As a boy of 10, he remembers accompanying his baba to Regal and Lido cinemas where only flies buzzed around and, seeing him return home, bitterly disappointed. However, Jayant is quick to remind that for the first two weeks, Nagin ran to empty theatres. Hemant Kumar and Pradeep Kumar also never looked back after Nagin,” informs Deb. Since his Anarkali, Bina Rai, didn’t know dancing, they opted for Vyjayanthimala who rocketed to the big league with this film. Anarkali was a superhit and my father decided to repeat the director-actor jodi of Nandlal Jaswantlal and Pradeep Kumar in Nagin. My father opted for the latter even though he didn’t speak Urdu, hiring a teacher so he got the pronunciation right and cast Shammi in Hum Sab Chor Hai. “Both Shammi Kapoor and Pradeep Kumar had auditioned for the role of Prince Salim. Mukherjee’s son, Deb, points out that his father had put Pradeep Kumar on the road to success with the historical Anarkali. “You need to give a hit first, else it will be an insult to me since I brought you down,” he reasoned, and soon after offered him Nagin. The composer who was smoking dejectedly turned to come face-to-face with an angry Sashadhar who caught him by the scruff of his neck and asked him why he was going back. The filmmaker told her that he was on his way and not to inform Hemant. “Disheartened by the flops, baba decided to return to Kolkata and reached CST Station from where ma secretly called up S Mukherjee and informed him that they would be taking the train in a few hours,” reminisces Jayant. “The film didn’t run but over 60 versions of “Vande Mataram” have come up since, but none could beat the one scored by my father,” asserts Jayant Mukherjee, Hemant Kumar’s son.Īnand Math was followed by Shart, another musical success for its evergreen “Na Yeh Chand Hoga Na Taare Rahenge” but a commercial failure. The film was Anand Math, based on Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s 1882 Bengali novel by the same name, set against the Sannyasi Rebellion in 18th century Bengal. In 195, filmmaker Sashadhar Mukherjee invited director Hemen Gupta, singer-composer Hemant Kumar and actor Pradeep Kumar to come down to Mumbai from Kolkata and collaborate on a production for his studio, Filmistan.