Kamal Amrohi

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Kamal Amrohi, Indian film director, was born in Amroha, Uttar Pradesh on 17 January 1918 and is one of the most original voices in Indian cinema of the post-Independence period. He was well known as a writer and poet in Urdu before beginning to work for the cinema as a script-writer and then director and his best work for the cinema is also remarkable for its literary and poetic qualities. Although he only made four films, they include two masterpieces, Mahal made in 1949 for Bombay Talkies and Pakeezah, first conceived in 1958 but not brought to the screen until 1972. As script-writer he was responsible for his work on the films of Sorahb Modi and K. Asif, including the dialogues for the latter's famous 1961 epic Mughal-e-Azam.

Both as script-writer and director, his work is notable for its highly charged sexuality, returning again and again to themes of illicit or obsessive passion. As a director, he developed a unique style that combines a stylised direction with minimalist performance-style, very different from the highly expressive acting-style common in much Indian cinema of the period. Both his two most famous films express an extremely personal vision of the world and are not so much films as symphonic poems on celluloid.

Meena Kumari, the star of Pakeezah, was Amrohi's second wife but the marriage ended in 1964, a divorce that halted work on the film. They reunited professionally to finish the film but Kumari, an alcoholic, died only a few days after the film was released. Amrohi himself died in Bombay on 11 February 1993, ten years after making his last film, Razia Sultan (1983).