Sharmila Tagore and Mansoor Pataudi got married in 1968. (Photo: Saba Pataudi/Instagram)
Sharmila Tagore reveals why she and Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi invited telephone operators to their wedding: ‘They were a part of our love story’
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Veteran actor Sharmila Tagore spoke about the backlash that she faced after posing in a swimsuit for a magazine photoshoot, and said that she had started seeing Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi by then. Revealing that they would communicate via telephone operators who became a part of their love story, she said that they even invited some of them to their wedding eventually. Recalling one conversation in particular, she said that one of them would convey Tiger Pataudi’s words of support for her during the difficult post-photoshoot period.
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During a recent interview posted on The Quorum YouTube channel, Sharmila Tagore spoke about the ‘bikini controversy’ and recalled being on the phone with Tiger Pataudi during that time. “By that time, I had already met Tiger. He was in London, and in those days, there were only telegrams. And if you had the patience to make a call, a lightening call took about half an hour. It went to London via Dubai, Singapore, Canada, wherever… And then you couldn’t really hear each other, so you spoke through the operator. The operators very much became a part of our love story, and we had to invite them to our wedding.”
She added, “Especially the one in Beirut,” and recalled that the operator would say, “He said, ‘Don’t upset, it’ll be alright, you’ll be fine’. This was immediately after Evening in Paris…” Sharmila said that the backlash became so intense that ‘the morality of Indian women’ was discussed even in Parliament, and that she got a stern talking-to from her mentor in the Hindi film industry, director Shakti Samanta. She said that it was a ‘conscious decision’ to do films like Aradhana after that, because she was told to tone it down and she ‘learnt (her) lesson’. “The times were different. If you wanted to be taken seriously, you weren’t alone, your audience was very much a part of… Their acceptance matters,” she said.
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Having started out in the films as a teenage star in Satyajit Ray’s movies, Sharmila moved to Mumbai some years later, and emerged as one of the biggest female actors of the 1970s. She was most recently seen in the Disney+ Hotstar family drama Gulmohar, also starring Manoj Bajpayee.
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