FilmIndia (1940)

Kardar-lndia's Ever-Smiling Director! Is That Charming Smile An Act ? Life-Story Of The Man Who Made "Pagal" "Come, dear, have dinner with me", said someone in a sweet and melodious voice and a soft hand touched me lightly on the shoulder. I turned round in the hope of finding a bewitching beauty angling for a colour plate in "filmindia". Instead, I found Abdul Rashid Kardar smiling sweetly as courtiers have smiled in India through ages. They were all there. For, Abdul Rashid Kardar, true to the onetime traditions of his ancestors, moves about with a court of his own. Sunny, Sadiq, Bapuji, Nawab Khan and ten others — their names don't matter as their trade-mark is "Kardar" — they were all there, burning incense of emotion to their deity and in their faces I found the reflection of their master's inimitable and charming smile which often cloaked a laugh within. For these courtiers laugh when Kardar smiles and scowl when Kardar smiles less. For. Kardar never scowls. Nor did his ancestors. A RELIC Elegant, polished and artistic Kardar is born more for a Nawab's drawing room than for the rough and tumble life of a hard-working studio executive. With a smiling wife and a loving child, Kardar still flirts with a book in a bed. It is the art in him that has made him a devotee of the screen. In his business of creating illusion, Kardar himself is a charming reality of an illusory past when courtiers smiled politely in the face of death and men fought courtesyduels for their sweethearts. Not that Kardar does any of these things now, but for some reason or other, his sweet chivalrous manner conspiring with his cold disarming smile does remind one of the times of Akbar and Aurangzeb when men claimed their descent from nothing short of the Sun and the Moon and took to bed the woman which the eye loved and the heart craved for. To the stranger, Kardar is still an illusion — a relic of the old times — mystic and difficult to read. And strangely enough, the hot sweltering plains of the Punjab, in their intense fury of mid-October yielded this cool customer to the world of movies. Abdul Rashid Kardar was born on the 11th October 1904 at Lahore To him we cannot credit with the thrilling romance of poverty and its time-honoured struggles. The Kardar's were a prosperous family of Punjab, and Abdul Rashid opened lvs eyes in a comfortable household rich in the material gifts of life. His childhood was spent under the devoted care of his parents and Abdul Rashid was soon sent to a school. No cr.e ever accused young Abdul Rashid of being a scholar a' d perhaps to remove all possible doubls from loving minds he managed to fail in the Matriculation. With impressionable kids like Kardar school studies ill-matched with picture shows and Kardar would run to a show house with greater zest than to a school. Very soon Francis Ford. Eddie Polo and Ruth Roland took the boy in hand and the day these screen idols took their places in the young Abdul Rashid Kardar— He doesn't smile here, but he need not now. and anxious heart, Kardar, the movie artist, was born. ACTOR FOR A DAY From then onwards young Kardar became a dynamo of action. Dressed with a disarming smile, that incomparable ally of his success, he came to Bombay in 1922 and presented himself before Mr. Homi Master at the Kohinoor Film Company as an actor who knew "every thing from stunt-riding to tea-cup balancing." Homi Master asked him to give an acting demonstration and young Kardar made faces and got into the company. But the very next day, tired of sitting in the actor's room he strolled into the studio, presumably to observe and learn. Cameraman Narayan Devare was shooting for Director Homi Master and Devare caught Kardar watching the stars with a too frank admiration. Devare, always a man of nerves, ordered the young man out of the studio. He didn't stop at that. He compelled the proprietor Mr. Dwarkadas Sampat to dismiss Kardar immediately. The studio pathan did the rest. Little did Devare know that in the man he had sent out, one of India's future prominent directors was driven out. To-day as fate would have it, when Kardar shoots at the National Studios, Devare looks on from outside. Fate has its cruel little jokes on men and the joke is on Devare to 27