Kishore Kumar: The Ultimate Biography, Winner of the National Award for Best Book on Cinema, 2022

For the people of Khandwa

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Preface

Prologue

BOOK I

BHAIRAV: THE MORNING

Jogia

The Gangulys (aka Gangolys)

Bhagalpur: The Banerjis

The Siblings

Bhairavi

Kishu

Kishore Gangoly

Indore

Keshore Kumar Gangoly

Bazm-E-Adab

K.L. Saigal

Filmistan: Pre-Indore

Filmistan: 1946–48

Kishore Kumar Gangoly

India’s Independence

Small Suitcase, Big Dreams

Parameshwari

The Big City

Samar

Taste of Failure

Todi

A Southern Tale

The Wedding

Greasepaint

The Gamble

Amit

Reincarnation?

Censorship, Radio and Other Stories

Changing Landscapes

Bombay Talkies: The Closure

The Multirole

Neorealism

Finding His Voice

Khandwawala

Tenzing, Arun Kumar Mookerjee and More

Misses: Some Notable, Some Terrible

Success

The Funtoosh Phase

Flashback

Begunah

The Three Ms of 1957

The Hits of 1957

Adios to Playback

Madhubala

BOOK II

POORVI: THE AFTERNOON

Dhaani

The Confession: Kashmir, 1957

Abdul … and a Film Idea

Lukochuri, Separation and Gouri Kunj

Bhimpalasi

Dilli Ka Thug

Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi

After Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi

Shelved Productions and Missed Opportunities

A Few Inspirations

Piloo

The Second Wedding

The Narrow Gauge Line

The London Trip

A Secretary

Half Ticket

Ennui

Door Gagan Ki Chhaon Mein

Charulata

The Return of Dev Anand

Puriya Dhanashri

Laxmikant–Pyarelal

Changing Equations

Mahmood

The Makeover

Demystification

The Predestined

BOOK III

KALYAN: THE EVENING

Yaman

Aradhana

Rahul Dev Burman

Door Ka Rahi

On Stage Abroad

Rajesh Khanna: The Early 1970s

Music and More

1970s: The Voice of the Young

Badhti Ka Naam Dadhi

Bageshri

Uttam Kumar

Yogeeta Bali

S.D. Burman

‘Gandhi Tere Desh Mein …’

Post-Emergency

Kedar

Leena O Leena

Rafi

Door Wadiyon Mein Kahin

Tagore

Changeovers

The Mid-1980s

Dusk

Afterword

Notes

General Index

Song Index

Acknowledgements

About the Book

About the Authors

Copyright

Foreword

IT TOOK TIME magazine a few years and several journalists to finally put Peter Sellers on their cover. This was not because Sellers was a difficult man to track down or speak to. It was just that every time they spoke to Sellers, they found a different person out there. They could not simply pin down his persona. His voice kept changing every time. So did his anecdotes. His looks, of course, kept changing too; after all, he was an actor. But, most mysterious of all, he—the man, as they kept discovering him—kept changing. He was never the same person, the man you had met before and thought you had finally tracked down. Each Peter Sellers was unique, special, as interesting and as complete a person as they could have expected. Except that each Peter Sellers was different, very different, from the others.

Yes, I knew Kishore Kumar. He was a friend of mine, I could well say. A very good friend.

Or I could turn around and say, no, I never knew Kishore Kumar. I had only met him a few times. He was barely an acquaintance.

Both the above statements would be absolutely true. It’s an either/or option. He gave you that option to decide whether he was your friend or not. He gave you that option to decide whether you knew him at all or not. And I, so many years later, choose to stay with the first option because he was exactly the kind of guy I enjoyed being friends with. And, as everyone may have told you by now, I do not make friends easily. In fact, to be truthful, I do not make friends at all.

And here I am, claiming Kishore Kumar was a friend. That was the mystery of the man and those few people he actually interacted with. Not professionally. (In Bollywood, you interact with hundreds every day. It’s part of the job.) I am talking about interaction at a personal level. I seriously doubt if many people were part of his universe ever. Yes, he loved his wives dearly—all of them were remarkably beautiful and gifted women—and he loved his brothers, his sons, he loved R.D. and a few others with whom he worked; he loved singing, he loved the movies—especially horror movies, of which he claimed he had the finest collection in the world—and he loved his trees, his home, his own infinite talent, of which he was very proud and, above all, his hard-earned money, which he claimed to protect more than anything else on earth. At least, he pretended to.

And that is where he drew the line. He rarely went beyond it.

That was his world, and he rarely stepped out.

He knew how fickle Bollywood friendships were. During his worst days, when work was slow to arrive at his door and everyone chose to ignore his talent to satisfy the whims of the stars they cast in their films, no one came to his help. When, during the awful Emergency years, the tax guys were set on him because he refused to sing at a huge high-profile Congress rally in Delhi, he calmly bore the brunt of their attacks. When the entire industry crawled when asked to bend, only he (and Dev Anand, quite separately) stood up and showed their spine. Vidya Charan Shukla, Indira Gandhi’s minister of state for Information and Broadcasting, tried to terrorize him by banning him from All India Radio. It didn’t make a difference to him. He took it in stride.

What Kishore learnt from that experience was that when the chips were down, no one—not even those who pretended to fawn over him—were ready to stand by him. That is why when the Emergency was over and good times returned, he chose to play his game solo. He depended on no one. He trusted no one. He focused, instead, on what he was best at: singing and, occasionally, acting.

As a singer, he excelled. As an actor, he had a few successes and a bunch of failed films. Some of which he had produced himself.

If you have the time, try to track down the full text of his interview with me when I was editing The Illustrated Weekly of India. I had put him on the cover with a manic smile on his face and a skull in his hand. (He loved skulls, skeletons, ghosts, witches, poltergeists and all kinds of paranormal phenomena; stuff that went bumpity-bump at night). I had sent Tyeb Badshah to photograph him. That interview, which is floating around all over the internet and keeps getting published and republished on his every birthday, may help you gain insight into the man and what he thought of the world around him. You must hear him in his own words. No one else can do justice to his thoughts.

Kishore knew one thing: that he was meant for bigger things in life. Bollywood was too small for him. He knew that I had read my poetry to Ananda Shankar’s music for an EMI LP and was talking to Ravi Shankar about a second album. Since I wrote poetry in English, he asked me if I would write songs for him. He was very keen to have an album published overseas and—somewhat mistakenly, I believe—he thought that if he sang in English, it would open up doors for him. Yes, he had thousands of fans out there, and he believed they would love to listen to such an album. I was not so sure. In any case, that album never happened.

Music publishers in the US were not particularly excited about Indian film music. The Guinness Book of World Records had told them that Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammed Rafi were squabbling over who had sung the most film songs in the world. But what actually interested them was the classical stuff. Ravi Shankar. Ali Akbar Khan. Their concerts were winning such big audiences by then that both settled down in the United States and started schools to teach Indian classical music to local American students. Chitresh Das went along to teach them kathak. And then came the Beatles. That changed the scale of their following. From thousands, it went up to millions. Ravi Shankar became iconic.

Kishore was hoping for a similar breakthrough. But it never happened.

It was not just the West. Even in India, Bollywood music was not considered for serious awards. I remember being on the jury for a music award that the Madhya Pradesh government gave to singers and musicians. If I remember right, it was called the Tansen Samman. It was a very prestigious national award and Ashok Vajpeyi, a fine poet and bureaucrat who looked after the cultural affairs of the state, presided over it and made sure the whole world noticed it. The classical genre was their natural choice, and the year I joined the jury, I discovered that they were already thinking of giving the award to K.J. Yesudas. Now, Yesudas was a fabulous singer. He sang both classical and devotional songs—and also did playback for film songs in many languages.

Since this was a sort of departure from the pure classical list, I decided to test my luck and proposed that, for a change, they should consider Kishore as a man of remarkable musical talent that went beyond his Bollywood playback credentials. I also cited the fact that he had stood up bravely to the government during the Emergency years. For me, that was an important part of any artiste’s job—to stand up against a brutal regime. I wasn’t sure others felt the same way, but I took the chance. At first, everyone looked at me askance, as if I had lost my marbles, till suddenly Kumar Gandharva, who was also a member of the jury, decided to openly endorse my choice. Seeing him join me, others like playwright Mohan Rakesh and parallel film-maker Mani Kaul switched their support to Kishore. Even Adoor Gopalakrishnan, the film-maker, who was also on the jury and may have earlier suggested Yesudas’s name, agreed that Kishore should get it. I think the Emergency bit helped. Everyone loves a victim. Naushad protested vehemently at first, and then said something rude under his breath and left the jury meeting. He never spoke to me after that.

In his absence, we had unanimity, and Kishore won his first real award from what he saw as the real world, not Bollywood. When he heard about the Tansen Samman, he was absolutely elated. He felt he had escaped the clutches of Bollywood and was now being taken seriously as a singer. He believed he could sing anything—even opera, if he was given the chance.

Fortunately, he wasn’t. Instead, he sang some Tagore songs in Bengali films, which turned out to be very popular.

But destiny’s a bitch. Just before he was about to get the award—it had been delayed for several months for some curious reason—someone had the bright idea that since a popular singer was now getting the award, its name should be changed to the Lata Mangeshkar Award.

Nothing could have enraged Kishore more. The recognition that he yearned for had vanished. What he was now about to receive sounded like yet another Bollywood award, and he hated that. But more importantly he considered himself a vastly better singer than Lata and always felt that he deserved far greater recognition even in Bollywood, where Lata reigned supreme even during Kishore’s best years. Yes, like all good men, he was hugely competitive.

There are hundreds of stories about him. About his genius. About his parsimony. About his run-ins with his directors. About his strange ways. I could tell you a few hundred more. But that is likely to distract from the importance of this wonderful book by Parthiv Dhar and Anirudha Bhattacharjee. I learnt so much more about Kishore from this book than I knew.

My friendship with him was based on our interactions and what I saw, heard, felt, discovered and what fell through the cracks, as Leonard Cohen would say. This book is more factual, more accurate and far more informative. And it is a delight to read even though this is seriously researched stuff. They have travelled. Been there. Seen that. Read everything there was to read. Found many things I never knew about the man and his background. If you are a serious KK aficionado, you must read this book. You will find it an enriching experience.

There are many heroes, many stars, superstars, successful people. And Bollywood is never short on superlatives. They discover new words when old ones fail them. I remember how they stuttered and stammered before they finally found the right epithet for Rajesh Khanna—the phenomenon. Most of the phenomenon’s best songs were playbacked by Kishore. Thus making him, at that time, the most in-demand singer in the industry.

During those years, I was also the editor of Filmfare, and the Filmfare Awards were the biggest thing in the industry. I remember planning an open-air event on Chowpatty Beach, where Kishore would be paradropped from the skies on to the stage, singing. He was delighted by the very idea and had even designed his costume for the night, but the civic authorities of that time—spoilsports as usual—thought it was too risky a proposition, and so we had to cancel and settle for stodgy old Shanmukhananda Hall or wherever. I remember how disappointed Kishore was.

I have several of Kishore’s songs in his own handwriting. Since he could not read music, he discovered his own notations and wrote them down. They remind me of an unschooled genius, who was so supremely talented that he believed, like Tansen, that his songs could bring down a stray summer shower, stop a waterfall midway, break open a volcano and open a blind man’s eyes to the impossible beauty of this world.

Read this book. Discover this incredible man. Possibly the only true genius that Bollywood has ever produced. Madcap. Mystic. Magician. He will hold you in his spell.

Pritish Nandy

Introduction

KISHORE KUMAR KHANDWAWALA was a phenomenon, the likes of which one gets to witness very rarely. Blessed with an incredible instinct for music, combined with years of relentless hard work, the value of the artistic legacy he left behind continues to increase day by day even now, so many decades after his passing.

While his music goes straight to our hearts, his personality was much more complex and kaleidoscopic. This book is a labour of love by Parthiv Dhar and Anirudha Bhattacharjee, and they have succeeded in documenting a great deal of information about Kishore Kumar’s childhood, his music, his career and the ups and downs of his life. The fascinating insights about his relationships with legends such as Kumar Sachin Dev Burman, Sri Rahul Dev Burman, Sri Khemchand Prakash and Sri Satyajit Ray make for riveting reading.

Despite being diehard admirers of Kishore Kumar, the authors have succeeded in keeping things in proper perspective throughout the book, without making anything sentimental or one-sided. In the present-day scenario, when sensationalizing anything and everything seems to be the general trend, they have kept things as objective and balanced as possible, even though the subject of the book was an extremely colourful individual, to say the least. His four marriages, his run-ins with income tax authorities, with Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, his perceived rivalry with good friend and legend Mohammed Rafi—all these and more have been covered in a matter-of-fact manner.

One marvels both at the extent of Kishore Kumar’s talents and exploits as one does at the commitment and tenacity shown by the authors in collecting such a wealth of lesser-known information about the man and his music. One gets to discover several unfamiliar yet beautiful songs by the legend, and one gets to view much-loved songs in a fresh light, after getting to know about the backstories related to them.

Anyone who is familiar with Kishore Kumar would know about his love for his native town Khandwa, and his persistent dream to go back and settle there. When we read this book, we understand a little more about where this desire came from, and the authors have befittingly dedicated the book to the people of Khandwa.

People are generally classified as ‘dilwale’, those with soul, and ‘dimaagwale’, the cerebral types. Singers are generally classified as sensitive types or as virtuosi. Voices are generally classified as either deep and masculine or as sweet and gentle. Kishore Kumar was a miracle of nature, who was blessed, in equal measure, with unbridled energy, complete lack of inhibition, breathtaking versatility, extraordinary range, absolute precision and gut-wrenching emotional intensity, sensitivity and tenderness. Despite spending a lifetime in a field that is labelled ‘show business’, where half is show and the other half business, Kishore Kumar, in combination with the legendary lyricists and music directors of his time, has left us with a treasure trove of wonderful songs that will continue to bring positive energy, joy, sunshine, sweetness, inspiration and solace to millions of people for years and years to come. Kishore Kumar is probably one of the most imitated of all Indian singers. But he also happens to be the most inimitable. 

As someone who has been practising classical Indian raga music for nearly forty years, this so-called ‘untrained’ and completely natural singer has always remained one of my greatest sources of inspiration.

Prince Rama Varma

Carnatic singer and veena artiste 

Preface

‘If I have to choose a male voice for the next fifty years, it would definitely be Kishore Kumar.’

—Lata Mangeshkar¹

IN THE 1970s, the small-towner in north and east India grew up with a few names: Sunil Gavaskar, Rajesh Khanna, Amitabh Bachchan, R.D. Burman … And then you had Kishore Kumar, who cut across the last three. Who knows, maybe Gavaskar, too, was a  fan.

We mention small-towners because, unlike the city-bred, there was hardly any protocol in our lives. Free to roam around, we identified more with the neighbourhood ice-cream wallah and the groundnut vendor than the Impala that we got to see only on the screen if taken to the cinema by elders in the family. We had less of Clint Eastwood and more of the Ramsay brothers. Jethro Tull and Led Zeppelin we thought were names of supersonic aircraft. The Ventures was and remained the strongest connection to anything having some semblance of Western music till we cleared our secondary examinations.

And the radio set at the nearby paan shop was our destination after school hours, where we spent valuable time our parents wished we invested in our textbooks. Anybody who listened to Vividh Bharti and Radio Ceylon (now Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation) would know that Kishore Kumar was not simply a name: he was a way of life. His songs taught us to dream, to enjoy, to feel the opulence within and not seek gratification outside.

A songbook in 1978 told us that he belonged to a place called Khandwa. A trip became a necessity. December 2010, and we were on a week-long holiday.

We had reached Khandwa with ‘Paan mahima’ on our lips, the poem Kishore Kumar wrote in favour of paan and discouragement against tobacco. He had mentioned his address thus:

Pandit Kishoredas Khandwavasi

Bombay Bazaar Road

Ganja Godam ke saamne

Library ke Nikat wala

Bijli ka khamba

Jispe likha hai ‘Dongre ka Balamrit’.

Bombay Bazaar has since become Mahatma Gandhi Road. Ganja Godam is now Indra Shopping Complex. The library, Manakya Smarak Vachnalay, has simply no literature on him. The bijli ka khambha of yesteryear has transformed itself into a labyrinth of wires resting on top of a pillar. Dongre ka Balamrit has been swept into oblivion.

Sitaram Tulsiram Sanwer. Dressed in a white kurta pyjama, the sexagenarian’s dull, battered looks were a match for the gates he opened as he welcomed us to Ganguly House. It has been a second home to him since he arrived at Khandwa as a twenty-four-year-old in 1966. A lot of water had passed under the bridge since then, but this house remained his home.

Ganguly House has a new name, though you are liable to miss the nameplate ‘Gouri Kunj’ on the dust-covered iron gates, which open to the house, numbered 581.

Inside, the first thing we noticed was an old sewing machine that, in all probability, belonged to Kishore’s Sudama—Fateh Mohammed aka Babu Rangrez. The one bright spot in an otherwise derelict structure was a million-dollar photo frame at the portico consisting of snaps of the Gangulys and people who really mattered to Kishore. Instead of photographs of film personalities in the frames, they sheltered his real friends, his gang of Khandwawalas—Ramniklal Bhai Mehta, Fateh Md., Lalaji Jalebiwale and Prafulla Nagda, among others.

Hamid, then ninety, the famous gajak vendor with whom he was so close, has since passed on the trade secrets to his son Moinuddin. While the quality of gajak was admirable and the paean ‘Badiya khale karari gajak’ hummed in the background with the same intensity as it did in Hamid’s time, the same could not be said of the broken lintels, the polythene sheets engulfing the stairs and the peeled plaster on the walls all around Ganguly House.

In almost all the establishments in the locality, we would come across posters of the Khandwa Triumvirate—Dadaji Dhuniwale, Makhanlal Chaturvedi and Kishore Kumar. The locals feel privileged to share Khandwa with these three. However, the aura of Kishore Kumar outshines them all. Almost every third person could recollect some trivia on him, each one better than the last we heard.

A visit to Lalaji Jalebi Bhandar silently told us something about the Kishore Kumar aura. A huge photo frame of the founder, the late Sri Hiralal Sharma aka Lalaji Jalebiwale, along with another one of the same size, of a certain Rashoki Ramaku, greets you at the entrance. Subscripted under the photograph of Ramaku are the words ‘Dildaar yaar’. Rashoki Ramaku, as fans might have guessed, is Kishore Kumar spelt backwards in Devanagari.

With every jalebi we ate, Khandwavasis’s take on Kishore touched our hearts. How, with the help of Melody Makers, he had organized his ‘nite’ here in 1982. He paid for the orchestra, and the entire proceeds were then donated to Ramnik Bhai to help build a state-of-the-art auditorium in memory of his parents. He had bulldozed his way through, pulling his childhood friends from their seats to the stage. He had also started renovating Gouri Kunj by streamlining brick and cement supplies. He was to stay with them permanently and would go occasionally to Bombay to finish all pending assignments.

Fate had other ideas, but Kishore’s indomitable spirit does not allow the Khandwavasis to lament his physical absence even for a minute. The whole atmosphere in the jalebi shop bore testimony to Kishore’s love and trust towards his childhood friends.

Said Ramnik Bhai Mehta, ‘On our way back from school, he would choose a delectable spot on the meadow (where the present-day court is situated) near the playground and would suddenly burst into one of his favourite musical phrases. An antelope used to graze around. On hearing young Kishore sing, he would temporarily stop in his tracks, waiting for the song to finish, and would leave the moment he stopped singing.’ Ramnik Bhai’s voice swelled with pride as he spoke of his friend’s precocious talent.

He continued, ‘Insaan toh ruk hi jaata tha. Jungli janwar bhi ruk gaye’ (Forget human beings, even wild animals would be spellbound when he sang).

Thus, it seems almost unfathomable and ironic that this boy’s habitat in Ramganj ward no. 16 would meet a fate it certainly did not deserve. The squalid bedroom cot had an age-old and torn striped blue-and-yellow mattress. Photographs of his mother Gouri Rani Devi surely hadn’t been cleaned for years. The kitchen was worn out; the decayed moth and the putrid water storage tank presented a view almost revolting. The corroded reinforcement in the structural beams exposed much more than it should have.

The only silver lining was the prayer room, where the deities Kali and Radha were maintained with aplomb by Sitaram. Sachets of Shiv Mahima Agarbatti bore testimony to this. Portraits of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Swami Vivekananda shone in between Kali and Radha. According to Sitaram, this was his Sahab’s favourite room and remained so till his last days. This was no less than his music room, and he used to do his spiritual riyaz here.

Spring 2012.

Walking on the pavement of Park Street, Calcutta, a copy of Filmfare dated 29 February 2012 caught our attention. A peek inside revealed the results of a survey that had been carried out to find the best performers of all time in Hindi films. The sample size of respondents was 40,000. Twenty-five years after he was no more, Kishore Kumar was unanimously chosen as the best singer of all times. And R.D. Burman was named the best music director. It is interesting to note that the same survey had chosen Kajol as the best actress, something which pointed to the respondents being of a young age group.

This is the reasoning Filmfare had attributed to Kishore’s humungous popularity:

Explaining why Kishore was voted the most iconic male singer would be akin to explaining why the Sun is the brightest star. Well God created the Sun and Kishore Kumar. The rest of the creation was taken care of by minions. Hence there is only one Sun and one Kishore […] He was the musical superstar in a country which doesn’t have the rock culture. He was our Sinatra, our Jackson, our Presley, our Pavarotti all rolled in one. He could make us cry and laugh with just a slight change in his tremor […] Thanks to the internet, the youth of today has caught with the K for Kishore phenomenon. His are some of the most downloaded songs, what with the Gen-x-ers vying with one another to unearth hidden gems of his career. He rules the air waves even today.

A screening of Door Ka Rahi at Nandan, Calcutta, had one of us thinking: Why not write a book on Kishore Kumar?

However, the deadlines of our respective professions hung over our heads. As we were dilly-dallying with the idea, Filmfare repeated the same survey a year later. Not only did Kishore Kumar defy the natural decay curve, he actually became more popular after he was no more—and remained at number one.

The entertainment industry can be very cruel. The life of a performer changes in a heartbeat. One day you’re up there in the sky. The next day you are gone. Interestingly, we discovered that Kishore Kumar was among the very few who managed to buck the trend. The last ‘great natural’, there was never anyone quite like him in Indian cinema. One biography is grossly inadequate for someone whose repertoire boasted around 3,000 songs and hundred-plus films, apart from leading a life that was colourful by any standard. Our attempt has been to document his life as per the time-based rule of raags. Starting with Bhairav, the morning, we conclude with Kedar, a raag traditionally sung at night. And as we move in a sequential manner from dawn to dusk, we touch upon the various vignettes of his life.

Someday, there will surely be more biographies to come by more capable people as we go along. But to start with, we name his story ‘The Ultimate Biography’ because Kishore Kumar, in our eyes, was the ultimate. Even after four decades in the film industry, he remained the iconoclast who mocked the very institutions that deified him. We don’t think anyone else has dared to do that in the Hindi film industry.

Nomenclature Used in the Book

1. Short form of film names. For example, Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi has subsequently been referred to as CKNG .

2. Short forms have been used for composers as well.

3. Hemanta Kumar Mukherjee has been addressed as Hemant Kumar in relation to Hindi cinema and Hemanta Kumar when talking about Bengali films or music.

4. Capital letters for sharp notes and small letters for flat notes. For example, ‘Re’ is Normal Rishabh, while ‘re’ is Komal Rishabh.

5. The spelling of ‘Kishore’ changes from time to time depending on how he or his father used it.

6. Ganguly and Gangoly are the same; the difference in spelling is a result of the pronunciation used by the members of the family.

7. Mukul Dutt and Mukul Dutta are one and the same person. Dutta has been used when discussing his song lyrics and Dutt otherwise.

8. We have stuck to old names of places wherever possible. So, it is mostly Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, and not Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai.

9. Indian light music is generally broken up into four parts: Mukhra (or the Asthayi), Antara, Sanchari and Abhog. The nomenclature has been used in connection to certain songs.

10. Majority of the translations from regional and non-English language sources have been done by the authors.

Prologue

April 2012

AT HIS BUNGALOW in Juhu, Bombay, veteran actor Danny Denzongpa was discussing a particular day in his life with author Balaji Vittal.

October 13, 1987. It was 2 or 2.30 p.m. I was watching a World Cup cricket match on TV when I received a call on my telephone downstairs. Dada had called to ask me to come over to discuss something. I replied that the cricket match was quite engrossing and that I would be there once the match ended. ‘Okay, come over as soon as the match ends. Need to discuss something very important,’ he replied and hung up.

After the match, I reached Juhu, dressed up in shiny, colourful clothes. As I approached his bungalow, I saw some musicians standing outside. I thought a music session had been organized and he had called them over. Violinist Uttam Singh was present; he was standing by a coconut tree inside the bungalow. I asked him, ‘What’s up? Has Dada got stuck while composing a pahadi tune?’

Uttam Singh replied, ‘My God, don’t you know? Dada [Kishore Kumar] is no more.’

My head started spinning. I collapsed.

A few years before, Kishore Kumar had received a call that claimed that Topol, the famous actor, had suffered a heart attack. Kishore—who was a huge fan of Topol and had seen him performing Fiddler on the Roof on stage—fortunately had a valid visa and flew to meet him that very night. Finding Topol in the best of health, he returned soon, probably laughing at himself for having fallen victim to the prank.¹ Leena Gangoly was perhaps hoping for something similar that fateful evening. However, by then the studios and recording companies had started pulling down their shutters.

The stream of visitors started arriving around 6 p.m. Among the very first were the musicians, followed by Danny, Raj Kapoor, R.D. Burman, Dev Anand and his brother Vijay, Pran, Raj Babbar, Rajendra Kumar, Bappi Lahiri, brothers Shomu and Deb Mukerji, Gulzar, Shakti Samanta and others. Dev Anand could not keep his eyes off the bed where his voice lay in eternal slumber.

Khursheed, Ashok Kumar’s secretary, called Anoop Kumar who was on the sets of Bheem Bhavani at Esel Studio. ‘Kishore babu nahi rahe,’ he murmured. Anoop found this hard to believe; he had met his younger brother just a few hours ago. Ashok was in the washroom at Esel when Anoop revealed the news. He brushed it off. Filmland thrives on meaningless rumours. All said and done, the brothers decided to visit Gouri Kunj to check for themselves. The moment they saw the crowd outside the house, they had their answer.² On seeing Ashok, Leena broke down.

Sumeet was smiling away. Too young to understand the consequence, he restricted himself to asking visitors the reason for their tears. He even got a mic from the nearby room to urge his father to get up from the bed and sing one more time.

Amit Kumar was having his breakfast at a hotel in Toronto when his friend Shah tried to break the news to him. All he could muster was a request to call Bombay at once. Along with Amit were producers Tito and Tony, Asrani, Govinda and Neelam. Asrani and Tito had by then got a whiff of the news, but they were at their wit’s end. It was Tony who gathered some courage and asked Amit to call home.³

By then the team had connected to Gouri Kunj. On the other end was Shakti Samanta. ‘Come by the first available flight. Leave everything aside.’ This was enough to have the rug swept from under Amit’s feet. Finally, Tito broke the news to him.⁴ For the next three hours, Amit didn’t know what had hit him. His first thought revolved around the eagerness displayed by Kishore to send him to Canada against his wishes. He was gasping for answers as he prepared for his return.

Ruma Guha Thakurta was suffering from a fever that night. The doctors suspected malaria. She got a call from the media, but the family refused to believe it. Finally, Satyajit Ray confirmed the news. The last time she had met Kishore was a year before, in October 1986, en route to Newcastle General Hospital for the brain surgery of her daughter Sromona. Kishore had cried profusely and prayed for Sromona’s well-being that day. Now, a year later, it was Ruma’s turn, although prayers seemed superfluous in the moment.⁵

For Bablu da, the man Friday in the Guha Thakurta household, it was the end of a very personal relationship. His Kishore da would never again call him in the wee hours at Hotel Hindusthan International, asking him to fetch piping hot jilipi and kochuri from Gupta Brothers near Triangular Park on Rash Behari Avenue, Calcutta, for breakfast.⁶

Lata Mangeshkar got the shock of her life when she landed at the Santacruz airport after a fairly successful tour of Madras. She was received at the airport by Shashank Lalchand, her concert recording engineer, who parted with the news. From the airport, Lata would directly visit Gouri Kunj. Later, back home at Prabhu Kunj, sedatives became a necessity.⁷

Those were the early days of the Doordarshan era. Those who watched the 8.40 p.m. Samachar or the 9.30 p.m. news on 13 October 1987 could not believe the respective newsreaders Manjari Joshi and Komal G.B. Singh as they delivered the unthinkable. The then prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, joined in the deluge of tributes: ‘The nation has lost a versatile talent, an artiste, singer, and actor, who imparted healthy entertainment to one and all. He has found a place in every Indian’s heart through his immortal songs.’⁸

The next day was a typical Indian family affair with swarming visitors, the arena still reeling from the shock. All awaited Amit’s arrival. On 15 October at around 10 a.m., it was time for Kishore to go home, one last time.

A flower-decked truck with a portrait as big as Kishore’s personality carried his embalmed body wrapped in a yellow chadar with the words ‘Hare Rama Hare Krishna’ written all over it. Starting along Juhu and then through Bandra, the heart of Bombay’s film suburbs, it took a left from Linking Road on to the express highway towards Chembur for a temporary stop at R.K. Studios, and finally to the road to Khandwa. It was the biggest funeral procession in film history.⁹

As the lights dimmed on the partly metallic highway, the birds homeward bound showed the way.

In Khandwa, as a practice, shops were closed on Thursdays. This time they extended the holiday to Friday, 16 October, as Kishore’s body reached his birthplace at 6.30 a.m., accompanied by loudspeakers reverberating with his songs. Perhaps the entire Khandwa population of over 2,00,000 had woken up before their scheduled time that morning for the last glimpse of their favourite son. As the van entered the parental house, the one who was moved the most happened to be a distant relative, Sudha Mukherjee, his ‘Bahu maa’, who was also the caretaker with whom he shared a special bond. She had been eagerly awaiting his Diwali visit. He had telephoned her multiple times, reconfirming every time his trip on 19 October that year.¹⁰

The old photos hanging on the walls, lantern, almirah, table, fan, and dressing table were silent witnesses as the body was taken to the room where Kishore was born. So were the mango trees in the garden, which furnished the yearly quota of the fruit he loved most.

At 10 a.m., the body was shifted to Gandhi Bhawan, where separate queues for men and women were made to manage the huge crowd that had assembled. Tanwant Singh Teer, Kalicharan Sakargaye and Ajit Jogi, political honchos of the area, all came down. The final journey, arranged by the Lions Club, the Rotary Club and Giants International, began at 2 p.m. in a bullock cart and moved towards the Aabna, the river on the banks of which he used to play marbles as a child. Kishore Kumar had arrived at the final destination of the last journey.¹¹

Ishwar deh Smashan was the cremation place he had chosen for himself long ago, consequent to a major tragedy in the family. Through some backroom discussions with the administration, he had arranged to build a cremation platform 10 feet long, 10 feet wide and 2 feet high for himself.

Jeebon Kumar Mukhopadhyay, the priest, invoked Amit to light the funeral pyre.¹² The embers glowed. The fans mourned, alternating between weeping and singing.

Recounted Danny Denzongpa, ‘After Kishore da’s death, my brother had been to Kalimpong, where he saw a gathering of Tibetan refugees lighting lamps for Kishore da. When my brother asked them why they were so emotional about Kishore Kumar, they replied, When we came to India from Tibet after the Chinese invasion, we knew no Indian language. We could not communicate with anyone. India was unfriendly and hot. But we used to listen to Kishore Kumar’s songs and derive happiness from those. They loved him. They had never met him, but his voice was there.’¹³

Thousands more had their own stories of how Kishore Kumar touched their lives.

BOOK I

Bhairav: The Morning

‘Laughter is timeless. Imagination has no age. And dreams are forever.’

—WALT DISNEY

An illustration of Kishore Kumar posing during his interview with Pritish Nandy. The photographer was Tayeb Badshah.

Jogia

Mera sukh dukh ka sansar

Tere do naynan mein

—Majrooh Sultanpuri (Fareb, 1953)

Artist's impression of Ganguly House, Khandwa, in 1930. Sajal Goswami

The Gangulys (aka Gangolys )

FOLKLORE ACROSS BENGAL, documented by many, including Sunity Devee in 1916 in the book Bengal Dacoits and Tigers, has a story that goes as told in the next few paragraphs.¹

So wealthy was Madhab Babu of Calcutta that the administration had a water tank named after him. Among his multiple unmovable properties, one was a country house on the bank of the Hooghly River in Chandernagore (now Chandannagar), a picturesque town governed by the French, forty-seven kilometres from Calcutta, on the western side of the river.

In the mid-eighteenth century, there was a dacoit who went by the name of Raghu (or Rogho, as mentioned by Rabindranath Tagore in the thirty-second poem of his collection Shesh Saptak, published