Sharmila Tagore was told that marrying Tiger Pataudi is a professional suicide: ‘She said I don’t care’ | Hindi Movie News

Sharmila Tagore married Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi (Tiger Pataudi) at the peak of her career. In many ways, it was a bold decision, as it was an interfaith marriage which faced a lot of opposition from everyone. They even got death threats but Tagore did what she had to. She also continued to work after she got married. In a recent interview, Sharmila’s daughter Soha Ali Khan revealed that people thought that it was a professional suicide.
Soha said during a chat with Nayandeep Rakshit, “She was earning her own money from the age of 13. She was working in films, which, definitely, at that point, was, good girls don’t work in films. And she chose to get married to someone from another religion because her heart told her to do that and her whole life she was asked, ‘how is your husband allowing you to work after marriage?’ And she was like, ‘what do you mean allowing?’ And my father was so liberal in his thinking. I really think he broke the mould.”
She further added, “She has always done what she wanted to do. At the height of her career, she chose to get married to my father and everyone said ‘this is like professional suicide, how can you do it?’ She said ‘I don’t care, I am doing this’ and she kept working.”
In another interview, Soha had revealed that Sharmila was the breadwinner of the family as after Tiger Pataudi got retired, he didn’t earn anything from cricket. At that point in time, there were no endorsements or IPL. She said, “My mother was the breadwinner in the family so I always saw him saying, ‘You should do what makes you happy’, and I also saw my mother who also has been an actor her whole life, and she still chose to do whatever her heart prompted her to do. At the age of 24, she got married even though you typically don’t do that if you are a woman. You know that when you get married your career takes a bit of a hit. She had a child a couple of years later, and she continued to work and she had some of her biggest successes after that.”
Soha added, “By the time I was born, my father retired from cricket but he played for the enjoyment of the sport. There was no money at all.”