Ruby Myers

Ruby Myers was born in 1907 in Pune, then a garrison and administrative city of the Bombay Presidency under the British Raj ^[1]. Her family belonged to the Baghdadi Jewish community, a small but prosperous group of Middle Eastern origin that had settled in the port cities of western India during the nineteenth century and built lives in trade, the professions, and civic institutions ^[2].

Her background mattered enormously to the career that followed. In the 1920s, acting in films carried a social stigma for women from most Indian communities, and respectable families rarely allowed their daughters near a studio. Women from Anglo-Indian and Baghdadi Jewish households, who lived somewhat outside the caste and purdah conventions of the wider society, faced fewer barriers, and several of them became the first female stars of the Bombay screen ^[2]. Myers grew up speaking English, and as a young woman she took a job as a telephone operator in Bombay, one of the newer occupations then opening to women in the city ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Ruby Myers before the cameras found her would have met an ordinary working woman of colonial Bombay. That ordinariness ended abruptly when the film industry came calling.

Mohan Bhavnani, a director at the Kohinoor Film Company, spotted Myers and pressed her to act in his pictures. By her own later accounts she refused at first, unsure of the profession and of her own ability, but Bhavnani persisted and she eventually agreed ^[1]. The studio gave her the screen name Sulochana, a Sanskrit word meaning the one with beautiful eyes, a choice that fitted both her striking looks and the industry habit of giving Indian names to actresses from minority communities ^[2].

Her rise at Kohinoor was rapid. In 1926 she appeared in Typist Girl, a contemporary social drama that drew directly on the world of office work she had just left, and the film's success established her as a box office draw ^[3]. Other silent hits followed in quick succession, among them Balidan and Cinema Queen, and audiences began to buy tickets on the strength of her name alone, something few Indian performers of either sex could then claim ^[3].

In 1928 she moved to the Imperial Film Company of Ardeshir Irani, the Bombay studio that would soon produce India's first sound film. At Imperial she was paired repeatedly with the actor Dinshaw Billimoria, and the two became the most popular romantic team of the late silent period ^[2]. Any Ruby Myers biography has to linger on these Imperial years, because they made her the face of Indian cinema at the exact moment the medium was becoming a mass entertainment.

The clearest measure of Sulochana's standing was her salary. Contemporary and later accounts agree that at the height of her silent era fame she earned around five thousand rupees a month, a figure widely reported to exceed the pay of the Governor of Bombay ^[1]. For a working woman in colonial India, and one from a small minority community at that, this was without precedent.

Her most celebrated performance came in Wildcat of Bombay (1927), a crime adventure directed by Bhavnani in which she played eight separate roles, including a gardener, a policeman, a Hyderabadi gentleman, a street urchin, a European blonde, and an expert pickpocket ^[3]. The film became one of the signature achievements of Indian silent cinema and demonstrated a range that went far beyond the decorative heroine parts usually written for women. Among the most repeated Ruby Myers facts, this eight role turn remains the favourite of film historians ^[2].

The arrival of sound in 1931 destroyed many silent careers, since the talkies demanded fluent Hindustani and Myers had grown up with English. She responded by withdrawing to learn Hindustani properly, then returned to the screen and rebuilt her stardom in sound remakes of her own silent successes, including Madhuri (1932), Indira M.A. (1934), and Anarkali (1935), in which she played the doomed court dancer of Mughal legend opposite Billimoria ^[3]. That she survived the transition at all placed her in a small company; that she returned to the top of the profession made her singular. Weighing Ruby Myers achievements, historians point to this reinvention as proof that her fame rested on more than novelty.

Myers never married. Her long professional partnership with Dinshaw Billimoria was widely rumoured to be a romance, and film historians note that the pair worked almost exclusively with each other at Imperial through the early 1930s, but the relationship ended and neither ever confirmed its nature publicly ^[2]. She guarded her private life with a discretion unusual for someone so famous.

Off screen she lived in Bombay, the city that had made her, and remained attached to it for the rest of her life. In the 1930s she took control of her own affairs in a way few actresses then attempted, founding a production concern, Rubi Pics, to make films under her own banner ^[3]. The venture reflected both her commercial standing and a streak of independence that ran through her whole career, from the initial refusal of Bhavnani's offer to her decision to master a new language rather than retire when sound arrived ^[1].

By the early 1940s a new generation of singing stars had displaced the veterans of the silent screen, and leading roles stopped coming. Myers adapted once more, moving into character parts, and worked steadily for decades playing mothers, aunts, and grande dames in Hindi films. Among the best remembered of these later appearances was the hit Jugnu (1947), in which she featured alongside Dilip Kumar and the singer and actor Noor Jehan ^[3].

Recognition of her place in film history came late but emphatically. In 1973 the Government of India conferred on her the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, the country's highest honour in cinema, given for lifetime contribution to Indian film ^[4]. She was only the fourth recipient of the award, and the citation acknowledged what audiences of the 1920s had known first: that she had done as much as anyone to turn the Bombay film industry into a star driven popular art.

Her final years were quiet and, by most accounts, financially modest, a common fate for performers of her generation who had earned fortunes before the era of residuals and royalties ^[1]. Ruby Myers died in Mumbai on 10 October 1983, at the age of 76 ^[1].

Sulochana's importance to Indian cinema is difficult to overstate. She was the industry's first fully fledged female superstar, and her success helped erode the prejudice that kept Indian women off the screen. The generation of actresses who followed her in the 1930s and 1940s entered a profession that she had made imaginable as a career ^[2].

Her films themselves survive only in fragments, since the great majority of Indian silent cinema is lost, and this has made her reputation depend on written records, stills, and the memories of colleagues collected by historians ^[3]. Scholars of early Bombay film treat her as a central case study in how the city's studios drew on minority communities, new forms of female labour, and imported ideas of glamour to build a national entertainment industry ^[2].

Public commemoration has continued long after her death. In 2013, as part of the celebrations marking one hundred years of Indian cinema, India Post issued a postage stamp bearing her image, placing the telephone girl from Pune among the honoured founders of the national film tradition ^[5]. For anyone tracing the history of stardom in India, the story begins with her.