Costume Drama

“I have spent more than 55 years in the industry and done more than 150 films,” says Athaiya,80. “It’s been an eventful journey with many stories to tell. So,for the past two years,I have been working on my book.” The coffee-table book Bhanu Rajopadhye Athaiya: The Art of Costume Design (Collins),with a gushing foreword by Attenborough,was launched in Delhi on Friday.

The 188-page book,full of pictures of Athaiya’s creations,is Bollywood down the ages and in costumes. The sensuous Vyjayanthimala as Amrapali; Sadhna,Saira Banu and Sharmila Tagore in their form-fitting churidar-kurtas and elaborate coiffures; Helen in a red Spanish dress with black tulle gyrating to O haseena zulfonwali; Mumtaz in an orange stitched sari prancing around to Aaj kal tere mere pyar ke charche; Zeenat Aman in a transparent white sari under a waterfall in Satyam Shivam Sundaram; Dimple Kapadia’s faded,almost worn-out look in Lekin (for which Athaiya won the National Award in 1990); Aamir Khan as the pre-Independence yokel from Champaner village in Lagaan-— many trendsetting styles in Bollywood have emerged from Athaiya’s drawing board.

It’s odd to think that Athaiya never attended a fashion school. “There weren’t any,” she shoots back. She was at the Sir JJ School of Arts in Mumbai in the 1950s when she started making fashion sketches for a magazine,thus paving the way to designing for a boutique frequented by actors like Kamini Kaushal and Nargis.

“Today’s designers who come out of colleges know how to cut and sew,but they’ve never been to villages,never travelled,they do not have the depth,” she says. The book,she adds,has another raison d’etre: “The time has come when the difference has to go down in people’s minds that fashion designing is about clothes,costume designing is about characters,” says the grande dame.

She reminisces about staying at Pochina village in Rajasthan before designing for Resha aur Shera. “The village people explained their dresses to me,how many bangles and necklaces brides wear for the wedding and how men tie their turbans,” she says. When Waheeda Rehman turned up as a traditional Rajasthani bride on the sets,complete with bone bangles,the locals had tears in their eyes. “That was one of my most memorable assignments,” she says. For Lagaan,she got in touch with friends of friends to get the look of the British regiment right.

And for Gandhi,she didn’t stop at museums and libraries. It is said that she arm-twisted Indira Gandhi to open her father’s wardrobe for her. Athaiya evades an answer: “I won’t give away all the secrets. Let me just say that I go from pillar to post for my research,” she says.

She is currently working on two Marathi plays and this book will soon have a companion. “There are so many more stories still left that a second book is inevitable,” she says.