Latest news with #MainTulsiTereAanganKi
Mint
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Mint
Raj Khosla@100: Asha Parekh remembers director who helped her break glam girl image with Do Badan
Mumbai, Jun 1 (PTI) Veteran actor Asha Parekh has credited the late writer-filmmaker Raj Khosla with recognising her potential beyond the "glam girl" image by offering her "Do Badan", a film that changed the trajectory of her career. At a retrospective event to mark Khosla's 100th birth anniversary on Saturday evening, Parekh said the filmmaker's decision to cast her in the 1966 drama came as a surprise to her as it went against the industry's perception of her. "Everyone in the industry thought I was just a glam girl, a dancing girl and that I am not a good actress. I do not know what Raj ji had in mind when he came to me and offered me 'Do Badan'. The critics wrote good things about me and my work in the film. It gave me confidence to do more such films," Parekh said at a panel discussion. "Do Badan" tells the story of two lovers -- Asha (Parekh), a wealthy young woman, and Vikas (Manoj Kumar), an orphan -- whose romance takes a tragic turn due to a series of unforeseen events. The film, which became a box-office hit on its release, also featured Simi Garewal and Pran in pivotal roles. The Dadasaheb Phalke award winner revealed that initially, her contemporary, Rakhee, was supposed to star in the film. "I remember, Raj ji called me and said, 'I want to talk to you'. I said, 'okay'. He came home and narrated the story. After the narration, I told him to promise me to make the film as it is. It was a beautifully-written film. It was poetic. I remember, women would cry watching the film," Parekh said. The actor also shared that she had suggested a different climax to Khosla for "Do Badan", one where only her character would die. However, after further discussions, Kumar convinced the director to go with a more tragic ending in which both lovers meet their fate. "He would say what he wanted but leave the artists to emote the way they want," Parekh said about their collaborative process. After "Do Badan", the two also collaborated in "Chirag" (1969), "Mera Gaon Mera Desh" (1971) and "Main Tulsi Tere Aangan Ki" (1978). Filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt was also part of the panel discussion along with Amborish Roychoudhury, the author of "Raj Khosla: The Authorised Biography", and Khosla's daughter, Anita. Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, director of the Film Heritage Foundation (FHF), moderated the panel discussion. Khosla gave Hindi cinema some of its most memorable songs like "Lag Jaa Gale", "Mera Saaya", "Jhumka Gira Re", "Kahin Pe Nigaahen Kahin Pe Nishaana", "Yeh Hai Bombay Meri Jaan", "Nazar Lagi Raja Tore Bangle Par", "Hai Apna Dil To Awara" and many more. Parekh said she loved the way Khosla shot the song sequences in his movies. "When you work in four films, the whole unit becomes like a family.... Raj ji came from the Guru Dutt school, there was a little bit of Guru Dutt ji that he had while doing (songs)," she said. The daylong retrospective, titled "Raj Khosla 100 -- Bambai Ka Babu", was curated by the FHF at the Regal Cinema in south Mumbai. As part of the celebrations, three of Khosla's acclaimed films -- "CID" (1956), "Bambai Ka Babu" (1960) and "Mera Gaon Mera Desh" -- were screened. The first two films have been restored in 4K resolution by the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) and National Film Archive of India (NFAI) under the National Film Heritage Mission, an initiative of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Parekh said re-watching "Mera Gaon Mera Desh" brought back fresh memories. "It did bring back fresh memories. I had the most fun working with him. I wish I could see the entire film, but I had to leave," the veteran actor told PTI. "It was a film that was different from the films I was doing. It had beautiful songs. Laxmi Chayya had a better role than I, but despite that, I stood my ground," she added. Earlier in the day, actor Raima Sen introduced "Bambai Ka Babu", which featured her late grandmother, Suchitra Sen, opposite Dev Anand. Sen said she is glad that these classic films are being reintroduced and thanked the FHF for taking the initiative to commemorate Khosla's work. "I am excited to introduce this film, which is my favourite film. For her (Suchitra Sen), to take up this subject was a very bold move because it was not conventional and she was a star. "So to do an unusual film story of a brother and a sister, who till the end do not know that they are brother and sister, and the romance between the two, I think the film was way ahead of its time," Sen said.
Scroll.in
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
In Raj Khosla biography, a portrait of an director as a ‘gloriously flawed human being'
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. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Film Heritage Foundation (@filmheritagefoundation) 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.
