He gave magic, mystery, great music to cinema

Hindustan Times

01-06-2025

The year was 1964 and in that one year, I literally swallowed a lot of Hindi films into my heart and soul. Those were cinema times and my brother would make it a point to take us for every new release in Patna town and on Saturdays we would see old films screened in the open for the other ranks. My brother, who headed the family after my father's passing away, was a handsome and a strict disciplinary at times but no restriction did he put on us watching cinema. Those were cinema and radio times and my favourite was of course Dev Anand. Some of my friends had switched their loyalties to Joy Mukherjee, who danced around Asha Parekh with a guitar in his arms singing 'Phir Wohi Dil Laya Hoon'. Surprisingly, I had no favourite heroine, although my mother was very appreciative of Nutan. But that year I found my role model in Sadhna and guess how and in which film? It was a Raj Khosla film with haunting music and mystery and even before I got to see the film, I would be glued to the radio listening to the promo I still recall like a nursery rhyme. It went thus: 'Andheri raat, sansanati dastan, kabristan ka darwaza apne aap khula aur woh dekhate hi dekhate gum ho gayi. Woh kaun thi?' (A dark night, a scary story, the door of the graveyard opened, and she was lost forever. Who was she?). Well she was to become my role model and I wept before my mother that she give me a fringe cut. Now hair cuts for girls was a no-no in our male-dominated family and my mother was afraid of the response of her haughty Major son. So a story by my mother and bhabhi was made that I burnt my hair while lighting a lamp in my mother's little temple and there was no choice but to give me a fringe cut. This earned me the nickname of Sadhna in my peer group, to my great joy!
The Raj Khosla times
All this comes to the mind as I have in hand a mint-fresh authorised biography of Raj Khosla by Amborish Roychoudhury with passion and deep research, including long interviews with his friends, colleagues and associates. The book comes from Hatchette when he is all but forgotten, not because of his merit, but owing to the fact that he was not party savvy or publicity conscious. Yet Khosla was always a lover, always a poet with a singing soul and the great urge to be a singer like his ideal Kundan Lal Saigal. He was a great connoisseur of the poet of all poets, Mirza Ghalib. Born and schooled in Punjab he was proficient in Urdu poetry. His dream was to be a playback singer but 'Bambai Meri Jaan' had other things in store for him. Dev Anand, in his early days of struggle, became a friend of Khosla in the Bombay Coffee House and later referred him to Guru Dutt when the Navketan cinema took root. Dev Anand always referred to him as a friend of the Coffee House days. The story of the Anand-Dutt camaraderie is well known. The two loved in the same building while they were trying to find a foothold in the Bombay Island as they called it. Once the press wala exchanged their shirts by mistake. So the two faced each other in the lobby in the exchanged shirts. They became such good friends that when they got a chance they would work together and the words came true. The book recounts that when Khosla was trying hard to get a break as a singer, Dev Anand told him, 'My friend Guru Dutt is directing my next film. Why don't you become his assistant. Come on Raj, we'll work together,soon you will be able to sing too.' The singing never came but much else came and Khosla was to become a great director with his films having some of great songs which are sung till date. If he reinvented Sadhna as a ghost singing 'Naina barsein rim-jhim', he also gave the feisty Mumtaz alluring song 'Bindia chamkegi' to lure Rajesh Khanna in one of the great breaks for the star. Biographer Choudhury writes; 'When I told my friends that I was writing a book on Raj Khosla, only the hardened film buffs among them showed any comprehension. Later, when I posted a collage from his films, my inbox was overflowing with messages of the following nature, 'Wow! All these songs are from his films? 'He needs to be celebrated'. Indeed, he is celebrated in this biography with aplomb and it is a book one find hard to put away.
As Mahesh Bhatt remembers
The heartwarming prelude to this soulful remembrance has a prelude by Mahesh Bhatt who approached Khosla in 1969 to be his assistant. Witness to his era, Bhatt writes: 'Raj Sahab's story is larger than my memories, larger than my single telling. He was a magician, a creator of light and shadow, a man no biography could fully capture. But I salute the audacity of Amborish who has dared to do that'. Well said.
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