Celebrated costume designer Bhanu Athaiya spills her trade secrets.
 Buxom beauties, spindly-legged mahatmas, nationalistic villagers and giddy-headed hedonists. Bhanu Athaiya has dressed them all. The veteran costume designer who brought India its first Oscar for Gandhi has worked in almost every genre of Hindi cinema. She has been a part of several films, including Amrapali, Guide, Waqt, Brahmachari, Reshma aur Shera, Gandhi and Lagaan. Athaiya’s picture book The Art of Costume Design doesn’t do complete justice to her experiences but it is a valuable addition to the arguably scanty literature on the making of popular Hindi cinema.
The book opens with a short introduction about her childhood in Kolhapur, education at the JJ School of Arts in Mumbai, and early employment with the magazine Eve’s Weekly. Athaiya had a rich exposure to the arts during her youth, which stood her in good stead when she set foot in the Hindi film industry in the 1950s. The bulk of the book is taken up by reproductions of her costumes, which are contextualised by captions.Athaiya entered Hindi cinema at a time when filmmakers were growing increasingly conscious of the importance of sets and costumes. She married her sense of observation to the story’s requirements. “You have to design the right outfit that will supply the right character,” she said. “Costumes depend on what the story demands. Costume design can’t be about the latest styles.”
One of Athaiya’s most celebrated films is Yash Chopra’s Waqt, a lost-and-found drama set among the swish set. For the 1956 movie, Athaiya kitted out her heroines in pencil-slim kurtas and churidars and put the heroes in dandy suits. “At the time, women in big cities mostly wore salwar kameezes and loose kurtas with floral designs,” Athaiya said. “In Waqt, I had the scope to create a more attractive look. I chose solid colours and fabrics that fitted the body lines of the actors.”
Athaiya devotes several pages to her work in Gandhi, which made very different demands of her. “People who saw Gandhi asked me, ‘Why did you get the Oscar for the film?” she said. “Everything looked so normal and ordinary. What they didn’t realise is that I had to cover 50 years of a lifespan in one movie. People only noticed the dhotis.”
The book benefits vastly from the evocative film stills, some from Athaiya’s personal collection and several sourced from producers. However, the section on costume jewellery is marred by a product plug for Tanishq, which appears to have partially sponsored the publication. Film scholars studying the development of visual culture through popular Hindi movies may not be satisfied with the page-by-page parade of pretty clothes. But movie nostalgists who want to know the story behind Vyjayanthimala’s sensuous costumes in Amrapali or Mumtaz’s unusually draped orange sari in Brahmachari won’t complain. Nandini Ramnath
HarperCollins, Rs 2,500.
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