The Leading Role

Mixing fact and fiction, Kishwar Desai’s new novel shows how Devika Rani laid the foundations of Indian cinema’s future

- Jai Arjun Singh

Anyone who has researched Indian film history knows well the frustration of discovering that much of what they have to work with is hearsay and that countless important documents are forever gone. Given this, one’s first response to The Longest Kiss—a detailed account of two decades in the life of Devika Rani, pioneering actress and studio head—is to be glad for its existence.

Though Devika lived till 1994, the period covered here is mainly from the late 1920s—when she met and fell in love with the actor-producer Himanshu Rai, with whom she would establish Bombay Talkies—to the mid-1940s, a few years after Rai’s death, when she married the Russian painter Svetoslav Roerich and quit the industry. This period, a pivotal one for Hindi cinema, included her stint as one of the first well-educated Indian women to become a film star; the deterioration of her relationship with Rai; and her later running of the studio in the face of many obstacles. Along the way, the book offers a counter-narrative to the contemporary ones provided by Saadat Hasan Manto and others, who saw Devika as cold and calculating; Desai stresses that Devika had dealt with emotional and physical abuse in her personal relationship, alongside the professional pressures of being in charge in a male-dominated world.

“I had struck gold,” the author says in her opening note, referring to her discovery of the old papers that had carefully been preserved by Devika. But it couldn’t have been easy to shape thousands of documents into a coherent narrative and some of that effort comes across in the finished book, which is occasionally swamped by much-too-detailed information about Bombay Talkies board meetings, resolutions and legal skirmishes.