'The Story Of Madhubala': A starry-eyed look at the star and the smile

Book: ‘I Want To Live’: The Story Of Madhubala
Khatija Akbar
Hay House India
264 pages
Rs 399

Across a chasm of two generations, men and women and children continue to fall in love with that face. Her face — even as a printed picture on cheap glossy paper — remains compelling. But my generation knows little about Madhubala’s life. We’ve heard about the giggles, the early death, the failed love, the disastrous marriage to another man.

I’ve been getting invitations to join a Facebook group whose raison d’être is to make Dilip Kumar visit Madhubala’s grave and say a fateha. One thing Khatija Akbar’s book does is to clear up a lot of misconceptions. And one of them is this: Not only did Dilip Kumar visit her grave as soon as he heard of her death, but he was one of the few people who continued to visit her when she was very ill.

This book tells us a lot about Madhubala. Her professionalism and charity is commented on early. We discover that her beauty was matched by her generosity and loyalty. That as a 14-year-old leading lady, she was cast opposite Raj Kapoor, who was only a clapper boy then. That she learnt to drive when she was 12. That she had a phobia of strangers and had odd suspicions about people. That she was dragged to court after she backed out of Naya Daur and that she wasn’t the first, or even the third or fourth, choice for Anarkali’s role in Mughal-e-Azam.

The author has clearly battled major odds in compiling the book — Madhubala has been dead for half a century as are most of her contemporaries. The book relies heavily on old film magazines.

But what a reader misses the most is insight. The author has written this book as a paean to Madhubala and yet, hasn’t bothered to sift through the research to build a faithful image of a famous woman.

A major fault here is that information hasn’t been subjected to a proper, thematic organisation in each chapter. One chapter is marked ‘Co-stars’ but it simply lists the actors she worked with, without any information of what they meant to her. Where was the point of crowding the page with a list of names, which are anyway included in the Filmography?

There are some irritants in the form of remarks like: ‘it was an exciting time to be in films’. Has it ever been otherwise? Besides, the 1940s and 50s birthed several mediocre films and Madhubala acted in quite a few. Yet, this aspect of her work hasn’t been paid much attention.

We are treated to glimpses of emotional integrity and a rare intelligence in Madhubala’s own words. But in many chapters, her words have been cited without any context. Where did she say (or write) them, and to whom?

Besides the haphazard organisation of the material, other failings are its repetitions (entire paragraphs are repeated) and its contradictions. For instance, the author suggests that Madhubala and Dilip Kumar never met on friendly terms after the Naya Daur court case. Later, we discover they did meet cordially. Also, her strict work schedule is brought up repeatedly, and later Akbar says those rules were often broken, impacting her health. The domineering father’s behaviour is explained away easily by saying that Madhubala received good values from him, after all, and was “never left loveless”. Yet, Madhubala herself hinted at extreme loneliness. Readers are expected to swallow the rhetoric of ‘values’ in much the same way as Madhubala must have had to.

Akbar’s approach to this biography is guileless and starry-eyed. It is almost as if she is afraid of what she may find if she analyses in depth the circumstances that shaped — and destroyed — a beautiful woman. This is a book about Madhubala the star, not an examination of a life.