Faizabad / Varanasi , UTTAR PRADESH :

Lucknow:

Umrao Jaan, the courtesan and poetess immortalised by Rekha in a 1981 classic, has got an address 80 years after her death.

A local club of sportspersons and social activists who had found Umrao Jaan’s nondescript grave in Varanasi in 2004 have built a tomb and decorated it for public viewing.

The tomb at the Fatman graveyard in Sigra was thrown open for public viewing on Tuesday (December 26, believed to be her death anniversary) and over 2,000 people have paid tribute to her since then.

Although there is no authentic research available on her, the general belief is that Umrao Jaan, on whose turbulent life at least a dozen films have been made in India and Pakistan and who inspired Mirza Hadi Ruswa’s novel Umrao Jaan Ada, left Awadh at the turn of the 19th century and lived in many places since, slipping into oblivion.

Shakil Ahmad, the president of the Derbyshire Club, a group of sportspersons and While trying to gather more information about her, “I was working on the grave of (shehnai exponent) Ustad Bismillah Khan one-and-a-half years ago when someone told me Umrao Jaan’s resting place was near his.”Some local people and I discussed and decided to renovate her grave. . The grave has been kept open at the centre in keeping with Islamic tradition, which says a grave shouldn’t be completely covered

None of the films made on Umrao Jaan, including the 2006 movie in which Aishwarya Rai Bachchan played the courtesan, mentions that she spent her final years in Varanasi.

source:  http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph, Calcutta, India / Home> India / by  Piyush Shrivastava / December 28th, 2017