Hard To Believe That He Won’t Be Heard Anymore Khan
Tasneem Kabir
With the end of 2018, the nation faced another termination – that of the life of a seasoned member of the Hindi film industry, Kader Khan. Even as we grew up with the lingering heaviness of his voice in movies, knowing we wouldn’t hear the same resonance in Bollywood anymore has been hard to take in.
What’s more, at a time when the election of right-leaning governments who pride themselves over being staunch criticizers of “foreigners” is constantly on the rise, Kader Khan lays in concrete a beautiful mould. Kader Khan was born in Kabul, Afghanistan to Pashto parents on October 22, 1937, who chose to live in India post-Partition.
Khan graduated from Ismail Yusuf College affiliated to Bombay University and before entering the film industry in the early 1970s, he taught at M.H. Saboo Siddik College, Mumbai, as a professor of Civil Engineering. His acting career was kick started when he starred as a prosecuting attorney in Daag (1973).
From then on, his traverse across the cinema was unstoppable. As we explore his rich legacy in the film arena, we realize how an individual of a lesser recognized; often sidelined community often times proves an asset to a nation, so much so that their death, along with rich remnants of their contribution, leaves behind an irreparable void.
How Kader Khan entered the glitzy world of the silver screen has a very humble story behind it, for the best gifts often come in the most soiled packages? Although an Engineering Professor by education and practice, Khan always had a penchant for the surreal world of Drama and the delicate art of weaving words together into silken threads of dialogues and screenplays.
Consequently, he became associated with theatre, which catapulted into him being a stock face of Bollywood. Kader Khan has spoken to the media about this story laughingly, and with a rather reminiscent look in his eyes: While performing in a play named TaashKePatey, he was noted by comedian Agha, who then urged actor Dilip Kumar to see the play for himself.
Dilip Kumar was sufficiently impressed and signed him up for his next films, Sagina and Bairaag. He was a prolific writer of plays for theatres and his career as a Hindi film writer began when director Narinder Bedi saw the theatre play Khan had written and asked him to co-write the script for Jawani Diwani with Inder Raj Anand, for which Khan received 1500 Rupees.
Thus began the dually jubilant career of Khan, who has carved his niche into the ranks of celebrities who have become a household name. Khan acted in over 300 films in Hindi and Urdu, and wrote dialogue for over 250 Bollywood films, from the 1970s up to the turn of the 21st century.
At the insistence of Rajesh Khanna, director Manmohan Desai paid him the hefty amount of Rupees One Lakh Twenty Thousand, for writing dialogues for the film Roti (1974), which was produced by Khanna himself.
Thereafter, he wrote dialogues for films with Rajesh Khanna in the lead like Mahachor, Chailla Babu, Dharam Kanta, Fifty Fifty, Naya Kadam, Masterji and Nasihat, all of which were hit films at box office. As for laureates, Kader Khan has to his credit two Best Dialogue awards, one Best Comedian award and a healthy ten nominations for Best Comedian. Clearly, when one excels at his work, the world bears testimony.
We are often told that the deepest waters are the calmest, and the literarily and expressively gifted Khan has been called a tranquil, composed and mature persona in his outlook and behaviour by his colleagues and co-stars from the Cinema. Perhaps, the even-temperedness that he displayed in an industry otherwise infamous for getting stars to lose their equilibrium and often resort to substance abuse, comes from his deep-seated and firm attachment to his religion, Islam.
Kader Khan was a renowned Islamic scholar and has set up the Arabic and Islamic Institute in Holland. A lesser known dimension of Kader Khan, the stellar actor-writer-comedian is that he was a Quranic scholar who designed a special academic syllabus in Islamic studies, alongside simplified Arabic and Urdu language courses.
This dimension again, has a heart-warming story attached to it – in the early 1990s, when Khan’s name was big in Bollywood, Khan’s father summoned him further his ideals for propagating Islamic Studies and help clear misconceptions among the minds of people by using simplied language and making religious literature accessible. Although mindful of his father’s theological legacy, Kader Khan was reluctant, for he at that time had practically no knowledge of either Arabic or Islam, or even Urdu.
To this, his father patiently responded that he had no knowledge of dialogue-writing as well, but he managed to learn it to the point of master, therefore by extension, he was surely capable of taking the same course for Islamic Studies. Hit hard and deep by his father’s utterance, he immediately enrolled for and completed his MA in Islamic Studies & Arab Literature from Osmania University in 1993.
Adhering to his father’s wishes, he set up a team of experts in Mumbai and also at his bungalow in Pune’s Koregaon Park, where he designed various Islamic courses for students from nursery to post-gradhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabicuate levels covering Islamic tenets, Sharia laws and the like. He followed up by opening the KK Institute of Arabic Language & Islamic Studies in Dubai and later in Canada to impart training in Arabic and Islamic laws as preached in the Holy Quran.
The aim always was simplifying and interpreting the Quran for the common masses, creating an entire syllabus from elementary school to post-graduation in Islamic studies in an easy-to-understand format, which could be understood easily even by non-Muslims. All his theologically inclined academic efforts were completed around 2005, and he felt gladdened after having fulfilled his father’s last desire, and having served the community.
In September 2014, an ailing Kader Khan went on a Haj pilgrimage accompanied by some family members and aides, the videos of which went hugely viral on social networks globally, thus setting yet another commendable example. Before his illness set in around seven years ago, he was planning to set up branches or study centres of the KK Institute in India, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada, Dubai and other countries, besides in Europe and work on many of them is at various stages.
Thus having impacted the Indian landscape in more ways than one, this multi-faceted magnum opus of a human departed of supra nuclear palsy, leaving in his wake large number of earnest tributes being paid to him, such as this particular piece of writing.