Umrao Jaan is a Bollywood film released in 1981.It is based on the Urdu novel Umrao Jaan Ada (1905), written by Mirza Hadi Ruswa based on the famous Lucknow courtesan.The film starred Bollywood actress Rekha.Director Muzaffar Alidoes not exaggerate with lavish set designs and his adaptation is of a rather lower budget.He gracefully shows us Umrao mastering the art of poetry and dance. The songs are beautiful and poetry is itself a character in Umrao’s life, like a traveling companion. In some of the songs we are shown flashes of old elegant paintings, old fashioned settings and what Lucknow may have looked like takes us back in time to what the late 1800s may have resembled.

Set among the elite Muslim society in mid-nineteenth century northern India, Umrao Jaan portrays a romanticized version of a tawaif, a kind of courtesan who has something in common with Japan’s geishas.Tawaifs were accomplished in the high arts of kathak (north Indian classical dance), poetry, and music.The film’s Umrao Jaan, sold to a brothel as a young girl, excels at all three, and becomes the most sought-after and famous tawaif in the region.But in spite of all her accomplishments, Umrao is never happy, and while she can find some measure of escape in crafting her much-admired poetry, she longs to extricate herself from the world of the tawaif.

She works her way through a brief series of lover/patrons, hoping each one will be her ticket out of the degredation of brothel.Needless to say, freedom is not Umrao’s lot, and after each attempt at escape - literal and metaphorical - she finds herself right back where she started: Umrao Jaan the famous courtesan, performing for the benefit and the pleasure of others.

Video Source: DVD
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Chapters: 4

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