Zohra Sehgal, the 102-year-old veteran actress, recently passed away quietly in Delhi, which is quite unlikely of her since she was known to be the lively little ‘naughtiest 100 plus girl’ in the world of Indian cinema. With her impeccable acting skills and her spirit for life she won hearts of not only her colleagues but also of her fans all over the world.
Zohra continued to work into her 90s without even an ounce of her old age coming in between her passion for art. It is jokingly famous all over Bollywood that she is the only actress who had worked with Prithvi Raj Kapoor and Ranbir Kapoor—a witness to such a tremendous generation gap.
She appeared in famous movies like Dil Se, Cheeni Kum, Bend It Like Beckham and some of the British movies like Tales That Witness Madness, The Courtesans of Bombay and Caravaggio. Her connection with the west was established when she moved to England in the 60s. She did a famous British series called Doctor Who during her time there.
Zohra bibi was a dancer before she plunged into acting full time. She studied ballet in Germany—a thing far too alien for an Indian girl to experience in those times. Soon she joined the troop of an upcoming dancer and choreographer, Uday Shankar, and performed with his company in countries like Japan and United States. Zohra’s whole life was a testimonial act of rebel against the orthodox conventional setup for Asian women at the time.
Much ahead of her time, Zohra bibi defied the purdah system in her own quirky way by tailoring her silk purdahs into fancy petticoats. Her valor, art and thirst for life won her many prestigious awards like Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan.
While rest of the world cringed with the thought of death, she once legendarily told famous writer Khushwant Singh that she wanted an electric cremation. She said, "I don't want any poems or fuss. And for heaven's sake, don't bring back my ashes. Flush them down the toilet if the crematorium refuses to keep them".
A true radical, she lived on her own terms and when her time came, she gracefully accepted her fate. Zohra Seghal has left a big void in the world of Indian cinema that can’t be filled and quite honestly, as her fans, we really don’t want it ever to be filled. It’ll always remind us of her timeless beauty and passion.