Kader Khan: From a Dickensian childhood to embodying essence of Hindi cinema

By Mayank Chhaya: Kader Khan rose from the depths of a Dickensian childhood in the Bombay of the 1940s, surrounded by drug peddlers, prostitutes, pimps and assorted thugs to eventually embody the essence of Hindi cinema.
Growing up in Kamathipura, Mumbai’s notorious red light district that is at once cruelly heartless and touchingly heartfelt, Khan absorbed a vast range of human frailties and poured them in to 700 films that he acted in and wrote.
There is no comparable figure in cinema anywhere in the world where a master’s in civil engineering juggled his writerly and actorly talents with such consummate ease in hundreds of movies for close to four decades. By Khan’s own reckoning, he acted in 450 movies and wrote dialogues and scripts for 250 films. That is an astonishing output even by the generally prolific standards of Hindi cinema.
Since Khan made writing and even a certain type of performance look so effortless, he often does not get his due for his remarkable contribution to Hindi cinema. Although born in Kabul, Khan went on to capture the quintessence of India’s everyday pluralism in his writings. It was under the tutelage of director Manmohan Desai, who commissioned Khan to write for his movies starting in the early 1970s, that he went on to powerfully capture Bombay’s street swag as reflected in its language.
Desai told this writer in 1986: “When I first met Kader Khan I told him, ‘Tum miyabhai khali sher-o-shayri aur nawabi Urdu likhta hai. Hum ko kuchh gully ka chahiye. (You Muslim writers write only poetry and Urdu of the royal court. I need some street stuff.)’ Khan also recalled Desai telling him that in his later interviews to others.