Bhanu Rajopadhye Athaiya
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A brief biography
Her Oscar
Avijit Ghosh, Oct 16, 2020: The Times of India
Bhanu Rajopadhye Athaiya, was a colossus of costume design who became India’s first Oscar winner for her work in Richard Attenborough’s, Gandhi (1982), and her chic couture in blockbusters like Waqt (1965) blazed fashion trends.
Her daughter Radhika Gupta told TOI on phone that Athayiya died in her sleep. “In 2012, she was diagnosed with a brain tumour. She had been bedridden since 2016 when her right side got paralysed,” she said. She was cremated at Chandanwadi in south Mumbai. In the foreword to her autobiography, The Art of Costume Design (2010), Attenborough described her as “the revered doyenne of costume designers.” It took me “17 long years to set up Gandhi, my dream film” and just 15 minutes to make up my mind that Bhanu Athaiya was the right person (for the job),” he wrote.
The Kolhapur-born costume designer’s career, spanning 56 years and over 100 films, reads like a catalogue of Bollywood’s best and biggest: Shri 420, Sahib Biwi aur Ghulam, Sangam, Guide, Waqt, Ek Duuje Ke Liye, Nikaah, Lagaan.
“According to Yashji (Yash Chopra), girls in Delhi bought movie tickets for their tailors so that could see the designs and replicate them,” wrote Athaiya, was married to film lyricist Satyendra (Anhonee, Naubahar, Radha Krishna), who passed away in 2004. It is both sad and shameful that Athaiya didn’t even receive the Padma Shri. “Being a proud Indian, she was very disappointed that her own country didn’t recognize her,” Gupta said.
Athaiya’s work reflects her versatility, her ability to painstakingly authenticate any period or people. For Lagaan, she framed the 19th century colonial India’s look. Always eager to learn and forever inquisitive, she was dedicated to her work. On Guru Dutt's advice, she visited Calcutta's old mansions for Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam and travelled to desert Rajasthan for Sunil Dutt's Reshma aur Shera.
Athaiya’s father was a self-taught artist. Books on Leonardo Da Vinci, Rembrandt and other European painters lay scattered in her home. "They were my comic books," she told this reporter in an interview in 2010. Her arts teacher noticed her gift for painting. She earned her diploma and a gold medal at JJ School of Arts in 1952. She also exhibited her paintings alongside FN Souza, MF Husain and SH Raza.
But slowly she moved away from painting, started working as an illustrator in fashion magazines and then starting her own boutique. That's where she met heroine Kamini Kaushal and launched into designing outfits for movies beginning 1953 (Shahenshah and Aas). What made her stand out was her meticulousness and attention to detail. For Gandhi, "I went to as many museums and libraries as I could, gathered photographs which helped me reproduce what the script demanded," she once said. Attenborough “was astounded by the amount of detailed research she had undertaken” and the way “she had pieced together and brought alive the historic journey to be undertaken by the script’s main characters.”
In 2012, this reporter spoke to her again, this time on the phone. It was about returning the Oscar. The statuette was couriered in a special container to its original owner, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles. “It was a burden. I wanted the trophy to be safe in future and in the right hands,” she said over the phone.
In an emailed press release she further explained, “If Tagore’s Nobel medal could be stolen, what is the guarantee my trophy would be safe? In India, no one values such things and we lack a tradition of maintaining our heritage and things pertaining to our culture. ”
