Dimple Kapadia: The return of romance

India Today

05-06-2025

(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated November 30, 1985)In 1973 she was the miniskirt-wearing Bobby-girl of everyone's dream and the silver screen's teeny-bopper goddess who came, conquered and went away. And then life imitated art through a dramatic marriage with superstar Rajesh Khanna—twice her age at that time, a total eclipse from films, the birth of two beautiful daughters, a traumatic separation, and her rising mermaid-like from the sea this year, in Saagar.advertisementDimple Kapadia is one of the most gorgeous women on screen today. But how has the Bobby girl grown into womanhood over the years? What strange imprints of experience her eventful life has left on her face that the film-goers now find so compelling? As a teenager, she was part nymph, part imp. At age 28, it is still Dimple all right, but blended totally anew. How did it happen?The change is of course something that the Dimple Kapadia of today would not readily like to admit. Because for the past three years since her return to movieland, directors obsessively thought of her—in the words of Saagar's maker Ramesh Sippy—"as Bobby grown over the years". No wonder the hemline was lower, but the neckline too was lower.
But, alas, the real Dimple Kapadia is no grown-up clone of either Bobby, the fisherman's daughter in the screen Mills and Boon story of Raj Kapoor, or Mona, the "grown-over-the-years" Bobby-girl cast as an innkeeper's daughter this time round. Dimple has acquired a totally new persona in her second incarnation. It is more elusive than the old one, more complex, and perhaps more beautiful.advertisementAnd now, spread-eagled over a huge grey boulder after climbing 1,500 feet in one burst up a hill 80 km from Bangalore on the Bangalore-Pune highway, at the location of Feroz Khan's blockbuster-in-the-making, Janbaaz, Dimple surveys her face before a shot in a heart-shaped looking glass, and says: "I think all my life's story is condensed in my face. It is neither innocent nor coy. It speaks volumes." It does indeed.Because no sugar-candy actress in Bombay's film and today has got so much of tautness tied up with so much of beauty. Khan looks through his camera once for a close-up of her near the climax of the film, and mumbles almost to himself: "No other girl has so much of pent-up aggression."But it is not aggression alone that makes Dimple Kapadia unique, for there are far more intertwined shades of expression under the layers of Max Factor on her face. Says Mahesh Bhatt, the new and subversive messiah of serious cinema in Bombay's entertainment industry: "Dimple Kapadia has gone through so much in her life that she need not read up the text books of method acting to play a real woman. She only has to be herself." The valuable compliment could not have been timelier. Bhatt announced last fortnight that Dimple was the heroine of his next film, Kaash, with Naseeruddin Shah.advertisement"I can't believe it. It is perhaps the most serious artistic challenge I have ever faced in my career," cooed Dimple as the offer filtered in through long-distance telephone from Bombay to the lavishly appointed farmhouse of Khan on the outskirts of Bangalore, where the Janbaaz unit is putting up. She was feeling higher than the top of the cliffs where all the unreal movies had taken her for shooting dance sequences through heavy filters. "I feel like doing a step right now, yeah, great heady feeling to know that I can play a real character at last, I mean someone who exists in flesh and blood, may be in the next house down the lane."In Dimple, the yearning to play the "real character at last" is perhaps the natural backlash to the event-filled, high-voltage life she has all along led. The first taste of its unreality comes off as soon as one steps into the overpoweringly decadent home of the Kapadias at Juhu in Bombay.There are no familiar stacks of doubtful trophies in the living-room: only rows upon rows of cutglasses, Belgian and not-so-Belgian, punctuated by peeled off plaster on which apathy and sea-wind have wrought strange cobweb patterns. It could indeed be the ideal set for The Cherry Orchard; one only has to imagine the sound of the falling axe. And the male members of the family, father Chunibhai and brother Suhail, are almost never to be seen.advertisementThe vague reply is: they have gone abroad for treatment. The ailment is deliberately left unspecified. What is more important is the tomblike silence that surrounds the inmates of the house—mother Betty, who is perennially cagey, and her two sisters Simple and Reem, who would shy away from any conversation on their illustrious didi on the ground that she is "her own spokesperson.""The life and happiness in our house came to an end the day I and Rajesh got married," Dimple now reminisces almost clinically. And it was really a marriage on which some of the weirdest film scripts could have been written. Rajesh Khanna was 32 at that time, flush from the success of a string of chart busters, and Dimple, at 16 and preening her feathers after Bobby, was just waiting to be swept off her feet in a whirlwind romance.advertisement"I came to know him well precisely seven days before the marriage. We were going together to Ahmedabad for some kind of a show on a chartered flight. He sat next to me all along but did not utter a word. Just as the flight was about to land, he turned towards me, looked hard into my eyes, and said he wanted me to marry him."There were very few young women then who could say no to the superstar's offer, for Rajesh was indeed at the zenith of his popularity. "What was I compared to him then? A one-trick pony!" But there were other reasons too for Dimple to be overawed by Khanna. Till end-1970, weeks before Raj Kapoor selected her for the role in Bobby, she had suppurating warts on her fingers which everybody took for leprosy.In fact family friend Raj Kapoor had one day come to their house to see her on hearing the rumour, and, according to Dimple, was so pleased to find that her affliction was indeed not leprosy that he at once decided to cast her as Bobby. "I really swung between the extremes. From the danger of being ostracised by the society, I almost overnight found myself as virtually the darling of the millions. I was thankful to my fate. So thankful that I could have accepted the hand of anybody at that moment."advertisementBut there was something oddly rebellious about Chunibhai himself, the scion of the family that owned the Killicks Nixon group of industries, who was driven out of the pack for his love of the horseflesh. But being a punter and a bookmaker was not what broke the camel's back. The wealthy Khoja family, which embraced Hinduism only with Chunibhai's father, Laljibhai, and which accepts the Agha Khan as its religious mentor even now, disowned Dimple's father the day he agreed to Raj Kapoor's proposal to let her sign for Bobby."When I was a child, my parents took me to Agha Khan, and he named me Ameena. Beautiful name, it means the dignified one". The marriage with Rajesh Khanna was hopelessly one-sided and almost totally lacking in dignity. Khanna put a ban on her acting career promptly after the marriage. But that was the time when, in the wake of Bobby's success, incredibly lucrative offers were coming her way, one of them being to play the leading role for the movie great Manmohan Desai."They were offering me Rs 5 lakh for a film in those days," she says. If true, it was decidedly the highest rate in the industry at that time paid to women artistes and only marginally less than the fees Dimple reportedly commands now—Rs 6 lakh."I was too young to realise the importance of Bobby for my career, but from the day I entered Rajesh's house, Ashirwad, I somehow knew that the marriage wouldn't work." Life at the oddly spacious Bandra bungalow, overlooking the sea, was full of experiences that seem like harrowing nightmares to Dimple now. Most notable of them was the arrival of "my first rival"—a glamorous star of the times—on the third month of the marriage."I was not in the least bothered by the procession of women who walked into Rajesh's life thereafter, but the marriage was certainly not based on any equality. It was a farce, but it took me such a hell of a long time to realise that!" Ironically, the slide-back in Rajesh's career also began with the marriage.After the resounding success of Aradhana, Anand, Aap Ki Kasam, all released between 1969 and 1973, his career graph began finally dipping with Namak Haram, where Amitabh Bachchan, the man who would finally take over the mantle from him, was aided by the script to outshine him completely.DiI Daulat Duniya, Prem Kahani, Mahachor, Bundlebaaz—the bombs piled upon each other. "It was my first encounter in life with failure," Dimple says. "When a successful man goes to pieces, his frustration engulfs the entire surroundings. It was a pathetic sight when Rajesh waited at the end of the week for collection figures but the people didn't have the guts to come and tell him."There was an upheaval in the house every day, and almost every night battle scenes were being enacted. After their separation, the film press in Bombay even reported acts of gross sadism, such as Dimple being subjected to cigarette burns and whipping. No one denied the reports."I left the house thrice earlier, but every time I went back home I felt sorry about the whole thing and came back. Both Rajesh and I were unable to accept the failure of our marriage. But I realised I wouldn't survive as a human being if I lived there any longer. I got totally neurotic because I was prepared to do anything...to go to any extreme ...only in order to extract a smile from him."The most widely publicised marriage of the early '70s between Rajesh Khanna and Dimple Kapadia thus virtually came to an end when, one day in April 1982, Dimple, accompanied by her two daughters, Twinkle and Pinkie, then aged eight years and five years respectively, arrived in her parents' home, determined not to go back this time. Dimple was at last prepared to put up a fight. She had already negotiated with Sippy for the role in Saagar, paving the way for her return.However, Rajesh and Dimple are still fighting in court over virtually every issue: the custody of the children, alimony, share of property, share of investments, "for a share of even the most insignificant thing that we ever possessed between ourselves."Dimple admits of having an involvement with another person during the period that her marriage with Rajesh had lasted. "It was a selfish involvement. I was experimenting with myself. I had to. I wanted to find out what was wrong with me as a woman." She puts up a brave front, but the separation must have left her a very insecure person. And she never got over her sense of guilt for having been the cause for her family's ruin...first being cast off by her grandfather, and then the humiliating raids complete with metal detectors and sniffer dogs. Chunibhai reportedly became a changed man afterwards, withdrawn into a shell, and shy of company. "I was the favourite child," Dimple chokingly says, "and everything went wrong in my life."Saagar, Lava, Patal Bhairvai, Arjun, Manzil—Dimple has been deluged with work ever since her return to films. And, in the three years, she and Rajesh have done their best to make sure that they don't have to run into each other. It is only early this year, during the dubbing of Lava, that they met on the staircase of the dubbing studio. "He looked pale and thin. I invited him for a cup of tea and he said he'd come. But 15 minutes later, when I enquired, I was told that he was gone."However, Dimple is not nostalgic but regretful for having taken so much in her stride, "having suffered at the hand of blind emotion, and inertia". But the gap of 10 long years has landed her up in the new realities of the film industry which has only lately emerged out of a long period of absolute male domination and is again on the lookout for faces, lovely feminine faces, well-scrubbed and glamorous, which can set the wheels of moviedom in motion all over again.Anil Kapoor, Dimple's co-actor in Janbaaz, reveried: "She is the most beautiful woman on screen since Madhubala." That may or may not be true, with a close contender like Rekha still being around. But it was left to Perez Khan, whose Qurbani hooked the nation on to disco fever and the pretty face of Zeenat Aman a few years ago, to give vent to the most accurate assessment of Dimple: "You look at her on a long shot. You see a good body, but there are many such that you're sure to find all around. Move the camera closer. Well, a remarkable face, something that always seems freshly washed, but made somewhat alien-looking with that longish nose of hers and the watery eyes. But now look at her big close-up. It is not at all the face of a woman who is acting her part: she is a woman who is just dying to be herself on screen."In an industry dominated by its cerebral Shabana Azmis and highly paid mannequins like Jaya Prada and Sridevi, Dimple Kapadia is the unabashed announcement of a return of romance.Subscribe to India Today MagazineTrending Reel