Super Star Rajesh Khanna - Where love has gone

Where love has gone July 22, 2012 Mumbai Paromita Vohra The two people who passed away last week symbolised the1970s. Mrinal Gore, the “Paniwali bai” and India’s first superstar, Rajesh Khanna. They exemplified two ends of the 1970s — the basic deprivations that touched many classes to some degree, unlike today’s wide gaps, and its mirror image, the lush illusions and grand delusions of Hindi cinema. Notwithstanding his brief but unparalleled rule in that time, the obituaries to Rajesh Khanna were perplexing, declaring the end of an era. I had to ask myself, which era would that be and did it seriously end, like, now? In fact, as my friend R, who was young in the 1970s, snorted in his text message about the many sentimentally ironic ‘zindagi ka safar babumoshai’ Facebook updates said, “Let’s face it, the man we loved died twenty years ago, this was just the shell of his body.” Rajesh Khanna Personally, as someone who grew up in the ’80s, despite watching Haathi Mere Saathi and Aan Milo Sajna on Doordarshan Sundays, Rajesh Khanna passed me by. Although I would occasionally note that famous songs which I knew only from radio or antakshari, were picturised on Rajesh Khanna, he already, seemed to belong to some long ago era — i.e., my parents’ youth. And like everything related to someone else’s youth, the stories of how he married Dimple Kapadia to spite his long-time lover Anju Mahendroo seemed like some mixture of unverifiable claims, misremembered rumour or retrospective glamour. For a man who made the term superstar necessary, Rajesh Khanna left curiously little impression upon the years that followed and hardly features in the catalogue of popular culture products Hindi cinema has spawned. Barring the line “Pushpa, I hate tears” there’s not much presence of Rajesh Khanna in spoofs and animated skits. And I can’t recall notable work on him in the fashionable academic field of Bollywood studies either. If we agree that our movies and movie stars serve today, the same purpose that myths of gods and kings did once, then it’s interesting how Rajesh Khanna’s films were like a looping thumbnail of his life — romantic passion, burning youthful belief in the present, no care for surrounding reality and tradition in the face of love and a human hubris, followed inevitably by death. Exactly how his career was — a flashy hibiscus that flowers just for two days. Watching the images of him replaying now, including the freshly viral BBC documentary on him, I am struck though by how he seems to have been the first movie star made primarily for women, with mannerisms that implied that love was all he cared for; that the woman before him was the only thing that existed at that moment, with eyes that saw only her. This full blooded evocation of the erotic, could hardly have had a very long summer and was of course edged out by the masculine self-absorption and angst of Amitabh Bacchan’s persona, before which women’s main function, as mothers or lovers, was to look at (and of course look after) the man, not be looked at by him. (I know, what a shock). It’s hard to say if the true meaning of Rajesh Khanna was revealed by his presence, or his very marked absence from public consciousness. His fall may have been accelerated by his personality, but it was inevitable, given our society’s particular relationship with power and status. We are much more comfortable deifiying traditionally masculine figures who are at the centre of their worlds, who control things, as opposed to our rather self-doubting, feckless relationship with love and the vulnerabilities and change it stands for. Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevi.com. The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper. http://www.mid-day.com/columnists/2012/jul/220712-Opinion-Paromita-Vohra-Where-love-has-gone-Rajesh-Khanna-passed-away.htm

A Real Story of a conflict between A Super Star Actor- Rajesh Khanna and Cheten Anand a Super Star Director

July 20, 2012, 2:03 am Filed under: Film Musings | Tags: film education, oorvazi irani, sorab irani, film workshop, indian cinema, Cannes film festival, Kudrat, Chetan Anand, Rajesh Khanna, hindi film industry, indian popular cinema, auteur, indian auteur, neecha nagar, Indian film stars, hindi cinema, Directr's cut, Producer's cut A Real Story of a conflict between A Super Star Actor- Rajesh Khanna and Cheten Anand a Super Star Director Musing of a Veteran Producer/ Director – Sorab Irani . So much is said about Rajesh Khanna post his sad demise in all media, I am reminded on this occasion of a interesting real life story which I would like to share. A little known fact is that Chetan Anand’s debut film,Neecha Nagar bagged the Palme d’Ore (Best Film) award, at the first ever Cannes Film Festival in 1946. It was my honor and privilege to have worked and observed and to have learned so much about cinema from this great truly Indian cinematic genius Chetan Anand was the first director to cast Rajaesh Khann is his film ‘Aakhri Khat’. Latter when his career started flagging a bit, Rajesh Khanna thought he needed a great director to make a film with him and he approached Chetan Anand. I was at that time general manager of Chetan Anand’s production company – Himalaya Films. In those days films were produced largely on star-power, and if a project was initiated by a Star it was good news. However Chetan Anand was in financial trouble and in a meeting with Rajesh Khanna confessed to him that he had the right subject but no money. Chetan Anand always had ready stories in his head, he thrived on the creative process that resulted in a film idea and at any given time had a great oeuvre of film stories. In that meeting where I was also present he narrated the story of ‘Kudrat’ to Rajesh Khanna and Rajesh Khanna loved it. In a week’s time Rajesh Khann was back at Chetan sahibs Juhu seafront shack with a producer in tow one B. S. Khanna. It was all settled in that sitting that B. S would finance and produce the film and that Chetan Anand would direct the film and so the film ‘Kudrat’ was born. This is not the story of how ‘Kudrat’ was made, which in itself is fascinating but about the antics of stars and a conflict that developed pre release of the film between Chetan Anand and Rajesh Khanna. The film was very hot, the music was already a super hit. It then transpired that Kakaji arranged for a private screening of the film and decided on a course of action which was unethical for sure but not entirely unheard of in the Bollywood of that time. Encouraged by his chamchas he decided that in order to hog the entire credit of the success of the film he had to reduce the roles of the others like Vinod Khanna, Raj Kumar, he high jacked the editor of the film, and started reediting the film. The editor informed Chetan Anand quietly as his conscious troubled him, he was in great awe of Chetan sahib and had worked together for over a year to shape the film. I got a call from a very distressed Chetan sahib at 6 am in the morning asking me to go to the editor’s house and bring him over to meet Chetan sahib. I was also very amazed that any one dare tamper with the edit of a director like Chetan Anand. By 7.30 am I was at the editors house in Matunga but he was absconding. I went to the shack and Chetan was furious. Kaka would not taking his calls nor was the producer B. S. Khanna, the conspiracy was clearly unfolding. What do we do. I went with Chetan sahib to Navarang Lab, spoke to the owner protesting but the owner claimed helplessness as he had to follow the instructions of the Producer of the project owing to the large sums of money involved. We then decided to file complaints with the Film Editor’s association and with the Film Producers association requesting this be stopped. In the night I started getting threatening calls. Some one called my wife and told her that she would find my dead body by morning. I was out and there were no cell phones at that time, so when I called home my wife was weeping and scared silly. Now I was indeed very angry and being in Juhu at the time went to B. S Khanna’s house to confront him, he was not home but I got him on the phone from there and asked him about all this nonsense about threatening calls to my wife and told him very plainly that I was not one bit intimidated and if it did not stop I would lodge a police complain. Later I spoke to Chetan sahib and he too complained that he had a similar experience of his residence getting threatening calls. The next day the producer B. S Khanna claimed total innocence about all the goings on and said nothing was true, we demanded that we need to be allowed to examine the final cut negative and talk to the editor and informed him that no one had a right to make changes to the final cut of the film. He diplomatically said it was too late, the negative was involved in the process at the lab of making copies of the release prints. Gloom set in at the shack, it seemed that the Rajesh Khanna camp in connivance with the producer B. S Khanna have prevailed. In an unprecedented move Chetan Anand decided to go to the Bombay High Court to stop the release of his own film. The case came up before the astute Parsi judge Justice Lantern. The whole film industry was there. Justice Lantern denied us the relief that we were seeking although sympathizing with our case but saying that huge sums of money would be lost of the third parties namely the distributors if he granted us the ad interim relief and posted the matter for regular hearing. The real point of this story is not to malign anybody but to raise critical questions – who has the right to the final cut of the film, the director or the producer. Who decides what the audiences will see, financiers/producers or the creators the/directors. Added to this perennial existing conflict and tussle enter today the marketing guru’s who with sampling and consensus building marketing methods start confusing matters completely. What happens to an Auteur director if he is not also the producer of the film. Food for thought and meaningful debate. http://oorvazifilmeducation.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/a-real-story-of-a-conflict-between-a-super-star-actor-rajesh-khanna-and-cheten-anand-a-super-star-director/

Rajesh Khanna’s Special Message

Rajesh Khanna’s Special Message July 25, 2012 Rajesh Khanna, the actor who romanced death on screen as often as he did heroines, left behind a special recorded message for his family, friends and fans. 40 years ago, in Anand, his character taped a message for Babu Moshai or Amitabh Bachchan. In real life, the superstar’s message was played at his chautha held over the weekend. English Translation of the message: My dear friends, brothers and sisters, I’m not the one to get nostalgic. I’ve always looked ahead towards the future. Whatever has passed let it stay in the past, thinking about bygones doesn’t help. But, when one suddenly comes across familiar faces in unfamiliar settings, the memories comes rushing back. My journey began with theater, I owe my success to the stage. This theater where it all began when I joined the film industry, I had no God Father, no relatives or family that I could turn too. I came into the movies through the United Producers Filmfare Talent contest. We were called to the Times of India in the presencen of celeberated filmmakers like Chopra saab, Bimal Roy , Shakti Samanta and many others. They asked me we had sent you a dialogue, did you memorise it? I was sitting in front of the table where they were seated and felt I was undergoing a courtmartial. I thought they would take a gun and fire at me. I said, “I know the dialogue but you haven’t told me what’s the characterisation of the person who is to narrate this dialogue. Is he the hero who is announcing to his mother that he plans to marry a dancer and maker her the daughter-in-law of the house? You haven’t told me whether this hero is rich , poor, a villianou character or a pleasant fellow, is he from the middle class?” So, Mr Chopra said, “You are from the stage so make your own characterisation how will you convince the mother.” I said this is not a dialogue for a stage actor to mouth, so he said then you chose your own dialogue. I was nervously sweating and anxious wondering which dialogue should I impress them with. I had seen their movies several times and this is the dialogue I said which took me towards stardom. The dialogue was Yes I am an artist , yes I am artist, why would you want to hear my story, the dialogue which began my story in cinema. Friends, I’m a part of you, and as I said, you have all taken time out for me. This is the love, your presence in numbers that I’m greatful for, thank you, thank you my salaam to you all. http://bargad.org/2012/07/25/rajesh-khanna-special-message/

Zindagi Badi Honi Chahiye, Lambi Nahin…ha, ha, ha

Zindagi Badi Honi Chahiye, Lambi Nahin…ha, ha, ha July 19, 2012 Susmita Dasgupta, a ‘Sociologist of everyday life’ wrote her Doctoral thesis on Amitabh Bachchan. Her blog is here. Susmita Dasgupta The first Hindi film I saw which I also happened to follow and recall was Aradhana. It was in a large group of uncles and aunts and cousins that we went to watch the film in a modest theatre in Behala of Kolkata. I think that Bulimashi got married and she being the youngest of her eight siblings, the large family of my mother’s decided to celebrate the moolah obtained from her husband as the gatekeeping money to the hilt by watching the new release called Aradhana with Sharmila Tagore in it. This was the film that also catapulted Rajesh Khanna to superstardom. The fall out of this film on us children was that my cousins and I could mimic the film, scene by scene and dialogue by dialogue. In such acts of imitation, we would identify with the heroine. Rajesh Khanna was not the principle point of view. But for the world around me, Dola Aunty, my private tutor, Geeta, our young maid servant, Saloni Pandey, my class friend were all ready to swoon by Rajesh Khanna. Dola Aunty bought piles of magazines those carried stories of the star; she would conspire to teach children of those mothers who subscribed to a large number of film magazines. Geeta lived from one Rajesh Khanna film to the other while Saloni Pandey showed an amazing academic talent in referencing enormous material on the star. Soon we were inundated by Rajesh Khanna look alikes; the tailor, the barber, the vegetable vendor started sporting the Rajesh look. Baidyanath, my grandfather’s driver from Chaibasa tried to have a wave of hair over his forehead notwithstanding the “tiki” at the back of his skull. He was the repository of the lyrics of the songs of Rajesh Khanna. Even my young cousins proudly wore “Guru shirts”, shirts more like kurtas and designed after the ones that Rajesh Khanna wore in the film Kati Patang. Frankly, I remained out of all this. Rajesh Khanna invoked femininity. I was not a pursuant of such sentiments. So when Amitabh Bachchan came, I took to him like fish to water. I also revelled that he and not Rajesh Khanna was the superstar. But even as I worked on Amitabh Bachchan, I could never quite get over the fact that it was Rajesh Khanna who brought forth the first ever idea of a superstar. I heard these stories that Geeta collected; she was illiterate and the media not being what it is today, I have no idea where she got her facts from. We made fun of her when she would tell us that women wore sindur on their partings with Rajesh Khanna’s photograph in front of them. Later I read from published sources that these stories were true. Rajesh Khanna was God and Geeta was the devotee; his exploits had a way of reaching her, I don’t quite know how. In one of his interviews Amitabh said that he has seen women take the dust from the tyres of the car that carried Rajesh Khanna and rub that on their heads. Such was the madness that Rajesh Khanna commanded. The more I worked on Amitabh Bachchan, the more uncomfortable I felt about not being able to analyse Rajesh Khanna well. After all, he was India’s first superstar and generated certain madness about him that no one but no one has ever been able to match. Many decades later when I moved in Delhi’s Sarvapriya Vihar, Rajesh Khanna was my neighbour. There was a tiff with him once or twice over parking of cars and hence with much trepidation I used to often peep into his ground floor drawing room to see whether he had retired for the day. He often had curtains drawn open, would change into his night clothes and with his reading glasses on would handle high piles of files using the centre table as his writing desk while he sat on the floor. Those days he was in the Congress Party and had rented the flat in our locality. I was always struck by his single minded focus on the files; such attentiveness I have never witnessed in anyone I knew. This power of concentration struck me with an extraordinary amazement. One day I sent him a note saying that I wanted to see him. In the note I said that I was sorry that I never made efforts to study him while I worked on my doctorate thesis on Amitabh Bachchan and if possible I wished to now start the process of unpacking his magical appeal. He granted me an appointment immediately. As I sat sipping Lopchu tea, Rajesh Khanna was very angry that when I was Amitabh’s house guest in Mumbai, the latter had misled me into believing that Rajesh never wanted to see me. How untrue all this is, he exclaimed. He believed that Amitabh had played really dirty politics with him especially manipulating Hrishikesh Mukherjee. Rajesh Khanna was also angry with Rishi Kapoor, who according to him was even more serpentine in crookedness. Clearly Rajesh Khanna was a person who had resentments. After he had spoken his mind and was more receptive to my presence, I asked him, where does Rajesh Khanna live now? Rajesh Khanna? He repeated; well Rajesh Khanna is a very big star, he told me, a larger than life figure, he overshadows everyone else on screen but I am Jatin Khanna yaar. It was this sentence alone that made me interested in Rajesh Khanna the person ever since. Truly, as Jatin Khanna had said, Rajesh Khanna is a shadow; he lives nowhere. He is actually no one. He never was anything except an illumination. Very recently, Cine Durbaar arranged a memorial service for Shakti Samanta, the director who created the superstar called Rajesh Khanna. In the memorial service the director’s son gave us a snapshot of his father’s life. Shakti Samanta’s father was in the airforce and was martyred in the 1947 war. He came away with his young widowed mother to live among his relatives. In Aradhana, Rajesh Khanna too is an air force pilot who loses his life in a campaign and Sharmila Tagore is widowed pregnant with her dead husband’s child. Aradhana was Shakti Samanta’s story around his mother. The image of the young widow has featured also in Kati Patang and Rajesh Khanna is the angel who comes in to rescue this widow out of her loneliness. I had a distinct feeling that Rajesh Khanna was Shakti Samanta’s search of a lover for his young widowed mother. Rajesh is a saviour who comes in to breathe life and loveliness into women, ignored and isolated. No wonder then Rajesh Khanna is a fantasy for those who are hemmed inside homes, pincered inside spaces defined for them for incarceration into their fixed social roles with predefined expectations. He is an invitation for such souls to fly out, to float out, and to experience the openness of space and the lightness of air. This openness was his appeal; this lightness, his illumination. Rajesh Khanna’s progenitor was Shakti Samanta, but the man who settled him in superstardom was Hrishikesh Mukherjee. In two films namely Anand and Bawarchi, Hrishikesh makes the final articulation of Rajesh Khanna’s spirit; the man who provides pleasure, the man who assures but he himself remains unnoticed and unseen. This is why the huge life giving force of Anand had to be concealed in his imminent death and he had to disappear into oblivion after he settles everything for the chaotic household in Bawarchi. Oblivion was Rajesh Khanna’s final destiny for the light giver cannot be seen; for in order to be seen one has to absorb light. Rajesh Khanna could never have been “around” in the way Amitabh Bachchan is. Principally such continued presence beyond the screen would have been contrary to Rajesh Khanna’s appeal. The time that I met Rajesh Khanna Shah Rukh Khan’s Devdas was released. Rajesh told me that he wanted to watch the film. I offered to take him to take him to PVR’s Premier Class. He did not agree. He said that he wanted to whistle wildly at Madhuri Dixit and that was not possible in civilized society. He would not like to stay on in Aashirwaad because while his daughter really looked after him well, he would like to open the verandah door and stand in the rain and that would wet the carpets and cause inconvenience for everyone. He wanted to be just wild, melt into the nature, mingle into the light, and dissolve in the rain. He could not be among people with routine, with lives to lead and schedules to abide by. I suddenly realized that Rajesh Khanna was also the person who created two other superstars, namely S.D.Burman and later R.D Burman and Kishore Kumar. Kishore Kumar wanted to expand; give me more space to move he would say; make me faster, carry me further, lift me higher. S.D would despair at Kishore because the scale had only seven notes. Then all of them found Rajesh Khanna, the body so rhythmic, one that had such lightness of being, such potential of dissolving into emptiness, just like S.D’s rhythms. In the opening song of Aradhana, Rajesh Khanna atop the jeep drives alongside the train singing in Kishore’s voice, Mere Saapnon Ki Raani, with Pancham’s mouth organ keeping the beat and as Rajesh sways almost like the thin breeze against the vast landscape and rolling hills, Kishore’s voice gets the broad movement that he has always looked for. Kishore’s voice leaves his body and embraces the world, moving at the speed of the train. Rajesh carries the voice, impersonates the spirit of the music and together with Kishore Kumar’s voice and S.D’s music weaves together the vastness of the landscape and the pace of the train. One wonders whether S.D.Burman and R.D.Burman or Kishore Kumar could have been what they were had Rajesh Khanna not lived on screen to embody the music. I sometimes feel that Rajesh Khanna was the personification of the song in the Hindi film; that song which is supralingual, comes into play where articulation must be transcended. No wonder it is difficult to talk about him but easy to sway in small pulses to the softer rhythms of music, just like his mannerisms were. We left Sarvapriya Vihar to come away to our present locality. Rajesh Khanna also changed his flat to occupy the one adjacent to the one that had been ours. Our maid Tara continued to work with the new occupants of our flat. Rajesh Khanna would often stroll in the terrace right next to her. We used to be Tara’s confidantes; the last time we met Tara it seemed that Rajesh Khanna was her advisor in matters of daily interest. http://bargad.org/2012/07/19/rajesh-khanna/