From Yeh Rastey To Rustom, Nanavati Continues To Entice Bollywood

The real life story of the naval officer, who shot his wife’s lover, continues to fancy movie buffs.

With the upcoming thriller Rustom,  Akshay Kumar has sprinted to the winning post in the race to reboot the sensational Nanavati murder case of November 1958.

Circa 1963, Sunil Dutt had produced the black-and-white film Yeh Rastey Hain Pyaar Ke, which, directed by R K Nayyar, was quite transparently ‘inspired’ by the real-life cause celebre.  

To avoid legal hassles, Dutt had been refashioned as a commercial airline’s pilot named Anil Kumar Sahni. Leela Naidu essayed the part of his wife, Neena. The third end of the triangle - camouflaged under the name of Ashok Srivastava and as incarnated by the charismatic actor Rehman - carried shades of Ahuja.

Veterans Ashok Kumar and Motilal enacted the silver-tongued lawyers for the prosecution and the defence. The parallels were a no-brainer.

In her biography though, the late Leela Naidu proclaimed that the script of Yeh Rastey Hain Pyaar Ke was written before the Nanavati case - a claim which remains debatable.

The film, with an evocative music score by Ravi (particularly the still-hummed title song), was tagged with an ‘Adults only’ censor certificate. Premiered at Mumbai’s Maratha Mandir cinema, it had struck up average business.

Naval Commander Kawas Manekshaw Nanavati had pumped three bullets into  Prem Bhagwan Ahuja, persistently described as the ‘Sindhi playboy businessman of Bombay’. Ahuja was involved in an adulterous relationship with Nanavati’s British wife, Sylvia.

So what was that about Akshay Kumar winning the race for re-filming the crime de passion?

Unbeknownst to many, ad man Ram Madhvani had a painstakingly-researched  script ready on the Nanavati case which he had offered to Aamir Khan for his valued consideration. Waiting for the Khan turned out to be as much of a chore as waiting for Godot. Madhvani moved on to make Neerja.

Some asking around indicates that Madhvani’s script, after some rewriting, had been okayed by Sylvia Nanavati, who had resettled in Toronto with her two sons and daughter and was joined by Kawas Nanavati after he had served a three-year sentence. Nanavati passed away in 2003. His widow and children have maintained a rigidly invisible profile.

Yet, Madhvani was persuasive enough to get a formal sanction from Mrs Sylvia Nanavati.

BesidesYeh Rastey Hain Pyaar Ke, shades of the Nanavati story were detected in Gulzar’s Achanak (1973). A couple of years ago, actor Soni Razdan had also sought to direct a script on similar lines and had approached Arjun Rampal for the lead role. That project went through the cracks.  

A book titled Nanavatika Muqadama has been written in Hindi, a chapter in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children narrated a thinly-veiled account of a Commander Sabarmati (rhymes with Nanavati!), and yet another riff, an e-line book on Nanavati is in the works.

Which just about makes the naval commander’s case an ongoing fascination through almost six decades. Love, murder, redemption, all the ingredients of a why-dunit are here.

That Sylvia Nanavati had behaved with equanimity and cool for the sake of her children, on the day the story hit the headlines in deep bold fonts, can be verified from the then students of the Cathedral and John Connon School.  

Around noon, she had arrived at the school on Outram Road, Fort, for a meeting with the principal. Although classes were on, the teachers as well as even junior students in their pre-teens had rushed to the stairwell to catch a glimpse of her. Classes had come to a standstill.

Sylvia Nanavati emerged some 15 minutes later, ensured that her son who must have been around 10 then, bid goodbye to his classmates, which he did with tears of bafflement in his eyes. That was the last time the son, an accomplished athlete at the school sports events, was seen or heard of by the Cathedralites.

It is learnt that the Akshay Kumar movie directed by Tinu Suresh Desai and produced by Neeraj Pandey, who previously helmed Special 26 (based on a true-life jewellery heist), is a ‘fictionalised’ reprise on the Nanavati case, which will be asserted through a disclaimer.

In this case, the lead characters have been named Rustom Pavri, Cynthia Pavri and Vikram.

Truth, once again, is about to be Bollywood-wrapped in fiction.

(The writer is a film critic, filmmaker, theatre director and a weekend painter)