Kishore Kumar was “mad” about “spooks”. Alfred Hitchcock was his favourite director. (Pointing to a skull, which he used as part of his decor, with red light emerging from its eyes) the legendary singer, at the end of an iconic interview, said, “Look, doesn’t it look nice with my specs on its non-existent nose?”
“You are a good man. You understand the real things of life. You are going to look like this one day,” Kishore Kumar went on.
The interviewer that Kishore Kumar was addressing was the brilliant Pritish Nandy.
Pritish Nandy, the prolific journalist, adman, producer and poet, died at his Mumbai house on January 8 after suffering a cardiac arrest.
Nandy, 40 years ago, stunned the world with his interview of Kishore Kumar for The Illustrated Weekly Of India. Kishore Kumar featured on the cover of the magazine in the April 28-May 4, 1985, issue… along with that bespectacled, Nandy-resembling skull that we began this piece with.
Kishore Kumar on the April-May 1985 cover of The Illustrated Weekly of India
Kishore Kumar’s “closest” friends were Janardhan, Raghunandan, Gangadhar, Jagannath, Buddhuram, Jhatpatajhatpatpa. They were not people, but trees in his garden.
During the course of the eccentric interview, Kishore Kumar spoke about showing “dead rats” when income tax people asked him for the papers. He also used those dusty income tax records as “pesticides.”
Last but not the least, Kishore Kumar said (on the record), “Wives should first learn how to make a home.”
No one knew of this Kishore Kumar before 1985, till the genius of Pritish Nandy showed the eccentric genius of Kishore Kumar to the world.
The world came to know about a music legend, his many wives, his love for Alfred Hitchcock; a music legend who was heard, perhaps, on every occasion in most Indian households back in the day.
The world also took notice of Pritish Nandy’s calibre, the journalist who could make a stalwart drop truth bombs one after another.
Some of you have posted bits and pieces of my Kishore Kumar interview here and others may have seen it elsewhere, especially reproduced on his birthday. Here is the actual cover picture for that interview done in 1985. I found a torn copy after years of searching. pic.twitter.com/OWIQf8TCMQ
— Pritish Nandy (@PritishNandy) June 24, 2019
“Wives should first learn how to make a home”
Pritish Nandy’s interview acquired something of a cult in the following years, as Kishore Kumar spoke about his four wives unapologetically.
When asked about his first wife Ruma Devi, Kishore Kumar didn’t hold himself back, “Wives should first learn how to make a home.
“She was a very talented person but we could not get along because we looked at life differently. She wanted to build a choir and a career. I wanted someone to build me a home. How can the two reconcile? You see, I’m a simple-minded villager type. I don’t understand this business about women making careers. Wives should first learn how to make a home. And how can you fit the two together? A career and a home are quite separate things. That’s why we went our separate ways,” he told Nandy.
When asked about Madhubala, his second wife, Kishore Kumar didn’t mince his words, “She was quite another matter. I knew she was very sick even before I married her. But a promise is a promise. So I kept my word and brought her home as my wife, even though I knew she was dying from a congenital heart problem.
“For 9 long years, I nursed her. I watched her die before my own eyes. You can never understand what this means until you live through this yourself.
“She was such a beautiful woman and she died so painfully. She would rave and rant and scream in frustration. How can such an active person spend 9 long years bed-ridden? And I had to humour her all the time. That’s what the doctor asked me to. That’s what I did till her very last breath. I would laugh with her. I would cry with her.”
Kishore Kumar called his third wedding to Yogita Bali a “joke”
“I don’t think she was serious about marriage. She was only obsessed with her mother. She never wanted to live here,” were Kishore Kumar’s words.
Did Kishore Kumar ever find happiness in marriage?
“Leena is a very different kind of person. She too is an actress like all of them but she’s very different. She’s seen tragedy. She’s faced grief. When your husband is shot dead, you change. You understand life. You realise the ephemeral quality of all things.. I am happy now,” Kishore Kumar said about his fourth wife, Leena Chandavarkar.
“I was Dadamoni’s brother, and he was a great hero”
Kishore Kumar, the brother of ‘Dadamoni’ Ashok Kumar, never wanted to be an actor. Kishore Kumar “screamed, ranted” to come out of the clutches of directors (whom he called “school teachers”). But, at the same time, he would run from one set to another as he ushered in a new era of stardom after Dilip Kumar.
When Pritish Nandy asked the legend how he landed up in acting, he said, “I was conned into it. I only wanted to sing. Never to act. But somehow, thanks to peculiar circumstances, I was persuaded to act in the movies.
“I muffed my lines, pretended to be crazy, shaved my head off, played difficult, began yodelling in the midst of tragic scenes, told Meena Kumari what I was supposed to tell Bina Rai in some other film – but they still wouldn’t let me go. I screamed, ranted, went cuckoo. But who cared? They were just determined to make me a star,” said Kumar.
Pritish Nandy had only one word to ask: “Why?”
Kishore Kumar shot back with a one-liner, “Because I was Dadamoni’s brother. And he was a great hero.”
Pritish Nandy’s interview of Kishore Kumar is one for the books. You can read the full interview here.
