In Raj Khosla biography, a portrait of an director as a ‘gloriously flawed human being'

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Raj Khosla was born in 1925, the same year as his mentor Guru Dutt. Khosla went on to become a well-regarded Hindi cinema director, making his debut with a Guru Dutt production – the crime thriller C.I.D. in 1956. Khosla then moved smoothly into other genres.
Ghost stories, melodramas, dacoit dramas – Khosla rolled them out mostly with panache until 1989, two years before he died at 66. 'No other filmmaker has, arguably, made so many iconic and path-breaking films,' says the introduction to Raj Khosla, a new book about the filmmaker. ' It is as if they are all from different filmographies. How on earth can the same director have made a C.I.D. and a Do Raaste? The same guy, without breaking a sweat, created Main Tulsi Tere Aangan Ki and Dostana within a span of two years.'
Written by Amborish Roychoudhury along with Khosla's daughters Anita Khosla and Uma Khosla Kapur, Raj Khosla is a well-researched and engrossing chronicle. Khosla's films attested to his technical feats – especially in the shooting of songs – as well as his troubled personal life, the biography suggests.
The book will be released on May 31, which is Khosla's birth centenary. To mark the occasion, three of his best-known films will be screened: C.I.D, Woh Kaun Thi? and Mera Gaon Mera Desh. The event at Mumbai's Regal cinema have been organised by Film Heritage Foundation, with restored prints supplied by the National Film Archive of India.
Roychoudhury, who has previously written Sridevi: The South Years, was approached by Khosla's daughters to work on the biography. He spoke to Scroll about the complexities of profiling a filmmaker with a varied filmography and a colourful personal life.
Here are edited excerpts from the interview.
What are the challenges of profiling a filmmaker who worked between the 1950s and the 1980s, whose contemporaries have mostly died, and about whom there is largely anecdotal material?
A lot of narrative gets lost over time. Unfortunately, we as a country really suck at archiving or preserving our past.
In this case, he said or she said wasn't possible since people weren't around to talk. There weren't too many interviews even when he was making his major films.
But there are resources available if one wants to do the research. There are bread crumbs.
I found the gossip columns in old Filmfare issues useful. They talked about films that were under production, so I found some stories there. For instance, how Solva Saal (1958) is based on a real incident.
The family was very helpful. They had some material, but not a lot. They had photographs, books and his diary, which is written in Urdu. A lot of the things that were discovered in the journey of writing this book were also news to them.
The book states, 'Like his mentor Guru Dutt, a lot of Raj Khosla's later work was autobiographical. As with every sensitive artist, the trials and tribulations of his private life had a direct impact on his creative approach and output.'
How did you approach the sensitive aspects of his off-screen self in an authorised biography?
There's a lot of information on him available on Google, which I have not said out loud or written explicitly. The family has been helpful and forthcoming. They didn't have qualms. They extended phone numbers of people who were party to the developments.
But I didn't get permission from the concerned people to quote them or state their names, which is why I didn't. I didn't want to sensationalise anything.
There is a thread that you can join from Guru Dutt to Raj Khosla to Khosla's protege Mahesh Bhatt, in terms of their scars and demons and how these found expression in their films. The distinction is that Mahesh Bhatt opened up and spoke about it publicly. Guru Dutt clammed up. Raj ji also didn't speak about it very often.
What did you discover about Raj Khosla while working on the book?
That he was a passionate singer. He was so passionate about his singing that he squeezed in some of his humming into his films without his music director knowing.
When I was interviewing Mr Pyarelal, I told him about one such instance and he said, humein to bataya nahi [He didn't inform me].
Then, there was the aspect of how what was happening in his life came into his films, like Main Tulsi Tere Aangan Ki or Sunny. He always wanted to run away from his work. There are many instances of how he found excuses to say pack up or go back to sleep – do anything but shoot.
I also found his relationship with his co-workers and people who worked for him fascinating. He used to pay salaries for months on end even when he wasn't making films. There is the incident of how his father was dying, so his secretary hesitated to ask him about singing pay cheques. When Raj Khosla got to know, he was furious. He said, my father is the one who is dying, why should these people suffer?
There was a lot of respect for him and genuinely so, not just from the standpoint of success but also as a human being.
He was a gloriously flawed human being. I developed deep respect for his personality, his filmmaking, his storytelling.
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And what did you discover about his filmmaking?
I don't think he had a very exalted view of himself as a creator. He basically said, I don't want to be celebrated as the maker. Filmmaking is a collaborative project, there's nothing grand about it. People come to see the actors and the stories.
At the same time, he had certain fascinations. Creators like Guru Dutt, Vijay Anand and Raj Khosla used songs as narrative devices, not only in terms of moving the plot forward but also in terms of building a personality for the character or emphasising the relationship.
Raj ji did this very well. His songs had a beginning, middle and end, like his films. Take Achcha Ji Mein Haari from Kala Pani (1958). There's a story in how Dev Anand moves, how Madhubala moves. A conversation is happening through the lyrics. The way he filmed the songs was very special.
He had a dysfunctional relationship with women in terms of how he wanted to project them. Some of his female characters had flaws and regressive aspects. At the same time, certain characters had agency and spoke for themselves, such as Asha Parekh's character in Do Badan, who stands up to her husband. The Sadhana trilogy [ Woh Kaun Thi?, Mera Saaya, Anita ] is all about the women.
Several of Raj Khosla's films have been ripped off from novels or American films. How do you view this lack of originality in his plots and scripts?
A work of art needs to be seen in its historical context. We would be hard-pressed to find films from previous decades that had not been adapted from somewhere, whether it's William Shakespeare's plays or Wuthering Heights.
The sources were not acknowledged – it wasn't a done thing, which doesn't make it right. That said, the world of the Hindi film was so restricted in the past that the filmmakers probably felt that the audiences wouldn't know, and that nobody outside India would see these films anyway.
A film like Bombai Ka Babu is based on a short story [O Henry's A Double-Dyed Deceiver ], but there are big changes in the script and storytelling. So I don't think we can say that it is a blatant copy.