Ruma Guha Thakurta, The First Wife Of Kishore Kumar Dies In Kolkata

Ali Peter John

There are some meetings in which I remember the face and what was said, but since that was the only meeting we ever had, it becomes difficult to place the situation in which the meeting happened....

It was more than twenty-five years ago. Amol Palekar was shooting for a film called “Ankahee"in which he played the leading man besides directing it and had Bengali actors like Anil Chatterjee, a veteran of Bengali cinema and a young girl who was more interested in making it in Hindi films. I may go off track, but I must mention what happened to the girl before I go on to talk about my first meeting with Ruma Guha Thakurta. The beautiful girl seemed to be in a hurry to make the best of her trip to Bombay. She got done middlemen to arrange a meeting for her with one of the leading producers who had made a fiery film which ran for more than five years in several theatres in the country and his filmmaker friend. They were both in their late seventies. The senior of the two invited the girl to his house on Peddar Road. The excited girls recited the apartments where the two producers were waiting for the. As soon as she reached, they said they would have to go to another apartment in Colaba. What happened in that apartment and what the two old man to the girl made her cru for two days and she finally give up all hope about making it in Bombay and take the first train to Calcutta and has never been heard of again....

Ruma Guha had come with the team from Calcutta and I happened to meet her in Amol's house “Chirebandi"where most of the shooting of “Ankahee" took place. The gracious lady introduced herself to me as the first wife of the singer-actor-producer-director, Kishore Kumar

In less than half an hour she told me her story in brief. She belonged to a family of classical singers in Calcutta and had sung for “Jwar Bhata"in which Dilip Kumar made his debut as an actor. Anil Biswas was the composers who inspired her to sing in a Hindi film of which he had no knowledge of Hindi....

It was her brief stay with IPTA which got her in touch with other actors, composers and singers. It was the well-known composer Salil Chowdhury who got her interested in the Bombay Youth Choir where he made quite a name of herself.

She had some of the popular patriotic songs and it was one song“marne ki duaayen kyun maangoon, “jeeni ki tamanna kaun kare”, which was the song with which Kishore Kumar made his mark as a singer under the baton of Husnlal Bhagatram and the song was to be picturised on Dev Anand in his second film, “Ziddi"(which made Ruma fall in love with Kishore and they got married and had a son who they called Amit Kumar. But Ruma couldn't live under the shadow of Kishore who within a short time grown into one of the most popular singer and actors. Their differences kept mounting till they officially for divorced in 1958 and Ruma went back to Calcutta, leaving her son, Amit with Kishore.....’

They then began their own lives, but continued to be good friends. Ruma got married and had a daughter in Calcutta, while Kishore went on having three more marriages, the first with Madhubala,the second with actress Yogeeta Bali and the third with Leena Chandavarkar with whom he had a son called Sumit Kumar.

Ruma continued her acting career in Bengali films and was so good that in one film directed by Tapan Sinha, all the five actresses in it won the National Award and Ruma was one of them.....

Ruma felt extremely delighted when she was chosen to sing a welcome song for Nelson Mandela on his first visit to India which started with a grand welcome at the Eden Gardens where more than a lakh and a half of people had gathered and Mandela had personally thanked the singers. Ruma had one more reasons to be happy and that was when the song sung in honour of Nelson Mandela was played when he was sworn in as the first President of independent South Africa.....

She however continued to sing songs based on classical music, but gradually gave up both acting and singing and spent the best of her life being a house wife who was very happy for the grand success of Kishore and was a little worried for her son, Amit who she said had a very tough task of being the son of a legend like Kishore Kumar, but as time passed, she discovered that Amit was gradually growing melodious and she believed he would grow better with time and when she last met him and heard him sing for her, she was sure that Amit would make it “because, after all he had the genes of his father in him".

She was not keeping well for quite some time. On the night of June 3, she sang her swan song. She was eighty-four and I wonder how Kishore Kumar Ganguly who died when he was only fifty-seven would look and sound like when he was eighty-four or more and how he would have reacted to the death of his first of four wives.

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Tags: Bollywood, Bollywood News, Bollywood Updates, Television, Telly News, Ruma Guha Thakurta, Kishore Kumar, Amit Kumar