RIP, Kamini Kaushal. Ms Kaushal, probably the oldest of Hindi cinema stars still living, passed away at the age of 98 on November 14, 2025.

Over the years I’ve been blogging, I’ve seen one after the other of some of my favourite stars pass out of our lives: Shammi Kapoor, Sadhana, Dilip Kumar, Kumkum… but with Kamini Kaushal, I have to admit to a somewhat pronounced sense of loss. Not because she was a particular favourite of mine (though I admitted to being quite impressed with her acting when I watched Biraj Bahu some months back). But because with her passing, the door seems to have shut firmly on those who heralded the start of the Golden Age in Hindi cinema.

Anyhow, a tribute seemed in order. A tribute to Kamini Kaushal, and to a film that I’ve been meaning to watch for a while now.

Shaheed is set in Amritsar, and the film opens in the household of Rai Bahadur Dwarka Das (Chandramohan). Dwarka Das is a police officer, a man proud of being quite Westernized, believing staunchly in the right of the British Crown to rule India: a ‘brown sahib’. Dwarka Das has two friends: one is, like him, a police officer, and is father to a teenager named Vinod (?). The other is Seth Himmat Rai (?), whose son Gopal (?) is a young man, already deeply committed to the cause of the Indian freedom movement.

Gopal has joined the Indian National Congress, and his patriotism is making quite an impression on not just his little sister Sheela (?) but also her childhood sweetheart Ram (Sashi Kapoor), Dwarka Das’s son.

Vinod and Ram are about the same age, Sheela somewhat younger. Vinod’s loyalty to the British Raj is quite virulent, and it draws the ire of both Ram and Sheela, who gang up and beat him one day.

While Ram’s mother (Leela Chitnis) is inclined to brush things under the carpet and dismiss the episode as a childish argument, Dwarka Das is most displeased. He is even more annoyed when Ram and Sheela, under the aegis of Sheela’s brother Gopal, participate in a dance-drama where the refrain Toadie toadie bachche teri aisi ki taisi, touches on a raw nerve.

Dwarka Das’s anger, however, obviously does not have the effect he had hoped for. When the scene changes, the story has moved forward some eleven years. Ram (now Dilip Kumar) has followed in Gopal’s footsteps to become a freedom-fighter. However, unlike Gopal (now Prabhu Dayal; a Congress member who believes whole-heartedly in Gandhian non-violence), Ram is a revolutionary, willing to resort to violence in support of the cause.

Along with a group of his companions, Ram holds up a train near Ambala in order to loot it. Unknown to him and his fellow-revolutionaries, the police have been alerted, and they arrive in the middle of the hold-up. There is chaos, firing, and general mayhem. To escape the cops, Ram climbs into a compartment—where he comes face-to-face with a young woman (Kamini Kaushal).

Before she can raise the alarm, Ram tells her who he is—a freedom-fighter, only resorting to violence for the sake of the motherland. She still looks scared as well as annoyed, but when there’s a banging at the door and the cops come calling, she lets Ram slip into the attached bathroom and doesn’t say a word about him to the policeman who’s been searching for him.

… and this policeman happens to be an old acquaintance of Ram’s: Vinod, now a DSP. The woman, too (though Ram hasn’t recognized her, nor she him) is no stranger: this is Sheela, now grown up and presumably having been away somewhere all these years, studying. She is now a doctor and is heading back home. Vinod and Sheela greet each other; Sheela asks after Ram—surely Vinod must have met him recently?—and it’s obvious that Sheela’s interest in Ram is quite different from her friendly but relatively lukewarm greeting for Vinod.

Vinod goes his way, and Ram his, back to his own home.

In all the firing, Ram had got hit in one hand. This is bleeding profusely, so he tries to bandage it as best as he can and keeps a low profile in his own room. His mother, inclined to be a worrier (when did Leela Chitnis, at least from the late 40s onward, not play a worrier?) is soothed by being told he would like to rest.

The next day, however, come some unexpected visitors. Sheela arrives with her father to call on Dwarka Das’s family. After so many years! She has a sweet reunion with Ram’s mother, and enquires after Ram. Ma tries to make excuses, to say that Ram will be down shortly.

But Sheela, ebullient and eager to meet the sweetheart she hasn’t seen in so many years (if they were so close, did they not write letters? Did they not exchange photos?), uses subterfuge. She lulls Ram’s mother into thinking Sheela has acquiesced—and then she goes running upstairs, to fling open the door to Ram’s room.

Of course there is surprise and then joy on both sides. To think they’d already met just the previous night, and didn’t even recognize each other!

But amidst all the happiness, Sheela discovers that Ram is wounded, his hand bleeding badly. She says she’ll call the doctor, but Ram forbids her. The doctor will find the bullet, and will alert the police. That will be the end of the road for Ram.

Sheela, being a doctor herself, says that the bullet can’t remain in Ram; it’ll start poisoning him. There’s nothing for it but for her to operate. She doesn’t have anaesthesia (though she seems to have pretty much all the instruments she needs, which is odd), so Ram will just have to grin and bear it.

It’s excruciating, but Sheela succeeds in extracting the bullet. That, and the heavily stained bandages, cotton, etc, she throws into a kidney dish on the floor while Ram lies back.

This is not, however, a day for Ram to get much rest. Not only has Sheela come with Himmat Rai; so have Vinod and his father.

Vinod may be a nasty character, but he is also a sharp-eyed policeman. Too late, Sheela realizes that she hasn’t hidden away the blood-soaked bandages and cotton. She tries to push the kidney dish under the bed, but Vinod notices and stopping her, he picks out one of the bloodied bits of cotton. Sheela tries making a somewhat lame excuse for its presence, but Vinod isn’t buying that.

Worse still, he finds the bullet, and there’s nothing Sheela can say that can account for that. Vinod being the brute he is, decides the bullet can be used as a means to blackmail…

And he doesn’t stop at this. Vinod is nothing if not ambitious, and he knows exactly how to get ahead.

It’s a bit complicated, but what happens is that Gopal—wandering about where he shouldn’t be—is arrested as a suspected revolutionary terrorist. Ram is away from town and is with his group of revolutionaries, so he doesn’t realize what happens next.

Which is that Vinod blackmails Sheela: marry me or I’ll send your brother to jail and to certain execution. And she agrees out of a sense of sisterly loyalty. Only, however, after having Vinod promise that he will be satisfied with her marrying him and will not expect anything more. Reading between the lines, i.e, the marriage will not be consummated. Vinod promises (poor Sheela. How gullible).

Just the other day, a blog reader commented on Mela (also a Dilip Kumar film, also 1948), saying that they hadn’t been impressed with the film, which was ‘dull’. My take was that it was also a singularly depressing and even regressive film.

Interestingly, when I watched Shaheed, it occurred to me that this film had something in common with Mela other than the male lead and the year of release. This too had the female lead marrying another man, and the whole thing ended in tragedy (you have been warned). However, on the whole, this was a film I liked more than I’d liked Mela. It’s still not a film I’d happily watch again, but it has its good points.

What I didn’t like about this film:

The tragedy of it all. I don’t like films that end sadly for no good reason. This film was released in 1948, after the British were gone; why couldn’t it then have had a happier ending, with India independent and Ram felicitated, and everything happy even after all the angst of the in-between scenes? But no. Beyond a certain point the film starts veering into sadness, and never recovers. It isn’t as deeply despairing in the way Mela was, but still.

There are some gaps. For instance, Sheela uses her skill and training as a doctor briefly, but beyond that, everybody (including her) seems to forget she’s a doctor. Also, there are a few jumps here and there in the narrative, but I am not sure if this is the fault of the film’s editor or whoever uploaded this film to YouTube (this is the copy I watched).

What I liked about this film:

The music, by Ghulam Haider, with lyrics by Raja Mehdi Ali Khan and Qamar Jalalabadi. Nearly all the songs are good, but my two favourites are songs that were runaway hits: Watan ki raah mein watan ke naujawan shaheed ho (in several versions) and Badnaam na ho jaaye mohabbat ka fasaana.

Then, the acting. Dilip Kumar, of course, is one of those who acted well in pretty much any film he was part of, even if the film itself was nothing to write home about. But the more I see of Chandramohan, the more I appreciate his acting. He has so much presence (rather like Prithviraj Kapoor), and his eyes, especially, are so fabulously expressive.

And Kamini Kaushal. I have a feeling she was probably one of those actors whose acting depended a lot on the director; while Bimal Roy might have been able to draw out one of her best performances in Biraj Bahu, Ramesh Saigal in Shaheed is able to elicit a fine performance too. I actually liked Kamini Kaushal as Sheela: for one, though she does sacrifice herself (is she the ‘shaheed’ in this sense?) at the altar of sisterly love, it’s not as if just by marrying Vinod she succumbs to the Hindi film trope of ‘mera pati mera devta hai’, no matter if he’s a complete lowlife. Vinod has forced her to marry him, and she doesn’t forgive him for it. Being married to this lout doesn’t mean that she transfers her loyalty to him: Ram is still the man she loves, his cause the one she too still upholds.

The female lead’s (relative) feistiness, I think, is what contributed a good deal to my enjoyment of this film. It’s not as if Sheela is very progressive or a rebel; it’s just that she has a little more spine than the average Hindi film heroine of this period. Definitely more progressive than Nargis’s character in Mela, at any rate.

Do you have any favourite Kamini Kaushal films (or songs?) you would like to mention? Please share!