By a strange circumstance Umrao Jaan finds her mother and brother. After Lucknow is attacked by British forces during a siege, Umrao Jaan is forced to flee as a refugee to a village near Lucknow, which she later learns is her birthplace, Faizabad. With no other course, she returns to her brothel and continues her life as a prostitute. It seems her choice in men is very poor, to put it bluntly. Wanting to escape the brothel, she runs away with him, only to find out that he is a wanted bandit who is ultimately killed. Knowing this hard fact, Umrao Jaan tries to find comfort in the arms of another man named Faiz Ali. Being of the upper class, he can indulge in the guilty pleasure of visiting prostitutes, but cannot marry one because of the scandal it would cause. Save for perhaps Nawab Sultan, a person of the aristocracy and a delicate peacock whose sensitive personality complements that of Umrao Jaan’s. None truly care about what the prostitute feels or what she goes through, its business and pleasure mixed together in a cruel environment. The Nawabs still visit brothels and entertain themselves with prostitutes, who in turn carry out their duties as those before them have.
The setting of the film is 1840s Lucknow, where changes are afoot throughout the subcontinent, yet the world of a courtesan remains frozen in time. Yet, despite these setbacks, she manages somehow to lift herself up, gather the shattered pieces and start all over again. Whether it is the scoundrel Gohar Mirza (Naseeruddin Shah), the charming but weak Nawab Sultan (Farooq Shaikh) or the rogue Faiz Ali (Raj Babbar), all the men in her life let her down. Sadly for her, words chosen in forming prose of poetry is far more easier than choosing a lover. This passion initially is kept secret and only revealed to those close to her, but gradually it becomes a trademark and in the end, as it turns out, a means of livelihood for her.īut poetry is not the only thing that keeps her heart beating it is love and a feeling of being wanted by other men that means as much to her. Dancing, singing and generally being submissive to would-be customers are the ways of the trade, but it is poetry that is her passion. In such an unenviable position, she is reborn and schooled into a courtesan. Her life started as a young innocent girl named Amiran, who is kidnapped by an enemy of her fathers in Faizabad and then sold to a brothel in Lucknow. Umrao Jaan was not born a harlot, as no prostitute ever is, but by a cruel hand that life deals her, she becomes one. How much truth there is to that claim, we will probably never know, but if there was a real person named Umrao Jaan and if this story is anything to go by, then she truly must have been a tragic figure.
Ruswa claimed that it was based on the true story of a courtesan named Umrao. The film is based on the 1899 novel ‘Umrao Jan Ada’, written by Mirza Hadi Ruswa it has also been called the first novel in the Urdu language. Not getting into the morality of the lead character’s profession, one could say she is simply a little girl lost, confined within the walls of a brothel whose only escape is her heartfelt poetry and the undependable lovers who share her bed. In essence Muzaffar Ali’s 1981 classic ‘Umrao Jaan’ can be called the story of a prostitute, or to be more precise, the story of a prostitute with a heart of gold and the soul of a poet.
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