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Bollywood stars have been under the scrutiny of the public eye ever since the industry has existed. The choices they make affect their fan following and many times, they stay away from making controversial choices just so they don’t have to be at the receiving end of harsh comments. Unfortunate as it is, stars have also had to face harsh comments with regard to the people they choose to marry and Zohra Sehgal faced something similar when she chose to marry a man from a different faith in pre-Partition India. Now remembered for her roles in films like Cheeni Kum, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and Veer Zaara, Zohra was yet to make a name for herself in the movies, but she was one of the most popular dancers of her time when she married a Hindu man who was eight years her junior.
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Zohra met her husband Kameshwar Sehgal at a dance school set up by Uday Shankar in Almora and for her, it was love at first sight. On her 100th birthday, Zohra shared in an interview with Aparna Gupta that she first met Kameshwar, who was eight years younger than her in 1940. He was a painter from Indore and was training in the dance school. “I found him to be handsome and talented and was bowled over by a Burmese hut he had painted using rice and fungus. Although Kameshwar was eight years my junior, he reciprocated my feelings,” she said. Zohra had already traveled to many countries as a dancer and was starting to establish herself as one of the most renowned classical dancers of the country.
Zohra recalled that they courted each other for two years and finally got married in 1942, during the Quit India Movement. “We had a civil marriage at Allahabad, but with railway tracks and roads being blocked, we had just one barati,” she recalled. But marrying a Hindu man was no small feat, especially since Zohra came from a “conservative Muslim family.”
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Zohra Sehgal with husband Kameshwar Sehgal.
In a recent chat with Hauterrfly, her grand niece Ayesha Raza Mishra shared that Zohra’s decisions were quite shocking for the family. “She decided to get married. She fell in love with a gentleman who was 8 years younger than her and he was a Hindu and she was from a conservative Muslim family. And imagine at that time, I am talking about in the 1930s, to go and talk to your father, say that I am in love and talk about your to-be husband. (They must have asked) ‘What does he do?’ ‘He is a dancer. He is from a different religion, he is younger’. I am saying my family went through these challenges two generations ago,” she shared.
Zohra and Kameshwar were deeply in love with each other and soon after their wedding, they started an institute for performing arts in Lahore, Zoresh. What looked like a beacon of Hindu-Muslim unity when it started, soon became a point of contention in the area as tension would flare up frequently. The couple, with a baby in their arms, moved to Bombay (Mumbai) almost overnight and joined Prithvi Theatres, where Zohra found her passion for acting.
Zohra Sehgal lived till 102. (Photo: Express Archives)
In a 2012 interview with Hindustan Times, Zohra spoke about her husband and described him as a “versatile talent who was a jack of all trades but who could master none.” She had then shared, “He was a talented artist, homoeopath, dancer and a cook… but he could not be famous.”
Kameshwar passed away in 1959. Zohra passed away in 2014 at 102.
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