Movatterモバイル変換

Twenty-two years after Nargis lost her battle against cancer, Duttsaab, as he is known to millions of his fans, opened his heart to tellrediff.com about one of Hindi cinema's greatest real life romances.

Asked if he married Nargis when she was on the rebound from her alleged affair with Raj Kapoor, Dutt says simply, "I never knew there was a romance. The only thing I knew was that she came into my life. I was not concerned about her past. I know these questions arise. But I am concerned about the person who comes in my life; what matters from that day on is how true the person is to me. The past is nothing to me."

The setting for our conversation is the luxurious Grosvenor House Hotel in Central London, where Dutt is stopping over on his way back to Mumbai from a fund-raising trip in the United States.

Twenty-four hours earlier, when we met at a gala dinner, the 74-year-old actor-politician had agreed to talk about his wife and family.

When Nargis and Sunil Dutt first met on the sets of Balraj Sahni'sDo BighaZameen, he was a student and an aspiring actor and she was already an established star. But they did not get married until several years later, soon after they starred as mother and son in Mehboob Khan's 1957 classic,Mother India.

"In my career I met so many movie stars, but starting a life together and building a home goes beyond all other relationships," he explains. "I found in her a human being and a woman who would take care of my family. I found in my wife both compassion and understanding.

"My sister had fallen ill and I was a raw guy; I didn't know any doctors in Bombay where I was then working. Without telling me, she took my sister to a doctor and got her operated. I thought this is a person who will make a better home for me and will do a lot of things for my family, which she did."

The two came from very different backgrounds. Dutt was the son of a Punjabi land-owning family who lost their land to Pakistan and had to rebuild their lives and homes in independent India.