Shabana Azmi dismisses her reported marriage plans with Sanjeev Kumar as absolute nonsense

Authentic authoritative biographies on Indian actors are very hard to come by. We wait for morsels on the screen legends like Dilip Kumar, Geeta Bali and Nalini Jaywant.

The newly released Sanjeev Kumar biography is titled The Actor We All Loved. It is authored by Reeta Ramamurthy Gupta and the actor’s nephew Uday Jariwala. Tragically it is more about the various women this exceptional actor wanted to marry rather than his substantial body of work.

While it is a well-known fact that Sanjeev Kumar wanted to marry Hema Malini (but she didn’t want to marry him) and that singer-actress Sulakshana Pandit was keen to marry Sanjeev Kumar (but he was not) the startling dating information in the book on the actor who died too young pertains to Shabana Azmi.

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According to the disappointingly low-angle biography, Shabana Azmi was yet another colleague whom Sanjeev Kumar wanted to marry. The biographers even suggest that Shabana was quite taken up with the actor and wanted to marry him. According to the biographers, Sanjeev’s mother wouldn’t allow her son to marry a Muslim girl.

Shabana Azmi dismisses this conjectural alliance as “absolute nonsense.”

“There is not even an iota of truth in this. Sanjeev and I very compatible co-stars in Mahesh Bhatt’s Vishwasghat, Gulzar’s Namkeen and another film called Devta which Gulzar wrote but did not direct. Sanjeev and I spent hours discussing life and cinema. But there was not a hint of any romantic involvement, let alone marriage. And where did this communal angle come from?”

Shabana is contemplating legal action against the “fabricated melodrama.”

One wonders why the biography doesn’t focus on the gentler more chivalrous side of Sanjeev Kumar. Jaya Bachchan who did some of her best films (Koshish, Parichay and Anamika) with her Haribhai (Sanjeev’s nickname) remembers only the mutual respect and almost paternal affection Sanjeev showered on her. Gulzar’s Mausam which was a turning point for Sharmila Tagore, who won her first and only National award for her performance as a hardcore sex worker, was originally offered to Jaya Bachchan (then she was Bhaduri). Jaya was finalized for the part and was then dropped from the film because of Sanjeev Kumar.

Jaya had even rehearsed her scenes for Mausam. She was very excited because it was a powerful part and her third film with Gulzar Saab and Sanjeev Kumar after Parichay and Koshish. It was Sanjeev Kumar who asked Jaya to step down from the project because of the sexual energy between the two characters. In one sequence the heroine, who didn’t know that the male protagonist is her father, offers him her services as a sex worker.

Sanjeev who was very close to Jaya, called her and said, “I’d be very uncomfortable sharing such scenes with you. Either you remain in the project or me. We can’t be doing this film together.”

That’s when Jaya opted out and Sharmila Tagore stepped in. Sanjeev Kumar showed the utmost respect towards Sharmila. She remembers him as being very protective while shooting in outdoor locations. They would get together in his hotel room after shooting. After two drinks he would tell her to leave his room as he didn’t want to behave inappropriately with her.

Sadly Sanjeev Kumar died before he could find his life partner. But to make him sound like a womanizer is to do injustice to his peerless performances.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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