Blast From The Past

Feb 07, 2020 01:24 IST   Malavika Sangghvi  Hindustan Times

Indrani Rahman ( Getty Images )

“She had been to Hollywood studios when she went for Miss Universe in 1953, I think. This must have been shot in the mid to later 60s, in India,” said acclaimed Delhi-based photographer and activist Ram Rahman, about this glamorous throwback picture featuring his mum, the legendary Indian classical dancer Indrani Rahman, with Hollywood icon Kirk Douglas, who died yesterday at the ripe old age of 103.

Indrani, the daughter of an Indian father and an American mother, who had converted to Hinduism and become a pioneer of classical Indian dance forms herself, had been a rare beauty, “brought up to be uninhibited and independent by her American mother”, who had been crowned the country’s first Miss India. Although married, and with a child at that time, had then gone on to compete in the Miss Universe pageant, held at Long Beach, California. Celebrated as much for her intelligence as her beauty, the dancer had gone on to perform for a galaxy of world leaders, including US president John F Kennedy, Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, Queen Elizabeth II, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro, along with teaching at universities like Harvard.

Her son Ram often reminisces on social media about those heady days. “She had met Danny Kaye when she’d visited Hollywood on that trip,” he said yesterday, adding, “Later I had met Kaye in her company in New York with Zubin Mehta. Ravi Shankar was at that dinner too. I think it had been Zubin’s birthday…”

https://www.hindustantimes.com/mumbai-news/malavika-s-mumbaistan-her-own-person/story-uY68KPn3ur0SMzGBiewpVJ.html