Netflix’s second docu-series about a Bollywood brood, The Roshans, like 2023’s The Romantics, has a clear roadmap and does all it can not to deviate from it. Over four episodes, it pieces together an entertaining, informative and frequently candid overview of the lives and careers of three generations of the talented Roshans, a family of two music directors, one super-successful filmmaker and a megastar.
The series apportions a chapter each to music director Roshan Lal Nagrath (who shed his surname after his shift to Bombay in the late 1940s from Gujranwala via Lucknow and Delhi), his two sons, actor-director Rakesh and composer Rajesh, and grandson Hrithik, one of the biggest stars that there is in Hindi cinema today.
Together, the four chapters of The Roshans add up to a story that spans 75 years beginning right after India gained Independence and Roshan made the move to Bombay with his wife, Ira Nagrath nee Moitra, who was an All India Radio Delhi staff singer.
The question that might be asked is: do we really need to know? The answer is: yes. In an era when Wikipedia entries and WhatsApp forwards too often blur the line between the reliable and the arbitrary, it is perfectly in order for Mumbai movie industry personalities who possess the wherewithal to try and set the record straight by producing documentaries about themselves and their work.
It is a corrective exercise whose usefulness cannot be questioned. As members of the audience, each one of us has the freedom to make what we want to from the information that is passed on to us through mediated means.
The appraisal, based upon personal reminiscences and the recollections of industry colleagues, might lack objectivity and cover only selective ground. They are essential nonetheless. They serve the purpose of dispelling misleading apocryphal stories that do the rounds and replacing them with accounts that come straight from the horse’s mouth.
The Romantics was an overarching documentary mini-series over which the long and eventful career of Yash Chopra loomed large. The Roshans is markedly different because each of the four episodes is distinct and self-contained although the linkages between the quartet are obvious and wholly understandable.
For instance, Roshan’s career arc, which set the ball rolling, was very different from that of Rajesh Roshan, who inherited his father’s musical genes and carried the legacy of the family’s founder forward, absorbing influences of a later era. Similarly, Rakesh Roshan, who began as an actor whose struggles never ended until he graduated to film production and direction, followed a course far removed in essence from the one that his son’s remarkable career took.
The final episode, titled Koi… Mil Gaya, is the longest. It centres on Hrithik Roshan. Nobody in the family, and perhaps in the industry as a whole, has ever had a career launch as dramatic as his. With Kaho Naa… Pyaar Hai (2000), he became an overnight sensation of unprecedented proportions. Never before in living memory, or since, has a debutant sparked the kind of mass frenzy that Hrithik did with his very first shot at stardom. The chapter delves into the sweat that went into it.
It was like Hrithik was snatching what his grandfather was denied in his lifetime. His undeniable genius notwithstanding, and despite the numerous beautiful numbers that he composed in a career cut short by death at the age of 50, Roshan’s contribution to the golden era of Hindi film music was never fully acknowledged.
That facet of the Roshan story, which stalks the next generation too to perhaps a lesser extent, comes out in the opening episode that jogs our memory of his many timeless hits and, tangentially, indicate to us how, and why, Roshan did not soar to the top of the heap.
In the pre-credits segment of the opening chapter, Hrithik Roshan plays a song (Isko bhi apnata chal usko bhi) in Roshan’s own voice – a rare archival recording of a rehearsal session that was, as the audience is told, found during the filming by series director Shashi Ranjan, who conducts all the interviews himself.
The rest of the episode attempts an assessment of the salient aspects of Roshan’s work as a music director through the points of view of Asha Bhosle, Suman Kalyanpur, Sudha Malhotra, Javed Akhtar. Sonu Nigam, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, and (in the form of radio recordings) Lata Mangeshkar, Ameen Sayani and Kidar Sharma, the man who gave Roshan his first break in 1949 in Neki Aur Badi, which was a box-office bomb that nearly scuttled the musician’s career even before it had begun.
Music plays a key role in this episode and the next, devoted to Rajesh Roshan, who honed his inherited accomplishments under the tutelage of the music director duo Laxmikant-Pyarelal, who, he assisted for years. He was offered a choice between RD Burman and L-P. He opted for the latter. He explains why.
Rajesh Roshan rose to prominence with Kunwara Baap (1974) and Julie (1975). He churned out hit after hit over the next two decades and a half but, as his elder brother and professional collaborator points out, nothing lasts forever.
In Rajesh’s case, history repeated itself. In spite of the string of successes that he toted up, he remained a low-key, media shy individual who was happy to avoid the glare of the spotlight. Besides his professional side, the episode shines a light on matters personal, too, and lets both Rajesh Roshan and his wife, Kanchan, have their say.
Rakesh Roshan’s struggles were far more severe. They stemmed from the lack of genuine stardom, which he thought he deserved. He kept trying to make a breakthrough, even producing a couple of films himself to play the lead, but nothing clicked for him.
And then Khudgarz, an indigenised reworking of Kane and Abel, and Karan Arjun, a vengeance saga embedded in a reincarnation story, happened and the tide turned for Rakesh Roshan. A film director who could do no wrong emerged out of the despondency of his continued failures as an actor.
Laced with interviews with Anil Kapoor, Shah Rukh Khan, Madhuri Dixit, Ranbir Kapoor, Abhishek Bachchan and Pinkie Roshan, among many others, the Roshans abounds in nuggets of information that were hitherto outside the pale of public knowledge.
In the case of Roshan, the docu-series stages reenactments with actors playing the music director, his wife and singer Ira Roshan, Kidar Sharma. Mukesh, his wife, Indeevar and Shailendra to narrate stories of the turning points of his career and the creation of a few of his most-loved songs.
As for the remaining three, they are at hand to help us understand the struggles they faced. Rakesh Roshan and his family and friends talk about the attack on him by unidentified gunmen even as he and Hrithik were basking in the glow of the Kaho Naa… Pyaar Hai success. He also talks about his brush with cancer.
Hrithik holds forth with refreshing forthrightness about “the insurmountable odds” that he had to counter with the help of “incredible desire powered by fear”. It was his fear, he says, that drove him to become somebody despite debilitating physical challenges.
We now definitely know this family of entertainers better. If nothing else, The Roshans is an easy, breezy watch liberally sprinkled with anecdotes, music and memorable moments. Go for it this weekend.
