An era ends — quietly

It was a small, single bed. Yet the fragile figure curled up on one side barely filled a third of it. The image just did not fit the one her son actor-writer Haider Ali had been describing for the last two hours.

Pramila, or Esther Victoria Abraham had not only been a devastating vamp and fearless stunt woman on screen for decades from the 30s on, but was equally devastating off it.

A real toughie, our very first Miss India (1947), she had outwitted the late Morarji Desai on several occasions, been arrested as a spy and even battled single handedly in the courts for two decades to get back her property in Shivaji Park in Mumbai.

The Baghdadi Jewess from Calcutta had certainly lived life and managed her men on her terms: eloping with a Marwari theatre director while still a teenager; marrying charismatic actor and producer Kumar (the  sculptor in Mughal-e-Azam, opportune beggar in Shri 420) and finally taking on a live-in companion, Parsi film director, Nari Gadhali, for nearly forty years after her husband went over to Pakistan in 1963. 
Haider Ali is an excellent raconteur.

So I had a vivid mental picture of a spunky, Mae West-ish persona, doing as she is wont and firing off one-liners in quick succession as we walked into her two-roomed flat in Shivaji Park barely two months ago.

But miraculously a few moments later—all traces of sleep rubbed out of her still-sparkling eyes—Pramila, in a plain green kurta, came cracklingly to life. Why, Pramila even got up from her bed to do the Charleston with his son. A few months from turning 90, she still had the rhythm, and the grace.

Her body may have let her down but it did not take long to realise that her legendary feistiness had not been diminished. I couldn’t wait to ask her about her contretemps with Moraji Desai, one of India’s best known cheerleaders of the moral brigade, known to have felled even the mightiest of politicians.

“In one of our films there was a line ‘Choli ke andar do anar hain’. Mr Desai thought the film should be censored, but then I explained that there must have been a misprint in the script because it was really ‘jholi ke andar do anar…,’ she says with a mischievous glint in her eyes.

Pramila’s quick thinking on her feet kept the censor’s scissors at bay in yet another film.
“There is a scene in which my sari pallav has dropped. Moraji Desai disapproved. But then I told him that I was an Indian woman, and as an Indian woman if my sari pallav had fallen down in one scene I would obviously have draped it back over my shoulder in the next.”

As for the spy saga, it really did happen. At one stage Pramila used to go to Pakistan quite often—she even had an office in Karachi to distribute films for her company Shama Productions.

Intrigued by her frequent trips to Pakistan, Morarji Desai, she says, had her arrested as a spy.

Pramila loved vamping it: “Being a vamp came easily to me after initial hesitation. I exalted in that role. Something got into me…I would tell my inner side

‘Now show yourself’, and it all came to me. Sometimes I wondered where it came from. How the hell did I become so terrible?”  Her languorously smouldering eyes may have had something to do with her poor eyesight.

“I couldn’t see without glasses. I did rehearsals by counting the steps. I was squint-eyed but beautiful...”

That’s chutzpah for you, the attitude she brought to over thirty films that ranged from a minor role in Achut Kanya, to films like Ulti Ganga, Bijli, Basant, Bambai ki Billi and Jungle King.  

But it wasn’t just what she did before the camera. Kumar and she set up their production company Silver Films, and produced 16 films.

One of them, Dhoon, flopped despite boasting Raj Kapoor, Nargis and Motilal as its stars. Sadly, she was never quite credited for the technical contributions she made to Indian cinema.

Not only did she design avant-garde clothes seemingly inspired by art deco geometric patterns, she was also asked by Ardeshir Irani of Imperial Studios to work on the costumes and the sets for his second technicolour film, Mother India—long before Mehboob Khan’s film of the same name.

Pramila’s sense of timing was impeccable until the very end. As she lay dying in her flat about a fortnight ago, she came alive on a screen thousands of miles away in Australia—in Amol Palekar’s new film, Thang (Quest) being premiered at Brisbane film festival.

It was her posthumous last hurrah—after 40 years away from arc lights.

Email: jain_madhu@hotmail.com