Meena Kumari's 'Pakeezah' Returns: The 4K Resurrection of a Melted Negative

Meena Kumari died on March 31, 1972, weeks after "Pakeezah" opened in Bombay. Fifty-three years later, her legend returns to the screen in a 4K restoration premiering at Festival Lumière in Lyon on Wednesday, presented by Thierry Frémaux.

The Film Heritage Foundation (FHF) spent two years restoring Kamal Amrohi's epic, working with the Amrohi family. A gala screening follows at the BFI London Film Festival's BFI Imax on Oct. 18, introduced by FHF director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur with Amrohi's son Tajdar, daughter Rukhsar and grandson Bilal. Dungarpur said the Imax screening sold out "in no time." The film is set to travel to the Smithsonian and the Academy Museum, and its producers plan a wide release in India.

What happened on premiere night in 1972?

On Feb. 3, 1972, the prints of "Pakeezah" arrived at Bombay's Maratha Mandir cinema in a palanquin pulled by four horses. Military bands played outside. Police held back thousands at the gates. Inside, Kumari sat beside her husband, director Kamal Amrohi, and gripped his wrist so hard during the screening that her nails drew blood. Tajdar Amrohi was in the theater. His father never pulled his arm away.

"He just gave a smile, and she also smiled in an embarrassment, you can say," Tajdar Amrohi says. "And it seems that even after 54 years, I feel as if that incident took place yesterday."

The film's production history matches that drama. Amrohi conceived "Pakeezah" in the mid-1950s around Kumari, his wife and muse. Shooting began in 1956 in black-and-white, then moved to Eastmancolor and CinemaScope. The production stalled in 1964 when the couple separated. Cinematographer Josef Wirsching died partway through. Composer Ghulam Mohammed died in 1968 after writing the songs; Naushad completed the background score. Amrohi finished the film deep in debt.

How much did one film cost its maker?

Everything, by his family's account. "His relations, his health, his wealth – he put everything into 'Pakeezah,'" Rukhsar Amrohi says. Every household request drew the same answer: after "Pakeezah." His kurtas, which usually arrived from Lucknow a dozen at a time every six months, wore thin during the shoot. Rukhsar recalls his response when she pressed him to reorder:

"I'll order all of this after 'Pakeezah' – not 12, I'll get 24 – but let my 'Pakeezah' get into theaters."

Financiers pushed Amrohi to drop Ghulam Mohammed's music as old-fashioned and credit Laxmikant-Pyarelal or Shankar-Jaikishan instead. He refused. When Kumari left and the shoot stopped, Amrohi sent Rukhsar and her mother back to Amroha so no one could say they had driven Kumari out. He later wrote asking Rukhsar to pray he would finish the picture. He had expected it to take a year.

How do you restore a film with no negative?

The FHF team examined the original camera negative at a Mumbai lab and found it had melted, with no images left on the celluloid. "Meena ji went into a coma two days before her death, and the negative of 'Pakeezah' had also gone into a coma," Tajdar Amrohi says.

The team rebuilt the film from an interpositive, a CinemaScope print and a color reversal internegative held at the National Film Archive of India — elements Dungarpur credits to archivist P.K. Nair. The sound negative had also survived. The restoration was carried out at L'Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna, with the soundtrack remixed in 5.1.

Color posed the biggest test. The available versions had faded badly, and accounts differed on whether Kumari's costume in the song "Inhi Logon Ne" was pink or red. Rukhsar Amrohi, who had been on set, came to Dungarpur's studio to check the few surviving color photographs. She noted the lyric itself mentions a dupatta dyed pink, and pushed for a deep magenta. That is what reached the screen.

"You have to make sure that you don't do something which he had not done, or you enhance it to that level, but keep it exactly his vision, the way he had conceived the film," Dungarpur says.

Doubles, including Padma Khanna, had performed some of the dances instead of Kumari, complicating continuity. FHF has faced missing negatives before: the restored "Sholay" had the same problem, "English, August" was rebuilt from a single print, and only subtitled prints survive of Shaji N. Karun's Cannes winner "Piravi." Dungarpur calls the neglect systemic. "So much money is spent on the production, so much money is spent, but there's very little money spent on preserving these elements," he says. "And that's been quite a tragic story of India's cinematic history."

What does the family want audiences to remember?

The siblings defend the marriage and the film's success. Tajdar Amrohi is adamant the couple never divorced and says Kumari asked Amrohi to promise he never would, calling him Chandan. He rejects the reading that "Pakeezah" became a hit because its star died weeks after release. "A good thing is good, and a bad thing is bad and won't run," he says.

Tajdar was at St. Elizabeth Nursing Home on Malabar Hill when Kumari died, and says it was the first time he saw tears in his father's eyes. Amrohi died in 1993 and is buried beside her. His son frames the burial as a verdict on decades of gossip: "Just as Shah Jahan immortalized Mumtaz Mahal by building the Taj Mahal, Kamal sahab immortalized Chhoti Ammi, Meena ji, across the whole world by making 'Pakeezah.'"

Rukhsar calls the film "the love child of our Baba and Chhoti Ammi." For Dungarpur, the restoration honors his grandmother, Usha Rani, the Maharani of Dumraon, who played the film's LP for him as a child. He founded FHF in her memory in 2014. "It's one of my most beautiful memories of restoration, and the most important film in my life," he says.

FHF's slate keeps growing. Next restorations include Shyam Benegal's "Bhoomika" and "Mandi," John Abraham's "Agraharathil Kazhuthai" — the foundation's first Tamil-language restoration — and Aribam Syam Sharma's "Imagi Ningthem." With Criterion, FHF is restoring Bimal Roy's "Bandini," "Devdas" and "Madhumati" plus Satyajit Ray's "Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne." Amrohi himself, asked why "Pakeezah" won no awards, told his son the audiences were prize enough: "All these people who are coming to watch the picture – that is my award."