Love Stories of Shimla Hills by Minakshi Chaudhry

Author:Minakshi Chaudhry [Chaudhry, Minakshi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788129116451
Google: q-dIywAACAAJ
Amazon: B00DBTMYJW
Goodreads: 55127979
Publisher: Rupa & Co
Published: 2010-01-01T18:30:00+00:00

1950s

9

Love In Simla

The movie Love in Simla, released in 1960, which introduced Sadhana Shivdasani and Joy Mukherjee to Hindi Cinema was an instant hit. Sadhana stole the heart of cine-goers.

But the real Love in Simla was between Sadhana and R.K. Nayyar, the director of the movie. Simla bewitched the sixteen-year-old Sadhana and twenty-two-year-old Nayyar and they fell in love.

Joy Mukherjee, the hero of the film remembers, ‘Simla was really beautiful. I feel nostalgic even now after nearly fifty years. Our unit came here thrice for shooting. Film magazines started to write about the romance between Sadhana and Nayyar when we were in Simla. So, when we went back they were the hot topic of discussion at Bombay parties. As the movie was being filmed we, the main cast and the producer, director, would go to parties together, and this fuelled more gossip about them and everyone started to talk about their affair. Yes, the real Love in Simla was between Sadhana and R.K. Nayyar.’

It was on these romantic curving roads that the real lovers walked. Though they were together every minute of the shooting, they wanted to take time out alone which was difficult. As they covered different locales for shooting, these places – the Mall, Ridge, Peterhof gave them memories of a lifetime.

Sadhana, the only child of the Shivdasanis, a Sindhi family, was born in Karachi and was named after her father’s favourite actress, Sadhana Bose. Her mother schooled her at home until she turned eight. They came to Mumbai at the time of Partition in 1947. She was fifteen years old when the film industry discovered her. Earlier, she had acted as a chorus girl in Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420 in 1955.

What brought her attention was her second lead in a Sindhi film called Abana (1958) where she played the heroine’s younger sister. She got admitted in an acting school run by film producer Sashadhar Mukherjee, which was training another aspiring actress, Asha Parekh. During the casting of Dil Deke Dekho (1959) Mukherjee asked the director Nasir Hussain to choose between Sadhana and Asha to play the heroine; Hussain chose Asha.

For his next project, Love in Simla (1960), Mukherjee again gave his director, R.K. Nayyar (Raj Kapoor’s assistant) a choice for the heroine. Nayyar chose Sadhana, and she was paired with Mukherjee’s own son, the new-comer Joy Mukherjee.

The film unit came to Simla and stayed at the Clarke’s hotel on Mall Road. Nayyar and Sadhana liked to watch the shimmering lights of Simla town at night from the hotel. In the late 1950s, the Mall was very different from what it is today. It had a strong colonial hangover.

‘It was always clean, spick and span and was washed regularly’ recalls an octogenarian businessman of Shimla. ‘All those people who came for a stroll here in the evenings were in formals, men dressed in suits with shining shoes and the ladies were invariably in saris. Rarely would one find people dressed in casuals and yes, there were no giggling, boisterous young girls and boys roaming here and there.

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