Chetan Anand (director)

A retrospective of his films was held at the Stuttgart Film Festival and at the India International Centre, New Delhi in 2007.

Chetan Anand: The Poetics of Film, a book written by his wife Uma Anand and son Ketan Anand (Himalaya Films Media Entertainment), was released in 2006. A documentary by the same name made by Ketan Anand was released in 2008.

On 27 March 2000, three years after his death, Priya Rajvansh mysteriously died in the same beachfront bungalow.

Anand died on 6 July 1997, at the age of 76 in Mumbai. He bequeathed a very sizable portion of his wealth to Priya Rajvansh. This included the right of lifelong residence in his sprawling beachfront bungalow in Juhu, Mumbai, where real estate is among the most expensive in India. She was given no right to sell the property, which would revert to Anand's sons upon her death; the arrangement was made because Priya Rajvansh and Anand had had no children together, and this would enable her to live her whole life in the house that she had shared with him for two decades, while not depriving his sons of this valuable piece of real estate.

Apart from 17 feature films he is also known for the acclaimed television serial, Param Vir Chakra, which was aired Doordarshan in 1988.

In the 1960s, well after being estranged from his wife, Anand fell in love with Priya Rajvansh, who had made her debut as heroine of his film Haqeeqat. The two fell in love during the making of this film and their relationship lasted all their lives. Priya Rajvansh worked in every single film made by Anand beginning with Haqeeqat, and more surprisingly, she did not work in a single film made by anyone else. Anand remained married to Uma, who refused to grant him a divorce because of the taboo and opprobrium attached to it and because divorce is utterly antithetical to the Hindu religion. Therefore Anand was unable to formalize his relationship with Priya Rajvansh even to his death, and they had no children together.

While he made his reputation as a director, Anand kept on acting too occasionally. He appeared in Humsafar made in 1957. In 1957, he directed two movies Arpan and Anjali, in which he played lead roles too. He went on to act in Kala Bazar, Kinare-Kinare, Aman, Kanch Aur Heera and Hindustan Ki Kasam, which he directed too.

By the early 1950s, he and his younger brother Dev Anand had set up Navketan Productions in Bombay present day Mumbai. Afsar, starring Dev Anand and Suraiya, was the first film made by Navketan, which turned out to be a moderate success. It was followed by Taxi Driver and Aandhiyan, both of which he directed for the Navketan banner.

He soon took to film direction with the well-acclaimed movie Neecha Nagar which won the Palme d'Or (Best Film) award (then known as 'Grand Prix') at the Cannes Film Festival in 1946. It was the debut film for Kamini Kaushal and became the first Indian film to gain international recognition and was the debut of Pandit Ravi Shankar.

In 1943, Anand married Uma Anand. The couple became the parents of two sons, Ketan Anand and Vivek Anand. However, they separated within a few years of marriage because of incompatibility. Divorce remains a very great taboo in India, for religious and cultural reasons, and until 1976, the law did not even permit divorce by mutual consent. Therefore the couple never got divorced.

In the early 1940s, while he was teaching History, he wrote a film script on king Ashoka, which he went on to show to director Phani Majumdar in Bombay. Anand failed to qualify for the Indian Civil Service (ICS) exams in London. As luck would have it, Phani Majumdar cast him as a lead in his Hindi film, Rajkumar, released in 1944. He also became associated with Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) in Bombay present day Mumbai.

Chetan Anand (3 January 1921 – 6 July 1997) was a Hindi film producer, screenwriter and director from India, whose debut film, Neecha Nagar, was awarded the Grand Prix Prize (Now Golden Palm) at the first ever Cannes Film Festival in 1946. Later he co-founded Navketan Films with his younger brother Dev Anand in 1949.

Anand was born on 3 January 1921, in Lahore, British India, to well-to-do advocate Pishori Lal Anand. He went to Gurukul Kangri Vishwavidyalaya to study Hindu scriptures and graduated in English from Government College Lahore. He remained a member of Indian National Congress in the 1930s, subsequently worked for the BBC and taught at the Doon School, Dehradun for a while, before coming down to Bombay to sell a film script.