Daily Times

The seven-week India visit reportage must end on a very personal note. One of my earliest memories (I had just turned four) was the news that actor Shyam had died in a tragic accident. Since ours was a film-going family, that topic kept on being discussed with a great deal of grief and sorrow. In those discussions, only my father was never a participant because he adhered to the old school that film, music and such activities were not in harmony with Islamic convictions.

When we were growing up in Lahore in the late 1950s and 1960s, the optimum pleasure and entertainment one aspired to was to have enough money to go to films once or twice a month, and have tea a little more often in those string of tea stalls and restaurants beginning at one end, roughly from Coffee House and Pak Tea House, and the famous stall of Mirza Sahib at the YMCA, and then till about another one-and-half or two kilometres eastwards till one reached the Alfalah building. Shyam, Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand and other Bollywood greats, and our stars Santosh Kumar and Lala Sudhir, provided an escape into a world of romance, thus forgetting the pressures of school-going, homework and other such routines. One had a fairly large choice for entertainment on a small budget.

The mystique of Shyam never really faded though he had departed a decade earlier when I began my initiation into films and film-music. One learnt that Shyam had married a Muslim, Mumtaz Qureshi, better known as Taji, whom he met in Lahore in the 1940s, but married when he had shifted to Bombay after the partition. They had two children, a girl and a boy. Senior film buffs, especially women, continued talking about him because his death evoked all the sympathy such a tragedy would.

Some time ago when I wrote a series of articles on Punjabi actors and actresses from Lahore and Punjab, the first article was on Shyam (Daily Times, June 24, 2012). Given the wonders that the Internet can do, I came into contact with his relatives as far away as Poona, Maharashtra and then Delhi. His nephew Bimal Chadha, a leading journalist who lives in Delhi, and I began to exchange regular emails. Within days we decided that he should call me Billu and I would address him as Chuno (the nickname Taya Shyam gave him). He told me he had always wanted to visit Pakistan and that he had many Pakistani friends. I told him that I visit India quite so often and always feel very welcome. He is the son of Shyam’s younger brother, Harbans Chadha.

Sunder Shyam Chadha was born on February 20, 1920 in Sialkot because his father, who was in the army, was serving there; otherwise, the family belonged to Rawalpindi. Their branch of the Chadha clan of Punjabi Hindu Khatris belong to a village near Jhelum, but their family had settled in Rawalpindi a few generations earlier. Shyam, therefore, grew up in Rawalpindi and studied at the famous Gordon College. Shyam lived in Lahore for many years and made his debut in films in Lahore in the Punjabi film Gawandi (1942). He then went to Bombay where he quickly became a leading star.

On March 21, I met the Chadhas at the residence in a New Delhi suburb. It was an unusually emotional meeting as Shyam’s relatives were very curious to meet someone like me who had written about him in a Lahore newspaper. We first called upon Harbansji, who is 90, very alert but the ravages of old age had taken their toll, and I learnt he did not any longer go out. We talked for a long, long time and many anecdotes about him and his elder brother were narrated by him. Both brothers had been very close to each other. Their mother had died when they were very young but their stepmother was an angel of a woman and both brothers dearly loved her.

I could immediately see a very strong resemblance between Harbansji and Shyam, though the latter was very tall while Harbansji is of medium height. He told me that the actual date when Shyam died after falling from the horse he was riding during the shooting of Shabistan was April 25, 1951 and not April 26, 1951, as is often mentioned in film magazines. It happened to be Harbansji’s birthday but since that day he had not celebrated it, and now he was 90. The evening continued with dinner, and more conversation with Bimal and his very gentle and kind wife, Veena, also hailing from a family originally from Rawalpindi.

We discussed a tragedy that has continued to cast sadness after the death of Shyam. His wife Taji left for Pakistan and took their two children with her. One of Shyam’s children is the well-known Pakistani TV personality Sahira Kazmi and the other her brother, Shakir, is a psychiatrist who lives in London. The Chadhas wanted me to help them get in touch with Shakir; there had been some contact with Sahira Kazmi, but it did not develop further. Upon returning to Stockholm on March 23, 2013 I began searching for him and finally traced him to a London clinic. I obtained his email address from his office and wrote to him and conveyed the message of his relatives in Delhi. He did not respond. I wrote to him again in vain. I had no choice but to give up and let Bimal know that there was no response.

Sahira and her brother have inherited a great deal of property in Bombay and Poona and their cousin wanted them to come and claim it. This they are apparently not willing to do. It is not for us to wonder why. Such a decision must rest with the individuals involved. However, with the DVDs now availableof Shyam’s films for quite some time, he is likely to continue fascinating people and evoke in them deep feelings of sympathy for him. He died too early, no doubt.

The writer is a visiting professor, LUMS, Pakistan, professor emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University, and honorary senior fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Latest publications: Winner of the Best Non-Fiction Book award at the Karachi Literature Festival: The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed, Oxford, 2012; and Pakistan: The Garrison State, Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947-2011), Oxford, 2013. He can be reached at:billumian@gmail.com