THE SECOND WIFE
Himanshu Rai and wife Devika Rani, who set up Bombay Talkies, acted in several movies together. In their first talkie, Karma, 1933 (above), a romantic story of a prince and a queen, they had a four-minute kiss, the longest ever in a Hindi film wife. Himanshu met her at a party. Bowled over by her beauty and talent, he offered her a job in his film, ‘Throw of Dice.’ For Devika Rani, Himanshu – more than ten years older than her – was a larger-thanlife figure, already the star of the 1925 silent film ‘Light of Asia’ where he had played the Buddha. He became like her mentor.
Cary Rajinder Sawhney writes that Himanshu had told Niranjan Pal about his German marriage, but had sworn him to secrecy. So maybe Devika Rani didn’t know about Himanshu’s secret marriage. Or did she? No one knows.
Abandoning Mary and their little daughter, Himanshu married Devika Rani in 1929 and went back to India with her; in 1934, they would go on to open a historic chapter of Hindi cinema by starting Bombay Talkies in Malad, then a distant, quiet suburb of Bombay. Why did he forsake his young German wife? “If you’ve ever looked at any pictures of Devika Rani, you’d know why he fell in love with her,” counters Peter simply. “Indeed, the two women knew each other and were friends. There are photographs of them together.”
When Nilima grew up, she married a German, Ernest Dietze in 1947 and migrated to Australia in 1952. Those were the days of the “White Only” immigration policy in that country (you couldn’t have more than 25 per cent of another race) and Nilima hid the fact that she had an Indian father. Also, maybe she didn’t want to have anything to do with the man who had left her when she was just a child. She never told her three sons (Peter has two brothers Walter and Paul) about him – till Peter discovered the picture in the attic. Once Peter found out though, he did all he could to track his Indian ancestry.
Bombay Talkies established itself as one of the leading film studios – it had a staff of 400 people, state-of-the-art equipment, and churned out films every year (many of which became big hits and are now regarded as classics). Devika Rani was the leading lady in many of them and the studio also introduced new stars such as Ashok Kumar.
But running Bombay Talkies took its toll on Himanshu Rai. He had a nervous breakdown, was hospitalised and died in 1940. He was just 48. “He was pedalling very hard,” says Peter. “It was the story of a man struggling to keep his studio together.”
The Second World War had begun and Himanshu’s lead director Franz Osten and the other Germans in Bombay Talkies were interned in camps in India. He had had a serious fallout with his long-time screenwriter Niranjan Pal. By this time there had also been a painful rift with Devika Rani. Some years ago, she had run away to Calcutta with a handsome young co-star Najamul Hussain (who came from an aristocratic Lucknow family), while they were shooting for a film called Jeevan Naiyya.
Himanshu persuaded Devika Rani to come back, but could things have been the
in 1934 by Himanshu Rai and Devika Rani after they got married. The studio’s first film was Jawani Ki Hawa (1935), but the first hit was Jeevan Naiya (1936). There’s an interesting story to the film. The lead stars – Devika Rani and Najamul Hussain (from an aristocratic Lucknow family) – eloped to Calcutta. Himanshu persuaded Devika Rani to come back, but he replaced Najamul with a new hero, Ashok Kumar, who was working as a lab technician at Bombay Talkies.
The two became a hit pair and acted in many films, including the classic Achhut Kanya, 1936, and the successful Vachan, 1938 (left). same again? Indeed, Cary Rajinder Sawhney writes that many people blamed Devika Rani for her husband’s death.
After Himanshu’s demise Devika Rani took over Bombay Talkies but it was tough going. It was rare for a woman then – or even now for that matter – to run a studio. There were many problems, not least of them opposition from other powerful stakeholders in the company such as Sashadhar Mukherjee.
In 1945, she quit the studio, married Russian painter Svetoslav Roerich (son of famous painter Nicholas Roerich) and went on to live a quiet life with him, first in Manali and then in Bangalore. But she took with her the entire Bombay Talkies archive. When she found she couldn’t take care of the material, she sent it to the New York Nicholas Roerich Museum. She died without any heir in 1994.
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In 2001 Peter happened to be in New York and went to the Roerich museum. He got talking with the curator who showed him the Bombay Talkies archive. When he came to know that Peter was actually Himanshu Rai’s grandson, he turned over the archive to him. Peter pored over the treasure trove: “You can picture vignettes of that time… even the receipt of the bottle of wine Himanshu ordered in Germany, the cup of coffee he drank,” he says.
In 2006 Peter paid a visit to Mumbai, and went with film historian Amrit Gangar to look at the dilapidated remains of the Bombay Talkies studio in Malad.
And around three years ago he went to Udaipur palace, one of the locations for ‘Throw of Dice.’ “I literally walked in my grandfather’s footsteps,” says Peter. “It was a very moving experience. I recognised a chair in the museum that was in the film! It’s sad, everyone in Udaipur knows that Octopussy was shot there, but no one knows about real history, about ‘Throw of Dice’ and how the king at that time loaned Himanshu horses, elephants, costumes, furniture for the film.”
Today it is Peter’s mission to make sure his grandfather’s legacy is not forgotten. “It is my destiny. It’s time for Himanshu to have his moment in the sun,” he says. And time perhaps to put together the littleknown but mesmerising personal story of Himanshu Rai, Mary Hainlin and Devika Rani.