Long before Bollywood became the global spectacle it is today, a cherubic, doe-eyed girl from Pune was quietly rewriting the rules of Indian cinema – without knowing a word of Hindi. Her name was Ruby Myers. The world knew her as Sulochana.
According to the Bombay Jewish Archives she was born in 1907 into a Baghdadi Jewish family – a community of traders who had migrated from Iraq and the Mediterranean to India as far back as the 18th century – Ruby Myers belonged to a world far removed from the silver screen.
Before stardom found her, she was working as a telephone operator. It was there that filmmaker Mohan Bhavnani of the Kohinoor Film Company first spotted her. She initially turned down the offer, bound by the patriarchal constraints of the era that considered acting an “immoral” or “unfit” profession for women.
But Bhavnani persisted, and his instinct proved to be one of Indian cinema’s greatest discoveries.
A star is born – without a script or a language
Having no prior experience or knowledge of acting or the film industry, Ruby’s career took off with her debut in Veer Bala (1925). Adopting the screen name Sulochana – meaning “one with beautiful eyes” – she went on to star in a string of silent blockbusters including Typist Girl (1926), Balidaan (1927), and Wildcat of Bombay (1927).
As reported by The Jerusalem Post, in the latter, she displayed extraordinary range by playing eight distinct roles, from a gentleman from Hyderabad to a European blonde.
Three romantic super-hits in 1928–29 with director R.S. Chaudhari – Madhuri (1928), Anarkali (1928), and Indira B.A. (1929) – saw her at the peak of her fame in the silent era. So great was her popularity that, according to the Bombay Jewish Archives, one of her dances from Madhuri was incorporated into a short film promoting Mahatma Gandhi’s khadi exhibition, with sound effects synchronized to it.
At her peak, The Jerusalem Post reports that Sulochana was better paid than the Governor of Bombay and earned five times more than her male co-stars – an astonishing feat for any actress of that era, let alone one from a minority community who didn’t speak the dominant language.
A language barrier that almost ended it all
The arrival of talkies in the early 1930s posed an existential threat to Sulochana’s career. Her Hindi was inadequate for the new demands of sound cinema. Undaunted, she studied the language for a year and returned to the industry with the sound version of Madhuri in 1932.
The comeback was triumphant. Further talkie versions of her silent hits followed, with Indira M.A. (1934), Anarkali (1935), and Bombay Ki Billi (1936), and she was once again drawing a salary of Rs. 5,000 per month, driving around in a sleek Chevrolet.
In her heyday, Sulochana also launched her own film production house, Rubi Pics, in the early 1930s, to advance her career. She told a reporter in 1953, as cited by the Bombay Jewish Archives: “In those days, films were produced in conditions which can only be described as primitive. But what we lacked in technique, we more than made up with our gusto and robust acting and thrills.”
A tragic curtain call
As younger actresses rose to prominence and her personal relationships faded, so did Sulochana’s career. As reported by the Golden Globes’ Female Pioneers in International Cinema series, her biggest late-career hit was Jugnu (1947), the film that also launched legendary superstar Dilip Kumar.
Though it raked in enormous collections at the Box Office, it was controversially banned by Home Minister Morarji Desai for its depiction of a college-set romance.
In 1973, Sulochana received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award – India’s highest honour in cinema – for lifetime achievement. Yet, as the film critic B.K. Karanjia noted, as reported by Jewish Currents, she did not have enough money to pay the monthly rent on her flat in Mumbai when she died.
She passed away in 1983, impoverished and in isolation – a heartbreaking end for a woman who had once been India’s highest-paid actress and a trailblazer for women on screen.
In 2013, she was honoured on a postage stamp, and in 2017, her contributions were celebrated in the documentary Shalom Bollywood. The documentary explored the role of the Indian Jewish community in shaping the film industry and Myers was a clear pioneer in her own right.
Ruby Myers may have been forgotten for decades, but her story – one of sheer grit and gumption – deserves to be told loud and clear.