldiers, her work for the Spastics Society ? all before their well recorded parliamentary stints.
A number of letters are reproduced, and this perhaps gives a better idea than anything else into the lives of the principals involved ? especially during the trying decades that followed ? the despair over her lingering illness and death in 1982, coupled with Sanjay?s stardom and descent into drugs. The letters are candid, and it is indeed remarkable that the daughters have chosen to share such intimate and trying moments of their lives. And the reader is all the more richer and humbler for getting to see humanity that shaped the life of this ?Mom and Dad?, who did everything to enrich the life of not just their children, but many others their lives touched as well.