E-Paper
Cinema can?t match her!
SHE IS eighty-nine and young. Three generations reflect in her eyes like stars. Cinema chased her but she ran faster and preferred to be with the theatre.
SHE IS eighty-nine and young. Three generations reflect in her eyes like stars.
Cinema chased her but she ran faster and preferred to be with the theatre.
Yes! She is Uzra Butt, the noted theatre personality of Pakistan, the younger sister of Zohra Sehgal and once the heart throb of Prithvi theatres of Mumbai.
She was in the city recently.
“I was not after glamour and money. Cinema can never match stage. Stage gives a sense of satisfaction to me and cinema is a mechanised expression.
When I a am into the character and charged with emotions, I hear the word “cut” and at that very moment the character in me dies. This is not done on stage. After every performance, the judge in me teaches a new lesson. I wish to be a learner and not a star,” she said.
Urjra was Born in 1917 in Dehradun and married to famous Ghazal Singer Hameed Butt before becoming the pillar of Pakistan’s ‘Azoka Theatres’.
“In 1937, when I was pursuing my diploma in domestic arts from Lady Irwin College Delhi, ‘Aapa’ (elder sister) Zohra called me up to join the ‘Udai Shankar’ Dance troupe in London. Aapa was already there ….I have performed in all the major countries of the world with Udai Shanker,” she recalled.
Media has brought the world to the neighbourhood. People are more after glamour than morality, she said talking about change eversince.
“It was about the World War I when our troupe was going to Germany for performance. But we had to come back and I joined my father in Dehradun,” she said and added, “He advised me to carry on with my diploma. Later, Udai Shanker started a Dance Academy in Almora.”
“I then left Udai Shanker and came to my brother in Calcutta and started learning Manipuri dance. Here I met Hameed. He would secretly watch me perform in classes. We got married and came to Delhi. Producer W.Z. Ahmed visited us and rated the voice of Hameed better than K.L. Sehgal’s,” she chuckled.
“When we were rehearsing ‘Zubaida’, the famous play of noted director Khwaja Ahmed Abbass featuring Balraj Sahni and Damyanti Sahni (wife of Balraj Sahni), Prithvi Raj Kapoor visited the place and offered me the central role of ‘Shankuntala’ in his drama with the same name. Actually he had visited there to take Damyanti Sahani as Shankuntala. But since she was not tall enough, he chose me instead,” she said. He handed her the copy of the script and requested her to go through it once.
After two days he sent for her. “By that time, I had learnt all the dialogues by heart. This impressed him a lot. Since then I was an all-time heroine and we shared a very good fifteen years with him till partition,” she said. In 1958 when Prithvi Raj Kapoor lost his voice and the theatre was closed down. “My husband suffered a major heart attack and insisted on going back to Pakistan. We went back. But love for India made me come back again and again,” she said.
