Durgabai Kamat — Indian cinema’s first female actor.
Born in a conservative Brahmin family, married at an early age, separated and raising her daughter as a single parent, Durgabai Kamat went on to become the first female actor in a full-length Indian feature film. Acting was considered taboo for women at that time, and while theatre continued to thrive, it was the men that had to play the roles of women as well. In her early twenties, after having separated from her husband Anand Nanoskar, a professor of history at the J J School of Art, Durgabai had few options to earn a livelihood and raise her child. There weren’t many work opportunities for women, even less so for single mothers. Between domestic work, prostitution and acting, she chose the latter. In the Maharashtrian Brahmin community this was considered reprehensible enough for her to be completely ostracised. She joined a traveling theatre company and home-schooled her daughter, Kamlabai Gokhale, since the two were always on the move, living a nomadic life.
In the early 1900s, cinema was still very new, with only a handful of Indian works having gotten any recognition at all before Dadasaheb Phalke’s ‘Raja Harischandra’ (1913), formally came to be known as India’s first feature film. For Raja Harishchandra as well, Dadasaheb Phalke was compelled to cast a male actor, Anna Salunke to play the female role of Queen Taramati. For his second film ‘Mohini Bhasmasur’ however, Phalke was determined to find female actors to play pivotal roles. Kamlabai Gokhale, Durgabai Kamat’s thirteen-year old daughter and theatre artist, was signed to play the title role of Mohini. Durgabai played the role of her on-screen mother, Parvati. The real life mother-daughter went on to become the first female actor and first female child artist of Indian cinema.
Even as Durgabai and her daughter paved the way for women to take up acting, they didn’t face competition from aspiring female artists, but from the established male ones. In an interview, Kamlabai said, “In those days, men played the female roles. So the fiercest opposition to my mother and me came from these men-we were their first natural enemies. Some companies just would not hire women as a rule…”. All through the many challenges they were presented with, Durgabai persevered, and under her guidance and support, Kamlabai became a successful actress, with a career spanning several decades.
Despite having created history, not much is known about the beautiful and multi-talented Durgabai’s film career after Mohini Bhasmasur. It is believed that she acted in several silent-era films but there aren’t many records of the same. She died in 1997, aged nighty-eight in Pune, Maharashtra. Her legacy continues to live on through the works of her daughter, grand-son Chandrakant Gokhale who acted in over seventy Marathi and Hindi Films, and great-grandson Vikram Gokhale. Vikram Gokhale is a notable film, television and theatre actor and director, who’s career has spanned over fifty years.
