Darlingji: The True Love Story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt
Kishwar Desai
Harpercollins, Rs 395
Fifty years ago, after a 28-year-old Sunil Dutt rushed to save Nargis from a fire that broke out on the sets of Mother India, the two actors — who were playing mother and son in Mehboob Khan’s 1957 epic — went on to fall in love and eventually marry. It became the best known “true love story” of the film world, alluded to and echoed as recently as in Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om in which Shah Rukh Khan (playing a junior actor) saves Deepika Padukone (playing the star female lead) from a circle of burning haystacks.

As Kishwar Desai remarks in Darlingji, an account of the extraordinary relationship of Nargis and Sunil Dutt, some sceptics assumed that it was star and showman Raj Kapoor who remained the great love of Nargis’s life, and that she married the less successful Sunil on the rebound; or that Sunil was marrying Nargis for her star status. Typical reactions to a choice made by a successful woman — and Nargis was, after all, the daughter and granddaughter of strong-willed women who made their own choices in matters of profession and relationships. Her grandmother, Dilipa Devi, a Brahmin widow at 13, went on to make a life as a gaanewali, living with a Muslim musician. Dilipa’s daughter Jaddanbai became a successful singer, entered the then new field of the cinema, and moved to Bombay where she began to make her own films. Soon Jaddanbai’s apartment in Chateau Marine on the famous Marine Drive became a hub for film people.

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