Kishore Kumar spent forty years in an industry he did not want to be in, promising to move back to Khandwa
He said it so often that people in Khandwa can still quote it back.
Doodh jalebi khayenge, Khandwa mein bas jayenge. We will have milk and jalebi, and we will settle down in Khandwa. He repeated it for decades, to interviewers, to colleagues, to anyone who asked what he wanted.
He never did it. He stayed in Bombay until he died there, and Khandwa got him back as ashes.
His father, Kunjalal Ganguly, was a Bengali lawyer brought to Khandwa by a local family who wanted an attorney of their own. Abhas Kumar Ganguly was born there in 1929, the youngest of four. The eldest, Ashok, went to Bombay and became a film star, which is the only reason anybody in this story ended up in the film industry at all.
He followed his brother to Bombay in the 1940s. That is the whole mechanism, and it is worth noticing how little intention there is in it. There was no ambition to be a playback singer, because at the time there was barely such a career to want.
What he actually wanted was to be funny on screen.
He acted, and he was very good at it. Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi, Half Ticket, Padosan. He directed Door Gagan Ki Chhaon Mein and produced films that nobody asked him to produce. The comedy was not a sideline he indulged between recordings; it was the part he cared about.
The singing took over anyway. Aradhana in 1969 made him the dominant male voice in Hindi cinema, and he held that position for most of two decades, singing for Rajesh Khanna and Dev Anand and Amitabh Bachchan and collecting eight Filmfare awards while he was at it.
The singing, which is the thing he is remembered for, he was never trained to do. No classical grounding, no gharana, none of the apprenticeship that everyone around him had served. He yodelled, which is not a Hindustani technique, and he built the most imitated male voice in the country out of instinct and nerve.
The walls
The stories about his behaviour are usually told as comedy, and they are better understood as defence.
He insisted on being paid before he sang and would walk out if he was not. He was said to keep a sign outside his house warning visitors off. He made no effort to be charming to people who could give him work, which in that business is close to professional suicide.
It was consistent rather than mad. When the government leaned on the film industry during the Emergency and asked him to perform for it, he refused, and his songs were taken off All India Radio and Doordarshan through most of 1976. He would not be handled by producers and he would not be handled by ministers.
He died of a heart attack in Bombay, at fifty-eight.
It was Ashok Kumar’s seventy-sixth birthday, the brother whose move to Bombay had put him in films in the first place. He had been in a studio the previous day, recording a duet with Asha Bhosle for a film released after his death.
His wife Leena Chandavarkar described an entirely unremarkable afternoon. Meetings at the house, a plan to watch a film that evening, and then a noise from the next room and a man on the bed saying he felt weak.
His body was taken to Khandwa and cremated there. It is the only version of the promise he ever kept, and he was not conscious for it.
Doodh jalebi
There is a memorial in Khandwa now, and every year on 4 August people go to it.
They take milk and jalebi and leave it there. The mayor turns up, and the collector, and fans who were not born when he died, and somebody usually sings.
Madhya Pradesh named a national award after him in 1997, which is the official form of remembering, and considerably less interesting than the milk.
He spent forty years telling India he was going to come home and eat that, and then did not, and a town he had left as a young man has been holding up its end of the arrangement ever since.
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