Kader Khan

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A profile

January 2, 2018: The Times of India

In his prime, Khan was both Bollywood’s premier and most-prolific dialogue writer, penning many of Amitabh Bachchan hits. Versatility was his USP, his mastery over the craft deceptively informal. The Kabul-born writer’s dialogues could produce claps and wolf-whistles from frontbenchers, evoke laughter, make handkerchiefs wet. He wrote lines that both taporis and raffish college students with upturned collars would repeat outside the theatres: Hum jahan khade hote hain line wohin se shuru hoti hai (Kaalia, 1981), or, Is thappad ki goonj suni tumne, ab is goonj ki goonj tumhe sunai degi (Karma, 1986), or, Aisa to aadmi life mein do heech time bhaagta hai... Olympic ka race ho ya phir police ka case ho (Amar Akbar Anthony, 1977) and many more.

Khan had the gift of making the asinine sound funny. He could be ribald as well.

In popular memory, Khan endures more as a comedian, especially in the bawdy and brassy Jeetendra movies of the 1980s South or in the 1990s Govinda-David Dhawan combos. Khan could be mean (Naseeb, 1981), mean but funny (Dulhe Raja, 1998), downright funny (Mujhse Shaadi Karogi, 2004), even the family’s suffering patriarch (Jaisi Kar ni Waisi Bhar ni, 1989).

Perhaps his hardy early life invested him with a mélange of emotions, gave him a hands-on feel of the popular pulse. Khan overcame a poverty-stricken Bombay childhood to become a college theatre star, a civil engineer and a teacher of science and mathematics. His career as a Hindi film writer began at the cajoling of director Narinder Bedi who had seen him perform at a theatre competition. He co-wrote Bedi’s superhit Jawani Diwani (1972) with the writer Inder Raj Anand. “I got Rs 1,500 for the job,” Khan recalled in an interview.

Director Manmohan Desai asked him to write the dialogue for Roti’s climax (1974) though he was skeptical about Khan’s ability to deliver. Khan recalled that Desai was “deewanawar” (ecstatic) after hearing his lines. The director heard it four times, went inside his house, grabbed a Toshiba black and white TV and gifted it to him. “He also gave me a gold bracelet. Then he asked me, ‘What’s your price?’ When I said, I had received Rs 21,000 for writing Rafoochakkar, he said, ‘Manmohan Desai’s writer should get more.’ He gave me Rs 1.21 lakh. Suddenly, I was a lakhpati.”