Meet the glamour girl of Bollywood, the first Indian actress to pose for a bold photoshoot.
From Kiara Advani, Disha Patani to Deepika Padukone, a number of actresses have set the internet ablaze with their bold photoshoots. However, do you know the first Indian actress to do a bold photoshoot was in the 50s?
Well yes, the actress who gave the first ever bold photoshoot started working at the age of 17. She was called the glamour girl of Bollywood and has a special connection to Dilip Kumar and Amrita Singh. She is none other than Begum Para.
Born in Jhelum in British India (present-day Pakistan), Begum Para was brought up in Bikaner. The actress had an elder brother Masrurul Haq, who had gone off to Bombay in the late 1930s to become an actor. There he met and fell in love with the Bengali actress Protima Dasgupta, and married her. After this, whenever Begum Para used to visit her brother and sister-in-law, she used to tag along with her sister on movie sets and on many occasions get-togethers. People would get quite impressed with her looks and offer her a lot of roles.
Begum Para then made her debut in the film Chand, from Prabhat Studios in Poona. The film turned out to be a huge success and started getting paid about Rs. 1500 a month. Soon after this Begum Para's sister-in-law made a movie named Chhamia based on the novel Pygmalion, which again was a huge success and Para signed a lot of films after this.
After starring in several films like Sohni Mahiwal, Zanjeer with Ishwarlal and Dikshit, Neel Kamal with Raj Kapoor; Mehendi with Nargis; Suhaag Raat with Bharat Bhushan and Geeta Bali and Jhalka among others, in 1951, Begum Para did a bold photoshoot for Life magazine which created a stir in the industry and made her popular as Bollywood's glamour girl, Bombshell etc. She was also offered to play Nigar Sultana in Mughal-e-Azam but she refused to do it because she considered it against her image.
Begum Para's last role was in the movie Kar Bhala in 1956, after which she quit films. The actress was married to Dilip Kumar's bother Nasir Khan and had three children, Lubna, Nadir, and actor Ayub Khan with him. Amrita Singh is also connected to Begum Para as she is her grand niece. Amrita Singh is the daughter of Ruksana Sultana, who is the sister of Begum Para. However, after her husband's death, she moved to Pakistan in 1975 to be with her family. After a break of 50 years, Begum Para made her comeback on the big screen with Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Saawariyaa, which failed to impress the audience and tanked at the box office. In 2008, the actress died in her sleep and breathed her last at the age of 82.
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