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BOLLYWOOD: ‘ALL I NEED IS WOR

BOLLYWOOD: ‘ALL I NEED IS WOR

by Khalid Mohamed August 12 2025, 12:00 am Estimated Reading Time: 7 mins, 32 secs

Rehana Sultan, the sensation of the 1970s following Chetna and National Best Actress Award winner for Dastak, in conversation with Khalid Mohamed on her late husband B.R. Ishara and the upbeat turns and tragic twists in her life which have relegated her into the shadows.

Rehana Sultan, the National Award-winning star of Dastak and the bold face of Chetna, reflects on her meteoric rise, decades-long marriage to maverick filmmaker B.R. Ishara, and the painful drift into obscurity. In this candid conversation, she speaks of lost opportunities, the struggle for work in her seventies, and a career overshadowed by industry politics and personal tragedy. Her story is a poignant reminder of Bollywood’s fleeting memory and the resilience of an artist determined to return to the screen.

Today, the room is wide open for senior women actors to assert that their advancing years do not rule them out from what they know best and have been intensively trained for. Shabana Azmi, aged 74, for instance, is a visible and much-wanted artiste in cinema, Indian as well as global.

By contrast, another graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, the 74-year-old Rehana Sultan has been deleted from the memory files. Although Sudhir Mishra had pencilled her in for Inkaar (2013), after a few days of shoot, she was replaced by Deepti Naval. The director avoided giving any statement for the reason but if reports from the film’s sets are to be believed, there was no option since she had lost her nerve before the camera and the glare of lights.

Here, then, is one of those disturbing stories of an actor — a National Award winner for her second film, Rajinder Singh’s Dastak (1970) in which she was paired with Sanjeev Kumar — of either losing her confidence or becoming awkward about portraying the character role of a mother. That’s quite inexplicable for a once confident, nuanced, FTII gold medallist-winner.

Love, Films, and an Unconventional Marriage

Despite being born into a conservative Baha’i family of Allahabad, after completing high school, she had applied to the FTII against her parents’ wishes. One of her colleagues has written a post on Facebook that in Vishwanath Iyengar’s student diploma film Shaadi ki Saalgirah, her performance had so impressed the progressive Urdu and Hindi playwright, novelist, film screenplay and dialogue writer Rajinder Singh Bedi that he had cast her immediately in Dastak as a newly-wed who is mistaken by her new neighbours to be a ‘sex worker’.

Followed Rehana Sultan’s filmography of over 30 films right till the 1990s. In between, unverified canards had spread that the underworld don, Haji Mastan, had offered to boost her career. And once her husband, writer-director B.R. Ishara, had passed away in 2012 after a paralytic attack compounded by tuberculosis at the age of 77, confirmed talk had spread that to subsist she was reduced to accepting dole-outs from the film associations. When she had to undergo heart surgery, Javed Akhtar, Rohit Shetty, Ramesh Taurani and Ashoke Pandit, among other film personalities, had helped her with the expenses.

That’s when I had sought to track Rehana Sultan, who had become the sensation of the 1970s with her very first film, the B.R. Ishara-helmed Chetna in the title role of an unapologetic sex-worker. After asking at least a half-a-dozen sources, I phoned her for an interview at her apartment in Parchhaiyan building in a Juhu by-lane, which she had acquired at the suggestion of lyricist-poet Sahir Ludhianvi.

Speaking with an Urdu-inflected accent, over the phone she said, “Why meet me? I don’t need anyone’s sympathy. My heart is in shape, all’s well. All I need is work, that’s all. I need to get out once in a while from Parchhaiyan which is quite an appropriate name for someone living in the shadows,” adding, “I’m surviving. I’m okay, just about. Please don’t make me out to be a laachaar. I merely need to somehow return to the movies or web series to make ends meet.”

She was to portray Chitrangada Singh’s mother in Sudhir Mishra’s Inkaar. Of her 12 to 13 scenes, only a couple were retained in the final edit. “They could have been edited out also,” she said. “The part was quite redundant. After that, there have been no acting offers. So here I am twiddling my thumbs.”

B.R. Ishara’s Legacy and an Uncertain Tomorrow

She agreed to a conversation reluctantly, and so there I was at her compact, neatly-appointed apartment. Quite relaxed, she had organised a generous spread of tea, biscuits and almond cake on a coffee table. Pre-empting my first question, she asserted that she hadn’t procrastinated over accepting Chetna, dealing with the rehabilitation of sex workers.

Except for the fact that she wasn’t thrilled that Ishara had called her over to Astoria Hotel for an initial discussion. A hotel meeting sounded shady. So he came over to her place, reclined on the sofa, and to her horror put his feet up on the coffee table. Yet she connected with the storyline and quoted a huge advance signing amount for those days. He handed over the Rs 5,000 right away.

The daring nude scene of Chetna didn’t faze her. Her hairdresser had covered her up with her long-flowing tresses. More than the camouflaged nudity, it was that one shot showing her bare legs, used in the poster, which continues to be a talking point to this day.

Subsequently, she acted in over 30 films, including the hits Khotey Sikkey and Agent Vinod — but admits, “aaram farmaane ki buri aadat pad gayee” after her marriage in 1984 to Ishara, whose half-a-dozen framed black-and-white photographs cover her apartment walls today.

As a teenage boy, he had run away from his home in Bharwain, Himachal Pradesh, and had become a canteen boy in a studio. A producer had liked the story about a courtroom drama he had narrated, which was then written and directed by him. That was Insaaf ka Mandir (1969), headlining Prithviraj Kapoor and Sanjeev Kumar. It was a moderate success at the cash counters but the critics and film producers alike noticed that the dialogue and direction were distinctly power-packed.

In sum, B.R. Ishara aka Babu helmed 30 films with newcomers as well as upcoming actors: Ek Nazar with Jaya Bhaduri and Amitabh Bachchan, Prem Shastra with Zeenat Aman, Woh Phir Aayegi and Sautela Bhai with Rajesh Khanna. He also gave breaks to Anil Dhawan and Shatrughan Sinha in Chetna, Reena Roy and Danny Denzongpa in Zaroorat, Raj Kiran in Kagaz ki Nao and Parveen Babi in Charitraheen. Yet Chetna remains Ishara’s most-valued film for shattering the taboos on depicting sex workers realistically, instead of cloaking them as tawaifs or courtesans.

From Spotlight to Shadows

The director’s marriage with Rehana Sultan lasted 27 years until Ishara passed away. “It must have been the world’s strangest wedding proposal,” she recalled with a faint smile. “‘Look I’m not marriage material, maybe you’ll leave me within a year but if you want we can give it a try.’”

Unfortunately, Society, one of his boldest films on the relentless oppression of a woman, enacted by Reena Roy, was banned. By then, Rehana had already retreated into the fringes. Ishara strove to work till his last breath. “But how could he last?” she asked. “He would smoke at least 120 cigarettes a day. He was a ticking bomb.”

The Writers’ Association helped him monetarily through his extended hospital treatment. “Danny Denzongpa, Shatrughan Sinha and Rajesh Khanna helped out as well,” she said. “Yet the end was near. Saab was disillusioned, not only with the sleazy sort of writing offers but had found an escape in the philosophy of J Krishnamurti whom he deeply admired.”

To my question, did Ishara leave behind any means of subsistence for her, she stated, “No, saab left nothing for me. I only have this house. He had made it clear that he didn’t want us to have children. He’d argue, ‘Why bring another machine into this world?’”

Without being prodded, she continued, “He did produce some films but there were far too many so-called friends around him. Both of us were clueless about business matters. There was nothing in the bank. By the time we realised that, it was much too late. Our story was bound to have a sad ending.”

Our afternoon conversation lengthened into evening. Seeing me off at the door, she requested heart-breakingly, “If you know of any role which I could do justice to, do tell filmmakers that I’m at Parchhaiyan.”   




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