Enduring love

on her new memoir about Nargis and Sunil Dutt, and why their love story was "the real thing".

The first thing I see on entering Kishwar Desai's Safdarjung Enclave house is a Mother India poster on the wall facing the door: the famous still of Nargis carrying a plough, the weight of the world seemingly on her shoulders. Kishwar herself is sitting at a table, signing copies of her book Darlingji: The True Love Story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt "" copies that are to be sent to Mumbai for Namrata, Priya and Sanjay Dutt, the children of this book's subjects "" and her expression suggests that a massive weight has been lifted off her back. "Signing copies is such a relief," she smiles, "it's a constant reminder that the hard work is behind me "" that I don't have to worry about the book any more."

Kishwar began seriously discussing the idea of a Nargis biography with her husband, the economist (and film buff) Lord Meghnad Desai, a few years ago, but during her research she realised that the most gripping parts of the story didn't belong to Nargis alone: this had to be a book about the actress's relationship with Sunil Dutt, whom she famously fell in love with after he rescued her from a fire on the Mother India sets and whom she was married to for over 20 years, until cancer ended her life in 1981.

In the movie buff's imagination, Nargis is inextricably linked with Raj Kapoor, being the leading lady and Muse in his seminal early films, involved with him in real life, and even immortalised in the "RK Films" logo, which was based on their famous clinch in the film Barsaat. But in Kishwar's view, the real love story, the one that always got short shrift, was the one between Nargis and Dutt. "Nobody played their story up, which was so unfair "" I feel that people haven't appreciated Sunil Dutt enough, because he was such an unassuming man. I wanted to show that this was the real couple."

She was helped immeasurably by the wealth of written material that Namrata and Priya Dutt allowed her to access after Sunil's death in 2005. "Nargis used to write every day, and very eloquently too," says Kishwar. "Her journals were a treasure-house for any biographer." Darlingji has many transcriptions of this material "" from the letters written by Nargis and Sunil to each other (using endearments such as "Pia" and "Hey There", "Elvis Presley" and "Marilyn Monroe" and, of course, "Darlingji") to a diary maintained by Nargis for the one-year-old Sanjay, written as if in his own hand ("Today I travelled with my mother to Madras in an aeroplane "" the hostess took me into the cockpit but I was soon sent back as I was becoming inquisitive and wanted to operate the plane myself").

What emerges is the portrait of a relationship that began on shaky ground but eventually became a standard for love, respect and stability. "To my mind, the Nargis-Sunil story is in many ways a template for two people getting into a relationship, especially if they are from different backgrounds," Kishwar says, pointing out that the year before they got married was an extremely difficult time. For starters, they had to keep their relationship under wraps until after Mother India released, because they had played mother and son in the film. Dutt was from a relatively conservative background while Nargis was a liberated, cosmopolitan woman, and he initially felt insecure because she was a much bigger star than him. The widely circulated gossip about her affair with Kapoor caused further tension during this delicate phase "" and yet, as Kishwar points out, "Despite all the difficulties, they never stopped communicating with each other, never stopped talking. Instead of problems surfacing after they got married, they resolved all their differences beforehand. As a result, by the time they settled down, they were completely secure."

Traces still remain in Darlingji of the Nargis biography that was originally planned: the early chapters deal with the lives of her grandmother Dilipa Devi (widowed at 13, she defied her orthodox Brahmin community by eloping with a Muslim sarangi player) and mother Jaddanbai (a fine singer, a practitioner of the Benarsi thumri, who also had a controversial personal life before settling down in Bombay and producing/acting in some of the early talking pictures). The trajectories of these lives and how they led to Jaddanbai's little daughter joining Hindi films as Baby Rani (years before she attained stardom as Nargis) tell us a lot about what made Nargis the person she was, but they also provide glimpses into Hindi cinema's early years. "Women like Jaddanbai were true pioneers who paved the way for others to enter this profession," says Kishwar, "I also think it was such a dynamic time. So many of the early women artistes were Muslim "" there were Anglo-Indians too, there was a German-Italian co-production. Many different communities worked together; it was only once Partition took place that people became chary about identities."

Kishwar's fascination with the period reflects in the projects she is currently working on: a biography of writer Saadat Hasan Manto, the script for Shyam Benegal's film about the life of British spy Noor Inayat Khan, another book about Devika Rani and Himanshu Rai. "I don't know why I'm so obsessed with the 1930s and 1940s," she laughs. "Maybe because my husband is a 1950s fan, I've decided to go back even earlier in time!"

"We haven't taken cinema seriously," she says, reflecting on the lack of high-quality biographies and film books in India, "and this will become a real problem as we go along. We need to archive more "" every copy of every film ever made should go to the National Archives. And we need books. A filmmaker like Raj Kapoor, for instance, should have had so many good books written on him, from different perspectives. Yet there's almost nothing of worth. I hope that changes soon." Darlingji, an elegantly written, well-researched and produced memoir, is a step in the right direction.