I recently found myself trying to defend Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani against this particular judgment, arguing that, while the film was indeed searingly bad, it was also very entertaining, a fact which I felt should place it above other Bollywood films that were comparably bad but also boring. The result, Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani ( Beloved Enemy: A Strange Tale), turned out to be not only a resounding box office dud, but also a film that would come to be widely considered one of the worst ever produced by Bollywood. To this end, the story of Nagin was updated, but then, in a curious touch, fitted with the title of Kohli’s other big seventies hit. By 2002, he seemed to have come to the conclusion that the key to success lay in forging an association between his son’s name and those beloved hits that had cemented his reputation as a director. Kohli, however, remained committed to furthering his son’s career - to the extent of limiting his directing output exclusively to films starring Arman. Two successive attempts at the same prize, 1993’s Auland Ke Dushman and 1997’s Qahar, didn’t fare any better. Virodhi, unfortunately, was an utter failure, both in terms of box office receipts and as a vehicle for Arman. That project started with 1992’s Virodhi, and had as its goal the elevation to stardom of actor Arman Kohli, who also happened to be Raj Kumar Kohli’s son. The hits kept coming for Kohli throughout the eighties, but the dawn of the following decade would see the director take on a project that, in retrospect, seems to have sent his career careening irreparably off the rails. While not quite as much fun as Nagin, Jaani Dushman was not without its moments of effectively creepy atmospherics, and boasted the added attraction of featuring a young Amrish Puri as its monster. This time, the film focused on a werewolf-like creature who murders brides on their wedding day. Second is that Nagin seemed to take 1970s Bollywood’s tendency toward fanciful design and blinding displays of color to a retina-rending extreme, adopting the look of a lurid cinematic comic book, complete with dreamily artificial-looking sets cast in florescent primary hues and woozily melding pastels.įor his next big hit, 1979’s Jaani Dushman, Kohli followed much the same pattern, stuffing the cast with as many big names as it could take and adopting a similarly narcotic palette.
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One is the trend for “multi-starrers”, which was in full force at the time. Under Kohli’s guidance, the film came to exemplify two prominent strains in 1970s Bollywood cinema, both of which the director seemed to have taken very closely to heart. The first of these was 1976’s Nagin, just one in a long line of Bollywood movies concerning the dark escapades of snake spirits who are capable of taking human form. Kohli made his initial mark on Bollywood with a pair of supernaturally-themed blockbusters during the seventies. For a fearsome reminder of this, one need look no further than director Raj Kumar Kohli’s 2002 film Jaani Dushman: Ek Anokhi Kahani, as terrible a monument to a father’s love for his son as has ever been erected. For the Hindi film industry’s directors, stars and producers, dynasty building seems to be a top order of business, right alongside the practice of their chosen craft. That some of Bollywood’s worst sins have been committed in the name of nepotism is a fact which anyone who has borne witness to Karisma Kapoor’s early career can sadly attest to.
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