Shakti Samant - Legend is No More

With the demise of legendary hindi film director Shakti Samant - a glorious chapter of Indian cinema has been brought to an end. Shakti Samant was one of the icons who single handedly wrote new idioms for making of cinema whose core motif was romance.

Shaktiji started his career with the cinema from the black and white era with HOWRAH BRIDGE and at the fag end of the innings also came out with a movie like DON MUTHUSWAMY which was anti-thesis to the image that he had created for himself.

One of the singular features of nearly all the films that Shakti Samant made was the integral presence the grand patriarch of Hindi cinema Dada Muni aka Ashok Kumar. It had become more so pronounced in the early seventies when Shakti Samant was on a roll with his romantic films.



Likeable films of Shakti Samant are classics like ARADHANA, KATI PATANG, AMAR PREM, ANURAAG, AMANUSH, etc., which bear an ample testimony to the same. Dada Muni and Shakti Samant seemed to grow together in film after film, and the image of grand patriarch sort of got solidification with Dada Muni�s association with Shakti Samant.

It is also ironic that the first romantic hero of the country Rajesh Khanna was the creation of Shakti Samanta through his series of films. For Sharmila Tagore as well, it was Shakti Samant who was her most successful director.It was a relationship that started with KASHMIR KI KALI, AN EVENING IN PARIS, following into AMAR PREM, ARADHANA, etc. He would be rare few directors who won three Filmfare awards for ARADHANA, AMR PREM and AMANUSH.

Shakti Samant therefore would be one of the giants of the Hindi cinema as he gave to the industry few of the all time greats that the industry has including Dada Muni, Shammi Kapoor, Sharmila Tagore, Rajesh Khanna, Uttam Kumar and in the realm of music the iconic success that R D Burman enjoyed along with Kishore Kumar could not have been possible had Shakti Samant not made films like ARADHANA, AMAR PREM, KATI PATANG etc.

He was also the first man who began the era of making bilingual films i.e. both in Hindi and Bengali and opened a new genre of film making, which was not followed up subsequently. He was one man who single handedly was instrumental in bringing the traditions and practices of Bengali culture on a country wide platform and his characters most of the time used to sport traditional Indian dresses, a sort of fashion statement about the Indian sartorial preferences.

In his passing away Hindi bollywood cinema has lost one of the biggest legends that it ever produced.