Meticulous, stylish yet unpretentious – that’s Sanjay ‘Abbas’ Khan for you. Certainly not the one to keep your interview call pending or have you waiting - he’s there at the appointed hour, at Sanjay Plaza, his tastefully decorated Juhu office, all set to relate his story. Fishing out the last of the batch of his pictures with his lovely younger sister at his 5-star hotel in Bengaluru, he explains,”Saturdays are meant for getting printouts, that’s my hobby.”

Secularupbringing
BEngaluru is his home town, “We are proud Kannadigas,” he declares,”Ours is a business family. My ancestor Ali Asghar came to that city during the fall of Tipu Sultan in the 1820s. He was commissioned to build the famous Attara Kacheri building (opposite Vidhan Soudha) then,” he elaborates. While his father Sadiq Ali Khan was of Indian Pathan descent, his mother belonged to the Irani Moghul stock. “Our mother was widowed at the age of 36 and she brought up her large brood of five sons and two daughters,” he relates with pride. It was a huge household with about 30-40 servants and the most important lesson their ammi taught them was that of “secularism and humanity”. While the Khan kids were convent-educated, their upbringing was rather conservative. “We had to be back home before the street lights came up, study and go to bed,” reminisces Khan, third of the seven siblings.

Cinema calling
Khan was barely 12 when he was taken to the theatre,”That was my very first visit to a cinema hall. While watching Raj Kapoor’s Awara, I was transported to another world altogether. I was completely mesmerised by it and insisted on going backstage to meet the lovely actors,”he laughs at that defining childhood memory. The manager had taken young Abbas into the projection room and explained how a film was fed into the projector and how images hit the screen as it set in motion, “That was the moment of epiphany - I just knew I had to be in films - it seemed like a divine command,” he sighs. The young teenager began his private acting excursions in school and was once caught “in the act” by the principal!
A good student, his poker- straight hair would often fall on his forehead much to the chagrin of Miss Joseph, his class-teacher who would even pin up his hair, “She taught us that handsome is as handsome does and that lesson still guides me,” he admits.
Soon after finishing his Senior Cambridge, Abbas had made up his mind about never joining college, “Where was the need? Somehow I always felt superior to my circumstances and believed that life is the biggest teacher,” he reflects.

Thumbing down hollywood
A gangly, chain-smoking Abbas came to Mumbai with older brother Feroz Khan, “Feroz never wanted to be in films. He was on his way to Germany to pursue a course in Engineering and we stayed with our eldest sister who was married here. Just then legendary filmmaker S Mukerji sent for Feroz as he had spotted him at some party,” relates Khan. Feroz surprisingly was totally reluctant about joining films and was even dismissive about the offer . “But our sister persuaded him to just check it out and he returned from Filmalaya Studio with a three-film contract in his pocket!” he chuckles.
Feroz shot to fame very soon and young Abbas’ dream was “in abeyance” until Feroz was cast in the role of an Indian prince in MGM’s adventure saga Tarzan Goes To India. “He landed me the job of 13th assistant to the famous director John Guillermin (of The Towering Inferno fame). I was only 18 then and when they asked me what I could do, I shot back confidently, ‘Anything!’. Abbas’ burning passion for cinema and his enthusiasm soon endeared him to the director and soon he became his right-hand man, organising 170 elephants for a stampede scene with a five camera set-up! He recalls how the six- feet-four-inches-tall Tarzan “chickened out” of the scene but Feroz and his co-star Simi Garewal braved it. At the end of the schedule, the director insisted that he accompany him on the next schedule in Africa, but Abbas declined the offer, “How could I leave my 14-year-old sweetheart Zarine behind?” he reasoned. The budding romance shut doors on Hollywood for Abbas.

Sanjay khan takes a bow
But there was another door opening right here as his friendly neighbour whose rickety jalopy he would help push-start every day gave him a plum offer, “ The year was 1963 and this gentleman offered me his film Dosti! He was none other than Satyen Bose, who not only gave me the coveted break but also my screen name,” he says. When Abbas joined films there were too many Abbas’s about - K A Abbas, S M Abbas and so on, so his mentor judiciously offered to call him Sanjay Khan on screen, “I loved it, it sounded nice and modern!” he says. Chetan Anand’s Haqeeqat came his way soon after .
Rajshri’s social drama Dosti made on a tiny budget of 4 lakhs was pitted against Raj Kapoor’s big budget (Rs 60 lakhs) bonanza Sangam. As luck would have it, Dosti was also a major box-office hit and outran Sangam then! “But six weeks after the film, I was still waiting for a producer’s knock on my door! I was depressed. And lo! in the seventh week, offers started pouring in. I signed 110 films then,” he laughs at the sweet memory of giddy success.

Lucky star
Those were the days when Dilip Kumar reigned supreme and charged Rs 10 lakhs for a film while Dharmendra’s and Manoj Kumar’s billing was Rs 5 lakhs per film,”I signed a film for Rs 7 lakhs then,” Producers were willing to pay me any price I asked for and Feroz would joke, ‘What’s the score for the day?’ he recalls. Of the 110 films many were made. Khan worked from 7 to 12 in three shifts everyday, “But I found the time in all this to tie the knot with Zarine. We were married on April 16, ‘1966,” he says.
Since then he busied himself. Ek Phool Do Mali, Intequam,Upasana, Shart, Mela, Dus Lakh, Beti, Abhilasha, Mera Vachan Geeta Ki Kasam, Milan Ki Raat and Dhund were some of his films. “My hit rate was high and they called me the lucky star back then,” he reminisces. From Nanda, Nutan, Mumtaz, Sharmila Tagore, Hema Malini, Raakhee, Rekha and Sadhana to Parveen Babi to Zeenat Aman – Sanjay Khan romanced all the leading ladies of the day.

Home banner
After B R Chopra’s Dhund turned out to be a major hit, the handsome star was so inspired by the legendary maker’s engrossing story telling that he penned his first script for Chandi Sona that he made in 1977 under his own banner Zafo Films. Produced, directed and written by him, it also had him in the lead and co-starred Parveen Babi. “My intention was to make socially-relevant films – Chandi Sona championed communal harmony, Abdullah was about celebration of human spirit while Kala Dhanda Goray Log focussed on the social evil of drug addiction,” he recounts.
For his second production, he chose to cast his hero and inspiration Raj Kapoor in the title-role,”I absolutely adored and worshipped him since I was 12. Later we became close friends. When I approached him with the title-role of Abdullah, he shook my hand saying, ‘We are two pathans - one Hindu, the other Muslim!’ and thus my dream project got underway,” Khan recalls with a smile. After shooting four reels of his fourth venture Surzameen starring Vinod Khanna and himself, the film had to be shelved as Khanna couldn’t spare any more dates,”I incurred a heavy loss amounting to Rs 50 lakhs,” he states with a heavy sigh.

Small screen, big miracles
By the late ’80s, video piracy became so rampant that leading producers shut shop, “Film business was drying up and very early on I sensed that television was going to be the next big thing. The Sword Of Tipu Sultan, my prestigious project, which was to be a film earlier, turned into a mammoth teleserial,” he reveals. The serial was shot on the outskirts of Mysore. Within two months of its launch, on February 8, 1989 a killer blaze struck the sets. “Within no time a huge fire was raging on the sets and the first thing I ordered that the barn doors be thrown open. I rushed in to inspect the source of fire and before I knew I was hit by a cannonball in the back of my head,” he relates. When he woke up next he was lying in pool of blood and pus. “I underwent seventy-two surgeries and with great personal resolve and faith in God I came out of it,” he adds. Not surprising that his surgeon hailed him as “the miracle man” for his heart had stopped functioning thrice over during them!

As he recovered he met a mahant of a Hanuman temple who had prayed for him,”I visited the temple up on a hill and decided to make my next serial about the inspiring tale of the monkey god,” says Khan. He the directed Jai Hanuman and also The Great Maratha.

Ramayana Ahead
“I have no regrets in life, I treat it as destiny. I just try and not repeat mistakes and take them as lessons of life,” he states. But Khan admits that he retired far too soon from films and now he’s all set to revamp his home banner with three new productions. “Farrukh Dhondy has given me a script about a filmmaker with three daughters, then there is a love story that will re-launch Zayed in a role that taps his charisma and charm. The most ambitious venture would be The Legend Of Rama, which will be a historical perspective. India needs an icon at this juncture and who better than Ram?” he says. He has offered Hrithik Roshan the role of Ram and Hrithik is going through the script. Zayed will of course play the devoted younger brother - Lakshman.