A forgotten author of affairs to remember
Gulshan Nanda was Bollywood’s go-to storyteller in the 1960s. He wrote family dramas shot through with suspense. The films live on, but what a pity so few even know his name
This month, 50 years ago, the film Kati Patang was released in theatres and became a big hit. It starred Rajesh Khanna, featured blockbuster music by RD Burman and was directed by the veteran Shakti Samanta. But few people remember the story and screenplay writer — Gulshan Nanda.
Nanda was a phenomenally popular writer of “pocket books”, the cheaply printed and low-priced Hindi novels that sold in staggering numbers in the 1960s and ’70s. If authors like Surender Mohan Pathak and Om Prakash Sharma were the pulp kings of the crime thriller, Nanda was the badshah of the “social” novel, which had love, romance, family drama, and often also mystery and suspense, all with a strong dose of high emotion.
I wanted to revisit Kati Patang the book this month and located an e-version with great difficulty. (The movie is on Amazon Prime). Reading the novel — of a young girl pretending to be the widowed daughter-inlaw of a wealthy family, and terrified of being found out — was like watching oldschool Bollywood unspool before my eyes.
I spoke to Nanda’s son Rahul — he and his brother Himanshu are leading publicity and marketing professionals in Bollywood today — to learn more about the writer, since there’s hardly any information about him online.
Nanda was born in 1929, grew up in Quetta (now in Pakistan), and moved to Delhi before Partition. As a boy, Rahul says, his father would sit and write stories in a Quetta graveyard, the only place where he could find peace and quiet. As a young man in Delhi, he worked as an optician but continued to write, mainly in Urdu.
Rahul says his father was invited to Bombay by actor-producer-director Guru Dutt, who wanted to buy the rights to his novel Pathar ke Honth. Nanda had already sold the rights to producer LV Prasad, who made it into a film titled Khilona, in 1970.
But Nanda had other stories to tell and sell, and soon became one of the top story and scriptwriters of Bollywood. Through the ’60s and early ’70s, there was a belief, in fact, that if the story was by Gulshan Nanda, the movie was sure to be a hit. And he had no trouble churning them out. By the time of his death in 1985, aged 56, Nanda had written 51 books.
His peak as a novelist came with the publication of Jheel Ke Us Paar in 1971 (made into a film of the same name in 1973), for which he received an undisclosed sum from Hind Pocket Books. In an unprecedented publicity blitz, the novel was promoted on billboards and radio spots. The print run was said to be 5 lakh, though Pathak says it was probably closer to 3 lakh (still a colossal figure for those days).
But by the end of the ’70s, his health began to fail and his work began to suffer. Between bi-weekly trips to Breach Candy Hospital for dialysis, “he lost conviction in himself and his writing,” Rahul says.
There was another factor at play too. The scriptwriting duo Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar had their first blockbuster, Zanjeer, in 1973, unleashing a new kind of hero upon the industry. The brooding persona of Amitabh Bachchan, all simmering rage and unsmiling exterior, completely swamped Nanda’s social stories and “family movies”.
The best of Nanda’s work included films such as Yash Chopra’s massive hit Daag (Rajesh Khanna, Sharmila Tagore; 1973). But many of his stories began to feel like retreads, their plots mirrored in early tales such as Phoolon ki Sej (Manoj Kumar, Vyjanthimala; 1964), where the lead pair falls in love and has sex on a thundery night, just before the hero is suddenly transferred. He scribbles his address on a piece of paper, which she loses. She then discovers she’s pregnant and spends years looking for him (while he simultaneously searches for her). When they meet again, circumstances force her to keep the birth of their child a secret.
Time after time, characters flailed helplessly against cruel twists of fate, kept grave secrets or were separated from loved ones.
In all, more than two dozen films were based on Nanda’s novels. They came to define their era, but Rahul says his father — despite his success — always smarted at the fact that he was never seen as anything more than a pulp writer.