Tag Archives: GS Kohli

Chaar Darvesh (1964)

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YouTube suggested this film to me, and for a few days, I was torn. Should I watch it (Feroz Khan is not a favourite of mine, though I don’t find him as irritating as some others), or should I not? Sayeeda Khan, after all, is someone I’ve wanted to watch, mostly because I was intrigued—she was married to film director/producer Brij Sadanah, and was murdered by him on their son’s eleventh birthday party (Sadanah also shot and killed their daughter, before committing suicide). Yes, macabre (not to mention tragic), but that’s how it is.

Eventually, it was the music—by the very talented but vastly underrated GS Kohli—that tipped the scales in favour of my watching Chaar Darvesh. Kohli, who did a lot of work as assistant to OP Nayyar (and it shows, in the rhythms and styles of much of his work), composed music on his own for several B-grade films, of which among the best-known are Shikari (1963; easily his magnum opus, with one great song after another) and Chaar Darvesh. Even if just for the music, I wanted to watch this film.

The story is set in some fictitious fantasy kingdom somewhere in the Middle East. At a shrine, three bearded darveshes, clad in flowing robes, have gathered to pray for boons. One is seeking a treasure [that sounds a little shallow, for a darvesh]; another is searching for his sweetheart, who’s gone missing.

These three men have learnt, though, that their wishes will only be granted once they have been joined by a fourth darvesh… who, thank heavens, arrives soon after. This is Qamar (Feroz Khan in blackface), and he proceeds to tell them his tale of woe and to explain how he happens to have turned so black.

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Mr India (1961)

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A simple-hearted—even outright simple, really—man turns out to be the look-alike of a much-wanted criminal. As a result, the police train him to impersonate the criminal so that they can get enough evidence to crack down on a web of crime.

I have no idea if Don (1978) was inspired by Mr India. Don is in many ways a very different film (the criminal, for one, dies fairly early on in the proceedings; for another, it’s a much more complex plot): but there is that fleeting resemblance.

Mr India begins by introducing us to Gullu (IS Johar), naïve and simple, as he goes about job-hunting, and getting rejected at every office because he doesn’t fit the regional profiles demanded by the parochial employers of these places. Gullu gets briefly hired by someone who wants to rig a ‘Mr India’ weight-lifting competition, with Gullu pretending to hoist what is actually wooden dumbbells rather than iron.

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Lata Mangeshkar: Ten Solos, Ten Composers – Part 4

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Last year, when Lata Mangeshkar passed away, I did a series of posts featuring songs she’d sung for different composers. This post, the fourth and final one, had been lying waiting to be published for the past several months.

I began the first list as a tribute to Lata when she passed away, but that, I realized, was too little; there were too many very talented composers, too many wonderful songs, which had perforce been left out of that list. I therefore ended up making another list. And then another.

Here, I cover ten more composers, most of them unfortunately either forgotten now or never really given their due. But, as can be seen (or heard?) by this list, they were not short of talent. These ten solos are all, as always, from pre-1970s Hindi films that I’ve seen. Plus, these songs do not overlap with the very first Lata Mangeshkar post I had published on this blog, here.

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