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Remembering

MR AND MRS DUTT

  Nargis Dutt         June 1, 1929  - May 3, 1981

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                                     Why Nargis Matters

The significance of stars who go beyond their immediate career demands and become part of a larger artistic current,  needs to be examined in a context that transcends the exigencies of popular taste and the particular years of their action. Nargis’s effectiveness as an artiste was related to, and enhanced by, her integrity as an individual. By embracing a wider domain than her contemporaries did, she became larger than the sum of her parts. The best actors embody the characteristics of their own cultures. Nargis epitomised the Indian woman in both her strengths and her weaknesses, her aspirations and her inherent dignity. Inasmuch as these are deathless values, her representative status is unrestricted by time.

Nargis lives.

by T.J.S. George

Nargis’s fame was the problem Sunil Dutt was struggling with. He wished she were an ordinary woman, and not a star; for him, she was simply the woman he loved. But he could not talk about their love, for there were many who would be against their relationship. The press would create a scandal. In secret, they wrote to each other; in his letters he called her 'pia', not Nargis. And with her irrepressible sense of humour, Nargis called him not Sunil Dutt but 'Hey There' from the first line of a song they liked: 'Hey there..you with the stars in your eyes...' At other times he called her Marilyn Monroe, and she called him Elvis Presley.