Khadaklat

She was born Rangu Shankarrao Diwan on 30 July 1928 in Khadaklat, a village in Belagavi district of what is now Karnataka, then part of the Bombay Presidency. Her father, Shankarrao Diwan, was a police officer; her mother was Tanubai. Both parents died while she was young, and she was raised by her maternal aunt, Banubai Latkar, whose surname she carried thereafter. Her formal schooling ended at the fourth standard.

By almost any measure of the period, that was the end of her prospects. She went on to appear in roughly three hundred films across two languages and to become, for two generations of Indian audiences, the definitive screen mother.

Her youth was spent in Kolhapur, then a serious centre of Marathi film production. Through a family connection she found work at Master Vinayak's Prafulla Pictures for thirty rupees a month, and made her first screen appearance in Chimukla Sansar in 1943.

Her husband, Aabasaheb Chavan, whom she married at fourteen, knew the film-maker Bhalji Pendharkar, and introduced her at his Jayprabha Studio. Pendharkar cast her in the 1943 Hindi film Maharathi Karna and renamed her Sulochana. The new name stuck for eighty years.

Leading Lady of Marathi Cinema

Between 1946 and 1961 Sulochana was among the principal leading actresses of Marathi cinema. She appeared in Sasurvas in 1946, Meeth Bhakar in 1949, Vahinichya Bangdya in 1953 and Sangtye Aika in 1959 — the last a phenomenon of Marathi film history, running in Kolhapur for an extraordinary period and becoming one of the industry's defining commercial successes.

Marathi cinema of that era dealt in domestic drama, social reform themes and rural life, and Sulochana's screen persona — composed, dignified, emotionally legible without theatrics — was ideally suited to it. She remained loyal to the industry throughout her career, appearing in some fifty Marathi films even as Hindi cinema absorbed most of her working life.

The Mother of Hindi Cinema

From Dil Deke Dekho in 1959, Sulochana began the phase for which she is most widely remembered: playing the mother. From that year until the early 1990s she was, more than any other actress, the face of maternal authority in Hindi film — mother to Sunil Dutt, to Dev Anand, to Rajesh Khanna, in a body of work running to roughly two hundred and fifty Hindi films.

Her credits include Kati Patang, Johny Mera Naam and Prem Nagar, and a long list of others in which she anchored the emotional register of the film from the domestic scenes. It is easy to undervalue this kind of work. The mother in Hindi popular cinema was a structural necessity — the moral centre against which the hero's choices registered — and the role could easily collapse into sentimentality. Sulochana's contribution was to play it with restraint. Her mothers were recognisably ordinary women rather than symbols, and audiences trusted them accordingly.

Her career was long enough that she played mother to actors whose own careers began and ended within it. The span from 1943 to the late 1980s covers the entire arc of Hindi cinema's studio era, its golden age and the masala period that followed.

Family and Later Years

She lived in Prabhadevi, Mumbai, for many years. Her daughter Kanchan married the celebrated theatre and film actor Kashinath Ghanekar. Her adopted son Ram Kelkar married the actress Jeevankala, and their daughter Manisha Kelkar also became an actress — three generations of the family in the industry.

Honours came steadily. She received the V. Shantaram Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997, the Padma Shri in 1999, the Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004, the Maharashtra Bhushan — the highest civilian honour of the state of Maharashtra — in 2009, and a Filmfare Marathi Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021, at the age of ninety-two.

She died on 4 June 2023 at a hospital in Mumbai, of respiratory failure, aged ninety-four. Tributes came from across both the Marathi and Hindi industries, and a striking number of them made the same observation: that a very large number of Indians of a certain age had, in some sense, grown up with her as their mother.

What the Record Shows

The essential facts are worth restating plainly. An orphaned girl from a Belagavi village, educated to the fourth standard and married at fourteen, entered films at fifteen for thirty rupees a month, became a leading lady of Marathi cinema, then sustained a second forty-year career in Hindi film after most actresses of her generation had stopped working, and finished with the Padma Shri and the Maharashtra Bhushan.

Khadaklat is a small place on the Karnataka-Maharashtra border, in the linguistically mixed belt where Marathi and Kannada meet. It produced an actress who worked in both film industries of that region and became one of the most widely recognised faces in the country.