Devika Rani

Devika Rani Chaudhuri (30 March 1908 – 9 March 1994), better known as Devika Rani, was an Indian actress in Hindi cinema. She is widely called the First Lady of Indian cinema and is considered one of its finest performers. She became the first person to receive the Dadasaheb Phalke Award and also earned the Padma Shri. During the 1930s and early 1940s, she was among the highest-paid actresses, and Box Office India listed her among its top actresses in both 1940 and 1941.

Born into a wealthy, anglicized Indian family, she was sent to a boarding school in England at age nine and grew up there. In 1928, she met film producer Himanshu Rai and married him the following year. She helped with costume design and art direction for his experimental silent film *A Throw of Dice* (1929). The couple then went to Germany, where they trained in filmmaking at UFA Studios in Berlin. Rai cast himself as the hero and her as the heroine in his next project, *Karma*, a bilingual film made in English and Hindi. It premiered in England in 1933, drawing attention for a long kissing scene between the real-life couple, but it flopped badly in India. In 1934, they returned to Bombay, where Rai founded a production studio, Bombay Talkies, with partners. The studio changed its name and produced many successful films over the next five to six years, with Devika Rani playing lead roles in most of them. Her on-screen pairing with Ashok Kumar became very popular. However, before Ashok Kumar was chosen by Bombay Talkies, Devika Rani had a passionate affair with Najmul Hussain, the hero of *Javani Ki Hawa*. She ran away with him; after frantic efforts by Himanshu Rai to bring her back, she reluctantly returned.

After Rai died in 1940, Devika Rani took over the studio and produced more films with his associates, Sashadhar Mukherjee and Ashok Kumar. She later recalled that the films she supervised tended to flop or only achieve average success, while those supervised by her partners were hits. In 1945, she retired from films, married Russian painter Svetoslav Roerich, and moved to his estate on the outskirts of Bangalore, where she lived a very reclusive life for the next five decades. Her personal style and the roles she played were considered socially unconventional. Her awards include the Padma Shri (1958), the Dadasaheb Phalke Award (1969), and the Soviet Land Nehru Award (1990).

**Background and education**

Devika Rani was born Devika Rani Choudhury on 30 March 1908 in Vizagapatam, Madras Presidency, British India (now Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh), into an extremely wealthy and educated Bengali family. Her father was Col. Dr. Manmathnath Choudhury, and her mother was Leela Devi Choudhury. Her father, the first Indian Surgeon-General of Madras Presidency, came from a large landowning zamindari family. Her paternal grandfather, Durgadas Choudhury, was the Zamindar of Chatmohar Upazila in Pabna district (present-day Bangladesh). Her paternal grandmother, Sukumari Devi, was a sister of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Devika’s father had five brothers, all distinguished in law, medicine, or literature: Sir Ashutosh Chaudhuri (Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court), Jogesh Chandra Chaudhuri and Kumudnath Chaudhuri (prominent Kolkata barristers), Pramathanath Choudhary (a famous Bengali writer), and Dr. Suhridnath Chaudhuri (a noted medical practitioner). Future Chief of Army Staff Jayanto Nath Chaudhuri was her first cousin—their fathers were brothers.

Devika’s mother, Leela Devi Choudhury, also came from an educated family and was a niece of Rabindranath Tagore. Through both parents, Devika Rani was related to the poet. Her father was the son of Sukumari Devi, Tagore’s sister. Her mother was the daughter of Indumati Devi Chattopadhyay, whose mother, Saudamini Devi Gangopadhyay, was another sister of Tagore. This meant Devika’s father and maternal grandmother were first cousins, both being children of two of Tagore’s sisters. Additionally, two of her uncles—Sir Ashutosh and Pramathanath—married their first cousins (their mother’s brother’s daughters), who were also Tagore’s nieces: Prativa Devi Choudhury (wife of Sir Ashutosh) was the daughter of Hemendranath Tagore, and Indira Devi Choudhury (wife of Pramathanath) was the daughter of Satyendranath Tagore. Devika thus had very strong family ties to Jarasanko, the Tagore family seat in Kolkata and a major center of the Bengali Renaissance.

At age nine, she was sent to boarding school in England and grew up there. After finishing school in the mid-1920s, she studied acting and music at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and the Royal Academy of Music in London. She also took courses in architecture, textile and decor design, and even apprenticed under Elizabeth Arden. Each course lasted a few months, and by 1927 she had completed them all, then took a job in textile design.

**Career**

In 1928, she first met her future husband, Himanshu Rai, an Indian barrister turned filmmaker who was in London preparing to shoot *A Throw of Dice*. Impressed by her exceptional skills, he invited her to join the production team of the film, though not as an actress.