Kamini Kaushal was Dilip Kumar's 'first Love', a romance they were forced to abandon

It was a love story that could not be. Kamini Kaushal and Dilip Kumar worked together in “Shaheed” and developed a fondness for each other but the actress, who was already married to her late sister’s husband, chose to end things between them and it left them both “shattered”.

Kaushal, who passed away at the age of 98 in her Mumbai home on Thursday night, made a spectacular debut with 1946 movie “Neecha Nagar”, which went on to win the Grand Prix award at the inaugural Cannes Film Festival.

Counted among the highest paid actresses of the 1940s and 1950s, Kaushal featured with Kumar first in “Shaheed” (1948), followed by hits “Nadiya Ke Paar” the same year, “Shabnam” in 1949 and “Arzoo” in 1950.

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At the time, Kaushal was already married to brother-in-law B S Sood, the chief engineer at the Bombay Port Trust, after her sister’s death in a car accident in 1948. She was an adoptive mother to two daughters and later had three sons — Rahul, Vidur and Shravan — with Sood.

The actor spoke about marrying her brother-in-law in an interview with Filmfare in 2014.

“I loved my sister deeply. I feared my nieces, who were just around two and three, would flounder without a mother… It seemed an ideal solution. It was not a sacrifice. I feared whether I’d be able to live up to the responsibility. More so, my husband was a genteel and decent human being,” she said.

About her doomed love affair with Kumar, the veteran actor said it affected them both.

“We were both shattered. We were very happy with each other. We shared a great rapport. But what to do? That’s life. I can’t dump people and say ‘Enough now, I’m going!’ I had taken on the girls. I wouldn’t be able to show my face to my sister. My husband, a fine human being, understood why it happened. Everyone falls in love," she said.

Kumar, who passed in 2021 at the age of 98, wrote about Kaushal in detail in his 2014 autobiography “Dilip Kumar: The Substance and the Shadow”.

He said Kaushal, whose real name Uma Kashyap, was an “understanding and facile co-actor” who was very attentive to the demands of the director.

“(She) had the intelligence to grasp the intrinsic sensitivity of some of the more poignant situations in the script. She was an artiste who could perform with the required authority when needed… Moreover, she was an educated person with whom one could have an interesting conversation. She had a noticeable fluency in speaking English, which was unusual those days for an actress…

“In fact, after a day’s intense work on scenes that called for serious emoting, we formed a small circle for some nice light-hearted conversation, in which occasionally Ashok Bhaiyya also joined. Ramesh Saigal was a good conversationalist and he was the first one to address Kamini Kaushal by her real name Uma (Kashyap) and all of us followed suit,” he said.

Kumar said the professional success of his films with Kaushal led to the public curiosity surrounding their personal relationship. He pointed out that even in the 1940s, film studios and audiences were eager to see co-stars paired together if they sensed a real-life attraction, something which is still common in the industry today.

“The difference was that we conducted ourselves with dignity and we did not make headlines in newspapers and magazines or let our private lives become the target of public debate and derision. There were snoopy journalists even then, although television was yet to make its appearance. If we were emotionally involved, there was no public exhibition of it and the decorum at work was consciously maintained.” Cinema wasn’t seen as a respectable profession for “educated ladies” at the time, so actresses who came from cultured or scholarly backgrounds like like Kaushal were rare, he wrote.

“I preferred the company of colleagues who were educated and well informed. Stardom bothered me more than it pleased me and I guess I was drawn more intellectually than emotionally to Uma, with whom I could talk about matters and topics that interested me outside the purview of our working relationship. If that was love, may be it was. I don’t know and I don’t think it matters any more,” he said.

In the same book, Kathak legend Sitara Devi — who was then married to filmmaker K Asif — recalled having seen firsthand the depth of Kumar’s feelings for Kaushal. “The only time I felt he was drawn to a co-star was when he worked with Kamini Kaushal. I feel she was his first love. She was educated and well spoken like him and could engage him in intelligent conversation,” she said.

Devi added that since Kaushal was already married to her brother-in-law, an alliance between her and Kumar was never possible, no matter what feelings existed between them.

“When people started talking about them – the Dilip–Kamini pair had become a hit with Shaheed, Shabnam – I ventured to ask him one day if there was any truth in the gossip. He remained silent and changed the subject. A couple of months later he dropped in unexpectedly.

“Asif and I noticed that he was sad and hurt and he would break down. He was only in his mid-twenties then and I guessed it was the pain of breaking up with his love,” she said.

She added that Kaushal was warned by her brother and thus decided to end things with Kumar.

“… She had informed Dilip Bhai that she wouldn’t be working with him or seeing him any more. As he spoke to us, I saw tears welling up in his sad eyes,” she recalled.