Covering Bollywood and the Hindi Cinema

Director Farah Khan is an affectionate defender of 1970s cinema. In a curious twist, her life story is the very epitome of the masala films she loves, finds SHOMA CHAUDHURY from TEHELKA

This is part 1 of the interview and expect part 2 tomorrow.



DON’T MAKE me a tragic story, Farah Khan, 42, warns at the end of a long conversation in her plush sea-facing apartment in Versova, Mumbai. The etting sun bleached by an expanse of darkened windows is burning a path of white gold across the still water. The bounce of its last light has recast the city’s dreary skyline in a platinum glow. The world is full of shimmering possibility. It’s difficult to imagine anything tragic about the brisk, cheerful woman lying in this setting, tracing the contours of a large belly. Khan is expecting triplets in February and her film Om Shanti Om has been declared a super superhit. (Most films in Bollywood are declared that — usually by the makers themselves — so that’s not much of a big thing. What is a big thing though is that the film has been raking in hosannas from the most unexpected quarters. And the smiles it has generated are still radiating.) Still, like the mega-masala films of the 70s she adores, Khan’s life has a little dose of everything: poverty, sorrow, tragedy, a beloved but troublesome sibling, inter-community love, hard work, comedy, and finally, formula success. In a curious twist, Khan is the very epitome of the masala plots she loves: she is not a tragic story though because she would never script one.

Khan was born into a film family. Her father Kamran Khan was a producer of successful B and C grade films — “the Samson and Delilah type” — and until Khan was eight, the family had swank cars and plenty of homes. Khan’s mother similarly came from a film family — her sisters were the child artists Honey and Daisy Irani. Khan herself seemed to have breathed cinema in the womb: she was born a prodigy of song and dance. “When Farah was about two, we used to ask her to pull out records for us,” says her mother Menaka. “It was the kind of thing one would do to show off in front of guests. We’d say, find Roop Tera Mastana, and she’d find the song amongst all the hundreds of records.” And she would dance — actor Sanjiv Kumar was among the many who were mesmerised by the child. “When she was about six or seven, the film Hare Krishna Hare Rama had come out,” continues her mother. “That Diwali, I saw Farah dance at a building function on the terrace — I couldn’t believe she was my daughter.” “We watched movies every day of our lives,” says Khan’s younger brother, Sajid. “Till today, we might miss each other’s birthdays, but we always get together in front of the TV to watch the Oscars. We’ve never missed a single one.”

But family idylls are usually shortlived in Hindi cinema. In 1973, the inevitable happened. Kamran Khan tripped in the casino of life: he made a film that was a colossal disaster. The failures began to cascade after that. The money disappeared, the houses disappeared, the cars disappeared. True to the ironies of Bollywood, the film was called Aisa Bhi Hota Hai. “The reason I’m so grounded,” says Khan, “is that I’ve seen it all. One day everyone is at your party, drinking and celebrating, and then the film flops, and the next day there’s no one there.”Except the steadfast companion: cinema. As the Khans’ world shrank, the siblings took refuge in films. Their father had withdrawn into drink — he wouldn’t recover till he died 14 years later — and their mother was forced to leave with the children, live separately in a 200 square feet adjunct in her relative’s house, and find a job as a housekeeper at Sea Rock Hotel. But neither sibling exposes a trace of self-pity. “It wasn’t his fault. It just happened,” says Khan with characteristic hardiness, “I feel as if I’m betraying my father if we talk about all this.”Life was a scrape those years. Young Sajid bivouacked into self-confessed delinquency and some sessions with a psychiatrist. “I was desperate to get rich,” he says. “I was always scamming people, making plans to rob. I could have landed up in jail.” Khan, on the other hand, to use her brother’s words, was “God’s child”. He went to the posh school, she to the neighbourhood convent. But while he was out robbing, she was out working — at whatever she could lay her hands on: colony surveys, tuitions, teaching Mithun Chakravarty’s son Michael Jackson dance steps. One time, she won a dance competition prize to Mauritius but she had the ticket converted to money to help her mother keep the household going.Talk to the siblings though and all of this is a minor strain: the truth as they would have you have it is that their childhood was a bedazzlement of laughter and forgetting in which cinema reigned supreme. Prakash Mehra, Manmohan Desai, Nasser Hussain, Rajesh Khanna, Amitabh Bachchan, Michael Jackson, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelley, Tarzan 303. And most significantly, according to Sajid, a CD of ham scenes their aunts had. “We loved that stuff,” he says — dire straits be damned. Fit kids for a mother who loved movies so much she went to see the first-day first-show of Beti before driving to the hospital to deliver her son.

Intermission.