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dhrupad: Durga Khote as Lady Macbeth in Rajmukut, a Marathi adaptation of Macbeth, 1954. via Khote was the pioneer. In the early 1930s when she went into films, she made her first impact just by being there: cinema had an uncertain reputation, even a dodgy one, so that when Dadasaheb Phalke made Raja Harishchandra, he had to cast a man in the role of Rani Taramati. While gradually women’s roles began to be played by women, film acting was not considered a suitable profession for girls from “good families”. And then came Durga Khote, upper- crust Brahmin from upper-crust family, educated at Mumbai’s elite Cathedral School, taking up cinema grease-paint instead of genteel matrimony. Appropriately, her first important role was of Rani Taramati, in V. Shantaram’s remake of the Phalke film (1932). Her background made it suddenly acceptable for other women from a similar social milieu to think of a film career. Not only that, her presence and bearing and the confidence a privileged upbringing bestows, made it possible for directors to think of movies featuring dominant women. A still from Maya Machindra which she made for Prabhat Studio around the same time, shows her dressed as a warrior queen in armour, sword in hand, crown in place, a cheetah at her feet, the martial effect softened by the presence of elaborate jewellery. The warrior queen image wasn’t just play acting. The story is told of a shoot in Kolhapur in 1935 featuring lions. One of these went out of control, pounced on a minor actor and began clawing his shoulder, whereupon Durga Khote caught the animal by its mane and struggled with it till its trainer arrived on the scene. Perhaps inspired by such real-life bravado, directors like Shantaram began to make films with heroines who really were heroines, like the 1936 Amar Jyoti where Khote played a wronged wife, wreaking terrible vengeance on her tormentor. Her last film in this mould might have been Acharya Atre’s 1941 Charnon Ki Dasi, but she was by no means finished with cinema, embarking on a second innings when she played character roles, often the good mother to Lalita Pawar’s bad mother-in-law. Her most famous essay in this phase was as the Queen Mother in Mughal-e-Azam. —From 100 People Who Shaped India
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