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13 April 1973: Balraj Sahni, Indian film and theatre actor, died
YB WEB DESK. Dated: 4/13/2021 12:54:24 PM
Balraj Sahni, one of the finest actors to have graced the Hindi film screen, was born Yudhisthir Sahni on 1 May 1913 in Rawalpindi (now part of Pakistan) to a Punjabi family. He died on 13 April 1973. As a youngster he studied Hindi and English literature in university, and worked as a teacher at Shantiniketan (Bengal) and for the BBC radio’s Hindi service in Britain. One of the pioneering members of the Indian People’s Theatre Association, he acted in plays like Zubeida and The Inspector General. Though Sahni is best remembered as a film actor, his colleagues in theatre had fond memories of the time he spent with them. In his memoirs, Habib Tanvir, one of the leading names in Indian theatre after Independence, wrote: “For all his work in films, cinema wasted his (Sahni’s) talent. He was such a brilliant comedian, he was so effective in Jadu ki Kursi that his performance was unforgettable. I have seen many of his films too; he always acted with great control and subtlety but he was never given a comic role.” A new medium Sahni’s debut Hindi film was Insaaf. This was followed by films like Dharti Ke Lal (based on the 1943 Bengal famine) and Door Chalein. In 1951, he worked with actors Dilip Kumar and Nargis in Hulchul. In between the film’s shooting, Sahni was arrested for being a communist sympathiser, and the film director K. Asif took special court permission to allow Sahni to shoot. Sahni wrote the story and dialogues for Baazi. In an article on Sahni, the renowned film critic Dinesh Raheja wrote in rediff.com: “The crime-musical (Baazi) was a smash hit. But Sahni’s refusal to kowtow to box-office parameters and his uncompromising nature as a writer—he made Guru Dutt wait for six months before he delivered the leather-bound script of Baazi—ensured that he was largely offered work as an actor.” It was, however, in 1953 that Sahni’s acting prowess was widely recognised after the release of Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen, which won a prize at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival in France. In it he played the role of Shambhu, a farmer trying to save his small plot of land from an unscrupulous landlord. Unable to pay a loan, he goes to Calcutta where he pulls a rickshaw to earn a meagre income. In an article in the DNA in April 2013, the writer and critic Jai Arjun Singh noted: “An undervalued aspect of Do Bigha Zameen is the depiction in its early scenes of the love between Shambhu and his wife, the playfulness of their banter. . . . Sahni grounds the edifice.