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Nighat Sultana

Nighat Sultana in Aas Paas (1957)

Characters that are born on the celluloid breathe amongst people. Otherwise, they die young! If you have watched Hasan Tariq’s classic, Neend, from 1959, you would have noticed a young prostitute in the scenes from the coalminer’s colony, who sings merrily along the littered streets, to the refrains of the famous song by Rasheed Attre, Aik dil hai aur gaahak itnay, by Zubaida khanum. After the song, she meets a young man coming down the pathway, who turns out to be Asad Jaffri. She pleads with him for alms, for the made-up excuse that her father is terminally ill and she doesn’t have the money for his treatment. This role was performed by Nighat Sultana, who seemed gifted with characteristic features. Hasan Tariq first met her on the set of film, Saat Lakh, where he was the chief assistant director. He liked her instantly, and after Neend, they got married.

Nighat Sultana, was a fine artiste, who played quite a few good roles in films, although not many of them are available in the video market. Her father, Hasan Ali was a Bengali, who enlisted himself in the army during the 1st World War, and went to Iraq. He married an Iraqi Kurd woman, but had no child for a long time. After lots of prayerful pleadings from God, he was finally blessed with a girl, in 1935, whom he named Gulzar Begum. The girl was 14 years old, when Hasan Ali returned from Iraq, and settled in Karachi. He wanted his daughter to become a doctor. Gulzar Begum studied nursing and became a competent nurse, working in an army hospital for sometime. During this period, Hasan Ali suffered from blindness, and now, his daughter was the only earner for the family. At this juncture, Gulzar Begum was advised by his colleagues to approach the film industry, because she was good looking and graceful, and had much more chances of making it big in the films than toiling away remorselessly as the nurse, who is paid chickenfeed. So Gulzar went to Lahore, and met director, Aslam Irani, who screened-tested her and cast her in his film, Tarap. The film was released in 1953, with the leads played by Sudhir, Alauddin and Shammi, but flopped miserably. By now, she was known by her screen name Nighat Sultana. The reason for naming her thus for the screen could be that Nigar Sultana the famous Indian beauty and Darpan’s first love in films, was a byword for beauty and grace in the sub-continent, at that time. After some personnel disappointments, Nighat returned to Karachi, and was cast in Rafiq Ghaznavi’s Mandi, in a secondary role. Here, a well-known film-maker, Hasan Ali Fazlani observed her work and cast her as the lead in Pakistan’s first–ever Sindhi production, Omar Marvi. It is interesting to note that Omar Marvi was a big hit at the box-office, while Mandi was a flop.

Nighat Sultana continued to play the lead in small-budget films like Pyar Na Kar Nadan, Lakhpati, Chan Mahi and others, apart from a few top-grade ventures like Aas Paas and Neend. But it was in Riaz Shahid’s Susral, in 1962, that she played a character role of an invalid young girl very impressively. Amongst her other movies are included Thandi Sarak, Sassi Punhu (where she also played the lead), Pawan, Nooran, Pasban, Shohrat etc. In the later stage of her life, Nighat Sultana was asked to perform pivotal role as the “boss lady” in a film called Madam X, but the film remained incomplete. Her get-up and performance on the sets of the film proved, once again, that the grace and performance of Nighat Sultana was unmatched even at that advanced stage in her career.

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