JP Dutta Birthday Special: Bikaner Ki Garam Ret Par Feroz Khan Aur JP Dutta Ka Garma Garm Panga

The deserts and the sand of Rajasthan have always been the favorite locations of filmmakers to shoot some of their most ambitious films and director J.P Dutta has been one director who has lost no opportunity to shoot in the deserts of Rajasthan. Some of his big films like “Hathiyaar”, “Yateen”, “Ghulami”, “Batwara” and Kshatriya are just some of them … –Ali Peter John

J.P.” as he is called was a one-time assistant director of Randhir Kapoor and was known for his hot temper had a problem with the media and made it a point not to invite the media to his shootings done on locations. It was his wife, the one-time actress Bindiya Goswami who asked me to talk to him and it was the first time that J.P. invited a team of the media to Bikaner to cover the shooting of his massive film Kshatriya. The highlight of the film was the casting of Sunil Dutt and Sanjay Dutt and Dharmendra and Sunny Deol as father and sons in addition to Vinod Khanna and Kabir Bedi. The other highlight was that none of the male stars wore any clothes above the waists, not even the villains like Prem Chopra and Puneet Issar who had become popular after knocking out Amitabh Bachchan on the sets of Coolie and playing Duryodhan in the T.V serial Mahabharata. The actresses in the film were Raveena Tandon, Meenakshi Sheshadri, Raakhee, and Divya Bharti ( Kshatriya was her last released film). The shooting at the Bikaner Fort was going on full swing with all the leading male stars involved in hand-to-hand fights in a specially built arena, with thousands of spectators. “J.P” who was a not-so-strong man and was even an asthmatic was totally involved in the shot which formed the climax of the film…

It was 3 p.m. and the unit of J.P. had just resumed shooting after the lunch break and J.P. was in a state of excitement to finish as much of the action before sunset. The entire unit was surprised when a mini aircraft kept hovering over the Bikaner Fort and finally landed exactly where J.P. was commanding the scenes. The plane had four tough men unit and they approached J.P in a menacing way one of them told J.P, ” Hum Bangalore se aaye hai, Feroz Khan sahab me bheja hai aur Sanjay dutt ko uthakar laane ko bola hai ” the angry man in J.P flared up and asked the man, ” yeh tumhare Feroz Khan sahab ke baap ka raaj hai Kya. Apni hawai gaadi ko lekar jaldi se nikal jao yaha se ” the Feroz Khan’s men were not willing to give up easily and try to threaten J.P . It had turned into an ugly scene which could hell tuned into a conflagration, but it was the timely intervention of Sunil Dutt that avoided it and Feroz Khan’s men who had come determined to take away Sanjay Dutt to Bangalore palace to shoot for Feroz Khan’s Yalgaar had to get into their aircraft and fly back to Bangalore, without having their target Sanjay Dutt on the flight with them.

The problem was that J.P had all the dates for Sanjay to shoot for Kshatriya and Feroz Khan was only trying to take advantage of the situation and get Sanjay to Bangalore to shoot for his film Yalgaar for better or for worse. These kinds of scenes of what was known as “Bhaigiri” and “Dadagiri” was very rampant in the early 80’s, a fact that can be guessed by how the late Rishi Kapoor received threats from a very powerful smuggler, Dawood Ibrahim to work as the romantic lead opposite his niece Karishma Kapoor and how he had to use another powerful man to get him out of the dicey situation

WOH BHI EK ZAMANA THA, AUR KYA ZAMANA THA WOH!