The 1940s was a very tricky time for Hindi cinema. While there was one section of the moviemaking folks who made it their mission to entertain the masses during stressful times, there was another section where actors, writers and filmmakers participated in the freedom struggle in their ways. But, the struggle didn’t end after August 1947. The country was in political disarray and those who had learnt to fight for their rights continued to do so for getting rid of British rule wasn’t enough. Balraj Sahni, one of the upcoming actors in those days, who had worked with Mahatma Gandhi at Sevagram, lived with Rabindranath Tagore at Shantiniketan and worked with the likes of TS Eliot and George Orwell at the London office of BBC, was one of the prominent members of the Communist Party in India, and also a member of Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), where he worked with the likes of Prithviraj Kapoor and Ritwik Ghatak, found himself behind bars for participating in a protest march. After a party meeting in 1949, when the party workers took to the streets, Balraj was arrested by cops. He spent months in a prison and strangely, was allowed to shoot for a film with Dilip Kumar and Nargis during his time in prison.
At this time, Balraj had appeared in a few films, and was, by no means, a movie star. In fact, a couple of weeks before this, he had signed a film called Hulchul, in which he was to star with Dilip Kumar and Nargis. He was going to play a jailor in the film and as a part of his preparation, he visited Mumbai’s (then Bombay) Arthur Road prison, not knowing that he would be housed here in the immediate future. Balraj recalled this incident in his autobiography ‘My Filmy Autobiography’ and shared that he spent the first two months of his jail time in Bareilly Jail. He was then given the tag of ‘A class’ as a prisoner, which gave him certain privileges within the prison system, and two months later, he was transferred to Arthur Road prison where the same jailor presided who earlier gave him a tour of the facility.
As Balraj spent days and night locked in a jail for participating in a protest, producer K Asif, who was the director of Mughal-E-Azam, was making arrangements so Balraj could shoot for his film even during his time in prison. “K Asif had managed to procure a peculiar order from the police commissioner. Whenever they wanted me at the studio, I might be allowed to go there under police escort,” he shared and recalled that on days when he had to shoot, other prisoners would give him lists of things that he were to bring back. Someone wanted a picture of Dilip Kumar and Nargis, and someone else wanted a pack of bidis. K Asif would make arrangements so Balraj could carry all the goods back to the prison. Even the jailor was invested in this project for Balraj was going to play a jailor on screen, and he felt like his reputation was at stake.
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On one such day, when Balraj reached the studio at 6 am, he got to know that the shoot had been called off because Nargis’ mother had passed away. Since all the film stars were going to be there at her house, Balraj requested the inspector who was escorting him to take him to her house. He agreed, and this turned out to be a transformative experience for Balraj. “Standing there in the midst of so many friends and colleagues, I realised that I had become almost a stranger to them. The way they were all looking at me, I might have been a corpse, which had suddenly emerged from a coffin,” he wrote and said that this was the day when he “resolved to never leave the world of films.”
After six months, when he got out of jail, he was mentally and physically exhausted. Balraj was no longer welcome to participate in Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) activities, which had become his second home by this time. “In their eyes, I had become a traitor and a renegade. Although I was reluctant to accept the charge, it nevertheless broke my spirit. I felt I had become old in the prime of youth,” he wrote. Two years after the release of Hulchul, Balraj appeared in Do Bigha Zamin, the role that changed his life and is still considered as one of the most accomplished works by an actor in Indian cinema.
