Darlingji

"Yes. It is by my wife and Darlingji is what they called each other, these people – Nargis and Sunil Dutt. Their love story has its roots in the partition. I met my wife when I was writing my book about Dilip Kumar, and Nargis, a very famous actress, was a contemporary of Kumar’s. My wife did a lot of research for this, looking at the personal diaries and letters and interviewing everyone about how they kept the romance a secret and what happened. Nargis was a fantastic actress. Yes, it’s the story of three generations of singers. The grandmother was a child widow who eloped with a sarangi player and then their daughter Jaddanbai who moves to Bombay and becomes an actress. Her daughter is Nargis and the book is about the obstacles she overcame before she was famous. It is very much from a woman’s perspective. She showed it to me, but I said: I don’t want to co-operate on this – it is your book, and it is from that angle of being a woman. I would have intellectualised it. Although this woman was iconic she was treated like shit by her family and that’s a woman’s condition in India. Well, it gets better generation by generation, as the book shows. Nargis became a member of parliament and her daughter is now in parliament. Politics interact with cinema and with life in an interesting way, you see. The condition of Indian women is always improving."