Nanda, in one word, was a benevolent presence. Even as she worked with some of the biggest heroes, featured in hits and competed with Nutan, Waheeda Rehman and Sadhna, she never struck out as an iconoclast or a pathbreaker. Rather she was that very relatable, pleasant, vulnerable, comforting persona who filled up all the emotional spaces in between with her beatific smile and wide-eyed innocence.
The 75-year-old actress, the niece of legendary filmmaker V Shantaram who died yesterday, would perhaps be overlooked because she has never been really assertive onscreen. But there have been many milestones in the history of Indian cinema that would not have been possible without her. The actress, who spanned every shade of feminine grace from coyness to smartness, paired up with many stars onscreen, including Ashok Kumar, Kishore Kumar, Dev Anand, Rajesh Khanna and Shashi Kapoor. But few know that she helped Shashi Kapoor (eight films) and Rajesh Khanna (three films) on their path to superstardom when many heroines of the time turned down offers to work with them, considering them to be newbies. Even if physically miscast, Nanda had the ability to blend the oddities with the ease of her unruffled demeanour. She also had the rare ability that many actors struggled to acquire back then, that fine art of understatement and the virtue of cinematic restraint.
Nanda was born in 1939 to Marathi actor-director Vinayak Damodar Karnataki. But the family faced hardships after his death. like many other industry children, she saw films as her only saving grace. She debuted as a child actor with Jaggu in the 1950s. Shantaram then formally launched her as a leading lady in the 1956 hit Toofan Aur Diya. Since then there was no looking back.
Then came the family dramas Bhabhi and Chhoti Behen, which entrenched her firmly in the model Bhartiya naari, one that became a grammar for all time to come. It was in B R Chopra’s courtroom classic Kanoon that she broke the mould, depicting the moral dilemma of a woman caught between her father and beau. Then there was Hum Dono, where a woman’s fidelity is tested by the arrival of her husband’s lookalike. She retains her faith with composure and grace in the song Allah Tero Naam, one of the film’s high points. She seemed fragile as the ailing wife but complemented the two differing personas of Dev Anand with a steadfastness that gave her that divine, touch-me-not image. In Aaj Aur Kal, she, as a wheelchair-bound girl, again becomes the gravitational force pitted against a disciplinarian father (Ashok Kumar) and physician (Sunil Dutt).
It was the quiet confidence and charm of these roles that helped her make a transition to a full-fledged city girl in one of her biggest hits, Jab Jab Phool Khile. Vacationing in Kashmir, Nanda indulges in merry abandon in the musical romance with Shashi Kapoor. The rich-girl-falls-for-poor-village-boy became a leitmotif of many films subsequently but the original had such a lasting impact that no less than Aamir Khan and Karisma Kapoor agreed to reprise the classic as Raja Hindustani.
Then Nanda did what few women actors attempt even today. She tested her limits with the thriller genre in Gumnaam where she is one of the seven people deserted on an island and each is murdered. From fear, awe, shock and not wilting under pressure, she followed all the rules of Western whodunits, delivering with a finesse in a genre that hardly had a template then in the industry. But it was in Yash Chopra’s Ittefaq that Nanda surprised everyone with her brilliance. As the film revolved around the intruder Rajesh Khanna and herself, she kept up the tautness wih a deliciously nuanced performance of her fear, helplessness, gradual acceptance of Khanna controlling her life, submission and in the end the sudden explosion of evil, of trapping him in her own wrong-doing. Since both the actors had imbibed the Hitchcockian grammar so well, they were repeated again in The Train.
Nanda had a remarkable equation with her co-stars, one that made many of the leading men work with her many times over. Other than Kapoor and Khanna, there was Dev Anand and Manoj Kumar. Nanda first worked with Dev Anand in Kaala Bazaar, where she played his sister but the actor said he would cast her as his heroine when he made films, a promise that he kept by working with her in Hum Dono and Teen Deviyan. “I started working with her when she was already established and I felt apprehensive about working with her. She encouraged me a lot. I had great experience working with her. She was obedient and punctual. She was a very down-to-earth person with no attitude, an extraordinary human being and a very talented actress. I used to call her angel,” Kumar told PTI. Very few women stars of the industry manage to get the good opinion of the ever sceptical papparazzi when they are friendly with their co-stars. It was more difficult back then. But it is to Nanda’s immense conduct that nobody ever linked her up seriously with her leading men.
In the latter part of her career, she returned briefly to play supporting roles, most memorable being her poignant turn as a young widow’s mother in Raj Kapoor’s social drama, Prem Rog. Once again her compassionate personality provides a soothing balm to Padmini Kolhapure’s suffering character and offsets the script’s over-the-top villainy. She followed it up with Ahista Ahista and Mazdoor but then retired completely.
Very little is known about her private life as she kept it away from her work. She was enaged to filmmaker Manmohan Desai in 1992 but she remained unmarried after his death in a freak accident. Desai fell off the terrace of his rented apartment in Girgaon in 1994 after the railing on which he was leaning collapsed. But she was never lonely, regularly calling on some of her peers, her closest being Saira Banu. And she passed away too in silence, without troubling anybody. All we will ever remember is her unflappable serenity.
