50 Years Of Padosan: Let’s Revisit One Of The Best Comedies In The History Of Indian Cinema!

50 Years Of Padosan: It is the favourite movie of many cricketers of the 1983 Cricket World Cup Winning Team. That is because during the World Cup winning campaign with the final against Clive Lloyd’s mighty West Indians, Kapil Dev had watched it together. What a movie Padosan was, it is one of the best comedies ever in the history of Hindi cinema. Today, on 29th November, as it completes 50 years, I take a nostalgic journey to discuss some trivia about this fun movie and its evergreen songs

Based on Arun Chowdhury’s Bengali story Pasher Bari, a Bengali movie by same name was directed by Sudhir Mukherjee. It was remade into Telugu in 1960 and Tamil in 1961 before Padosan was made in 1968. Later it was once again remade in Telugu in 1981 and Kannada in 2003.

Padosan was produced by Mehmood and NC Sippy and directed by Jyoti Swaroop. It stars Sunil Dutt, Mehmood , Kishore Kumar and Saira Banu. Urban legend has it that Kishore was disinterested to act and wanted to only sing. However Mehmood requested him to act as it was his 1st production. Even so, Kishore refused and relented only after Mehmood spend an entire night standing outside his house with his request. Thank God Kishore agreed. His depiction of Vidyapati, singing with pan juice dripping down from his lips is one of the all time great characters of Hindi cinema

The song Ek Chatoor Naar is one of the highlights of the movie. The song has Kishore Kumar lip syncing for Sunil Dutt while Manna Dey sings for Mehmood. A peculiar situation arose when Manna Dey raised his objection as in the movie, his character loses to Kishore Kumar in a singing duel. He was perplexed as to how he who was a classical maestro, which was acknowledged by even Mohd. Rafi could lose to Kishore who was not classically trained. With great difficulty Mehmood convinced him.

Ironically, a decade earlier, in Basant Bahaar, Manna Dey’s character had defeated Bhimsen Joshi’s character in the song Ketki Gulab Juhi. To be fair to him though, he had opposed at that time too and agreed only after being convinced that it was the demand of the situation . The same logic was given by Mehmood as well- that the situation demanded it.