Madhubala at Athens 2004: Greece’s love letter to India’s Marilyn Monroe

During the Closing Ceremony of the Athens 2004 Olympics, popular Greek singers Antonis Remos and Anna Vissi mesmerised thousands at the iconic Olympic Stadium in Greece with a foot-tapping rendition of a popular Greek song Mandoubala.

To any Indian listening, the language of the song could have been ‘Greek’ but the emotions behind it, not quite. Mandoubala is, after all, an ode to Madhubala – the Marilyn Monroe of India.

So how did a song from distant Greece end up being a serenade to one of the most beloved Bollywood heroines of the yore?

The answer is an intriguing one, perhaps as captivating as Alexander the Great’s fabled meeting with Porus on the banks of the Jhelum – one of the first, and the most iconic, records of Indo-Greek exchanges in history.

Madhubala – Indian cinema’s Venus, Greece’s Aphrodite

Ask anyone growing up in India in the 1950s and 60s and they’d tell you that falling in love with Madhubala, born Mumtaz Jehan Begum Dehlavi**,** wasn’t hard.

Along with Nargis, Madhubala was the leading lady of Bollywood in the 1950s and 60s and acted in over 70 movies, including ageless classics like Mughal-e-Azam, Mr and Mrs '55 and Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi, among others, before her untimely death at the age of just 36.

An ethereal beauty and brilliant actor, Madhubala was, and still is, synonymous with love and beauty in India – an appeal that earned her the ‘Venus of Indian cinema’ moniker. Venus was the Roman goddess of love and beauty, the equivalent to the Greek goddess Aphrodite.

And like India, Greece also found its Aphrodite in Madhubala.

Greece and India - separated by miles, united by Madhubala

The reason behind Greece’s affection to Madhubala can largely be attributed to the mass appeal of Indian cinema among Greece’s working class during the 50s and 60s, mostly brought about by the societal parallels between the two countries at the time.

During the partition of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, Greece saw a huge influx of refugees coming in as the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish war between 1919 and 1922. Soon after, Greece was engulfed by the horrors of World War II and a bloody civil war followed.

The tumultuous times gave rise to an economically and socially marginalised blue-collar working class in Greece, mostly living in slums on the outskirts of cities like Athens and Thessaloniki.

The class comprised families of the refugees who came in after 1922 trying to rebuild their lives and carve out their own places in a new nation.

The movement also spilled over to cultural instruments like music and cinema. One of the products was a new style of music called rembetiko, which later evolved into laiko, Greece’s version of modern pop music.

“The refugees sang a new style of urban blues. Called rembetiko it was played on oriental instruments like the bouzouki and tzouras and told stories of injustice, longing, addiction and hope for a better future,” music and art expert Nate Rabe explained in his editorial for the Scroll.

“Though the middle classes rejected the refugees and their music, it caught on in the cities with a number of singers gaining national popularity. By the 1950s, in a process not dissimilar to the blues morphing into rock and roll, rembetiko was transformed into laiko, the pop music of Greece.”

The landscape in India wasn't too different.

Still early days following its independence from British rule in 1947 and in the bloody footsteps of a violent partition that followed, the Indian society was also looking to rebuild.

Cinema, as it often does, mirrored society with Bollywood movies like Shree 420, Naya Daur and Mother India reflected the socio-political changes sweeping across the nation at the time.

Bollywood movies being cheaper to acquire than other international counterparts also found its takers among Greek film importers. Though in a language unknown and often poorly-subtitled, Hindi cinema struck a chord with Greece’s marginalised, who identified their own struggles of coming to terms with exile and migration with the portrayals in these movies.

“These Hindi-language films aired in both first and second-tier theatres. Over two decades, more films aired and their influence embedded in the popular music of the time,” writes Greek educationist Helen Abadzi in her book The Revelation of Hindi-Style Songs in Greece co-authored with Manuel Tasoulas.

The popularity of Hindi movies also made the stars like Madhubala and Nargis household names in Greece at the time.

Origins of Mandoubala - the song

A lot of rembetiko songs were also inspired by Bollywood movies, songs and lyrics, infused with local Greek sensitivities, instruments and flavour.

And Mandoubala, originally sung by Stelios Kazantzidis in 1959, was one of the biggest hits to emerge from the marriage of Indo-Greek sentiments at the time.

Kazantzidis, often referred to as the father of laiko music in Greece, was a master of communicating the pain of separation through his songs and Mandoubala, perhaps, saw Kazantzidis at his best.

“From the days of Homer's Ulysses to the contemporary songs of Stelios Kazantzidis, who has died of cancer aged 70, Greeks have turned the pain of exile and migration into art as a means of coming to terms with it. Kazantzidis was considered a lone rider in the rich tapestry of Greek music,” Guardian’s obituary for Kazantzidis reads.

“His achievement was to express, single-handedly, the undiluted social and emotional upheaval that Greeks went through after the second World War and the ensuing civil war.”

There have been debates whether Kazantzidis himself or a female refugee lyricist Eftihis Papayiannopoulou, a woman, penned the heart-wrenching ode.

In the song, the singer pleads for their lost love ‘Mandoubala’ to return. Papayiannopoulou’s Mandoubala, it is believed, was her daughter, who had died the year she wrote the lyrics.

Legendary Greek composer Theodoros Derveniotis arranged the music for the rembetiko song, which is said to have been traced a lot from the old Bollywood classic ‘Aa Jao Tadapte Hain Arman’ from the movie Awaara. Interestingly, Awaara didn’t star Madhubala, but her peer Nargis.

More than a song, Mandoubala was a cultural phenomenon in Greece and became the first record in the country to sell over 100,000 copies. Greece’s population at the time was just around 7.5 million.

The success of the song even inspired Stelios Kazantzidis to release a follow-up number named ‘The return of Mandoubala’.

Sports, cinema and music – all three, individually, have the power to melt away boundaries or borders, be it linguistic, political, sociological or geographical.

However, the rendition of Mandoubala to close Athens 2004 was one of the rare instances that all three popular mediums combined in a way to spread the message of kinship and empathy.

And what better stage for it to play out on than the Olympic Stadium in Athens – the spiritual home of the Olympics – as the Summer Games returned to Greece for the first time since the inaugural modern rendition in 1896.