The Court Dancer (1941)

A gifted young dancer performs at the royal court of Manipur, and the prince is drawn to her art and then to her, but the love between a dancer and a royal is forbidden, and religious and political pressures rise against them. The film was made in 1941 in Hindi, Bengali and English versions, under the title Raj Nartaki for the Indian languages, and the English version, The Court Dancer, is counted among the earliest Indian feature films made in English for an international audience. Its main attraction is Sadhona Bose, a celebrated dancer whose classical and Manipuri-style performances are the film's centrepieces, opposite a young Prithviraj Kapoor. Modhu Bose, her husband, directed.