During the recital, Nawabjaan recognises Shahbuddin, Salim's paternal uncle, and calls him to witness the irony of the situation: his own daughter dancing and entertaining his family.

[10] Daaera's commercial failure left Amrohi feeling insecure about his career,[11] and he wanted to make a film that would both establish him as a filmmaker and be a tribute to Kumari,[12] reflecting his love for her.

[22] In 1958, Amrohi stated he would play Salim because he could not find a suitable actor for the role,[23] but he abandoned the idea because he found it difficult to act and direct at the same time.

[27] After considering a number of actors, Raaj Kumar became the final choice for the part; Pakeezah was his second collaboration with Amrohi after the medical romantic drama Dil Apna Aur Preet Parai (1960).

[48] What remained uncomposed were the music for the alap and background score, and by the time production restarted, Amrohi chose Naushad to finish both because distributors persisted with their recommendation.

[51] On 30 January 1972, The Illustrated Weekly of India carried an article by Kamal Amrohi, saying that he doubted Kumari could deliver a good performance at the age of almost 40.

[56] Pakeezah premiered at Maratha Mandir, Bombay, on 4 February 1972;[57] Kumari attended the opening with Amrohi, his son Tajdar, and Raaj Kumar.

[60] Pakeezah initially opened to mediocre box-office returns[61] but the film emerged as a sleeper hit[62] and ran for over 50 weeks,[63] in 33 of which it was fully booked.

Due to the success of the televising of Pakeezah, few people visited cinemas on that day, leading the owners, who faced financial failure, to demand a ban on airing the film.

[70] Thought magazine panned the storyline of a prostitute as irrelevant for the 1970s but complimented the technical aspects, including the colour cinematography and Amrohi's dedication to continuing production of the film for such a long time.

[71] The Thought writer also added that the film's dialogue uses many metaphors, especially a scene in which Sahibjaan has a monologue about the letter she finds on the train, and considered it to be excessively philosophical and unnatural.

He keeps hovering between fantasy and realism and often the world outside seems more interesting—those shots of a passing train, for instance, to suggest the heroine's thoughts recurring to the man she never met ... Nobody seems very sure whether the heroine's playing prostitute or virgin—not even the heroine.Nirmal Kumar Ghosh reviewed Pakeezah positively for Amrita Bazar Patrika, saying the popular belief among critics of the time was that the film's "overabundant wealth of dramatic conviction wrapped in superb cinematic fluidity is slow to its core".

[73] Ghosh predicted it would be "a standing testimony to the great heights of tragedy that a peerless actress-tragedienne of Kumari's calibre could climb to achieve deathlessness".

"[59] He commented that Kumari's "understated performance and moist eyes sparkling with unshed tears have a hypnotic effect", saying Raaj Kumar's presence is felt because of his character's "likeable steadfastness".

[59] In 2005, British academic Rachel Dwyer applauded Pakeezah for presenting aesthetics in the cast and the choreography, and noted "the elaboration of scenery and in particular of clothing, tied to a certain nostalgia arising from the decline and disappearance of courtesan culture".

She called Kumari's character a "quintessentially romantic figure: a beautiful but tragic woman, who pours out her grief for the love she is denied in tears, poetry and dance".

[82] Writing for The Hindu in 2008, Anjana Rajan likened reviewing Pakeezah in the 21st century to stepping "into the twilight world when India was traditional even in its approach to modernity.

And when commercial Hindi cinema looked society in the face to point out its flaws, yet laced the statement with a sad sweetness, a searing beauty.

"[83] In a review carried by the Pakistani newspaper Dawn in 2012, Raza Ali Sayeed found the plot to be "over-the-top" but said it is helped by the visuals: "From the dazzling colors of the dresses worn by the courtesans, to the beautiful set pieces which bring the world of the tawaif to life, this film is a joy to the senses".

[40] In protest, Pran, the winner of Best Supporting Actor for Be-Imaan, returned his trophy[88] and said Mohammed's loss was "an insult" for India's music industry.

[92] Moreover, Kumari earned a then record-setting twelfth and final nomination for the Filmfare Award for Best Actress for her performance in the musical romantic drama Pakeezah after her death in March 1972.

In Pakeezah's narrative, Nargis and Sahibjaan present as Lucknow-based tawaifs, in the mold of hookers with a heart of gold, who fall in love with Shahbuddin and Salim, members of nawab families, respectively.

In the film's opening minutes, voiceover is used to identify Nargis as a courtesan with a "mesmerising voice" and whose tinkling of bells are "a sensation all over", and is the younger sister of the character Nawabjaan.

Later in the film, the voiceover describes a man who wants to remove Nargis from her brothel, which is referred to as "this hell", and the black-dressed Shahbuddin then opens the doors.

[112] According to Raheja, Amrohi narrates "a story imbued with the despair and the euphoria of human desires so deftly that you are caught up in the swirl of the visual maximalism in the fanciful, almost surreal setting.

[125] Pakeezah has been noted for its unusually long production time,[126] and is described by critics as the finest example of the Muslim social,[127] a genre that declined in the 1970s with the rise of secular themes in Bollywood.

The duo Abu Jani–Sandeep Khosla's design of anarkali, the Indian version of a ball gown, was inspired by Kumari's costumes in Pakeezah; it was shown in their first fashion show in 1988.

[136] The American Indologist Philip Lutgendorf of the University of Iowa, who compiled a list of "Ten Indian Popular Films that are Not-to-be-missed" in 2014, placed Pakeezah in the third position.

"[148] Writing for Open in 2018, Dwyer said Pakeezah along with Deewaar (1975), Sholay (1975), and films of Bimal Roy and Guru Dutt "could constitute some kind of 'world cinema', where despite their typical features such as the use of melodrama and heightened emotion especially around the family, an engaging narrative, stars, a certain mise en scène, usually one of glamour, grandiloquent dialogues and all-important songs, they can be appraised on similar critical and aesthetic terms".

[150] Desai wrote the book Pakeezah: An Ode to a Bygone World (2013), providing an inside look at the production, release and thematic analysis.