Nirupa Roy - Mother of Bollywood

By: Ambika Prem Kumar
Thursday, March 01, 2007
Nirupa Roy The mother of Bollywood cinema Nirupa Roy was born in Gujarat town of Valsad. She first came to Mumbai at the tender age of 15 after her marriage. Her husband and she applied to an advertisement for actors in a Gujarat paper, and it was then that she made her debut in the Gujarati film, Ranakdevi. Her husband had been extremely supportive towards Nirupa.

She has acted in over 200films in a career spanning over five decades. She was best known as the mother of Hindi movie heroes in the 1970s. Her films with superstar Amitabh Bachchan -- Deewar, Mard, Khoon Pasina, Muqaddar Ka Sikandar and Amar Akbar Anthony -- were among the more well known ones. She last appeared in Lal Badshah (1999), where she played Bachchan's foster mother.

After her debut immediately the next year, she started doing small roles in Hindi films. Her career making film was the Gujarati - Hindi bilingual, Gunsundari in 1948 made by Ranjit affiliation, in which she plays a housewife who wins back her husband.

Then slowly she got the tag as queen of mythological film, after she played Parvati to Trilok Kapoor's, Shiv in Jayant Desai's immensely popular Har Har Mahadev (1950). Consequently, she became extremely busy over the next few years -- doing 16 films with Trilok Kapoor alone, and playing a variety of goddesses. So overpowering was her pious screen image that people would regularly come to her home, fall at her feet and ask for her blessings.

She then got a chance to act as Balraj Sahni's wife in Do Bigha Zameen as film by Bimal Roy. This film was produced in 1953. Her performance kept with the sentimental idiom of the day when she played the role of a housewife beset by trouble who makes a solo journey to Kolkata, in torn clothes actually bought from the chor bazaar in Mumbai. This led to Nirupa doing several realist films in the mid 1950s, often alongside Sahni, like Amar Kumar's Garam Coat, Hemen Gupta's Taksaal and Krishen Chopra's adaptation of Premchand's Heera Moti. In Tangawali, also opposite Sahni, she had a Mother India kind of role, alongside truant son Shammi Kapoor.

Nirupa Roy With maturity and strong character, her role was being pushed a little too early as only being the mother and housewife. She played the role of the homely wife of Ashok Kumar in Bhai Bhai(1956) while Shyama played the seductive mistress who lead him stray. As consolation, she bagged Filmfare's Best Supporting Actress for the film.

The latter half of 1950s came the best phase when the devotional film Janam Janam Ke Phere. A song from the movie topped the Binaca Geetmala countdown for that year. Slowly she started to get better roles opposite heroes like Ashok Kumar in heroine oriented, Bedard Zamana Kya Jaane and a memorable trilogy opposite Bharat Bhushan -- Samrat Chandragupta, Rani Rupmati and Kavi Kalidas -- the last two directed by S N Tripathi had cinematic merit and unforgettable music.

With the advent of the 1960s, Nirupa got slotted as the mother, especially after playing Asha Parekh's estranged mother in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's 1961 film, Chhaya (and winning another Filmfare award).

Other memorable roles in the decade include Mujhe Jeene Do (1963), in which she played a dignified matron whose husband is shot dead by a dacoit but who finds the humanity within herself to give shelter to the dacoit's wife and child when they are in trouble in the climax. In Shaheed (1966), she essayed another dignified character who helps a patriot escape while in Ram Aur Shyam (1967) she played Dilip Kumar's harassed sister who is browbeaten by Pran.

The crowning glory in Nirupa Roy's life however came in the 1970s when Vyjayanthimala turned down the chance to make a comeback with Yash Chopra's Deewar (1975). The author-backed role of a mother grappling with her son's (Amitabh Bachchan)'s transgressions and her own love for him came to Nirupa and she made it unquestionably her own. As the moral pivot of the film, Nirupa's role was far superior to that of the heroines, Parveen Babi and Neetu Singh. Projecting the straight-backed mother in the famous 'Mere paas maa hai' dialogue with perfection, Deewarensured Nirupa Roy's place in movie history.

Deewar was followed by several Amitabh blockbusters where she played the mother -- Amar Akbar Anthony, Muqaddar Ka Sikander, Suhaag, Mard. She cut down on her work by the end of the 1980s and worked only occasionally in the 1990s. She played Amitabh's mother one last time in Lal Badshah (1999). After all, after 50 years and 250 films, she had devoted a large part of her life to her profession.

Actress Nirupa Roy passed away following a cardiac arrest, film industry. She was 73.

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