Through Her Lens | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

Through Her Lens | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

Written by Atikh Rashid |New Delhi |Published: March 16, 2019 10:34:39 am

Through Her Lens

A festival will highlight the contribution of women to Indian cinema

The festival is being organsied by TIFA Working Studios in collaboration with National Film Archives of India (NFAI), Raja Dinkar Kelkar Museum and The Heritage Lab and Feminism + Art.

Her real name was Khorshed Minocher-Homji, but Indian cinema’s first female music director adopted a Hindu ‘screen name’ — Saraswati Devi — when she started composing songs for Hindi films in 1935. Bombay Talkies founder Himanshu Rai had persuaded Khorshed and her younger sister, who ran a popular classical music show on All India Radio at that time, to compose songs for his film Jawani Ki Hawa starring Devika Rani and Najmul Hussain, but the decision by the sisters to join “disreputable profession” didn’t go down well with local Parsis who demanded that the film be banned. The solution that was reached by the mediators was to change the names of the sisters to Hindu names so that the community’s prestige remained unharmed.