Like several movies of that era, Achhut Kanya was a reformist piece featuring a Brahmin boy falling in love with a girl from the so-called untouchables in Indian society. His subsequent venture with Devika Rani in Achhut Kanya, the same year was one of the early blockbusters of Hindi cinema. Thus began the storied film career, not as an actor but as laboratory assistant, of the future Ashok Kumar.Īshok Kumar, as Kumudlal Ganguly was now known, started off his acting career reluctantly. His father would not hear of this, and it required the intervention of Sashadhar Mukherjee before he finally reconciled himself to the situation and agreed to let Kumudlal abandon his law studies. He tried to convince his father that he would not become successful as a lawyer and that he would be able to earn a living as a technician or lab assistant. The salary was quite decent furthermore, Kumudlal was successful at his job and found the work interesting, which had not been the case with law college. Kumudlal wanted to earn some spending money for himself, and at his request, Sashadhar Mukherjee used his influence to get him a job as laboratory assistant at Bombay Talkies. Kumudlal's sister Sati Devi had been married at a very young age to Sashadhar Mukherjee, who lived in Chembur in Mumbai and worked in a fairly senior position in the technical department of Bombay Talkies, a pioneering Indian film studio.
However, Kumudlal failed his exams and, to escape acrimony at home, came to live with his sister in Mumbai for a few months, until the exams were held again. Kumudlal's father wanted him to become a lawyer and got him enrolled in a law college. Ganguly was more interested in cinema, in which he dreamt of working as a technician.Ĭareer Early career (1936–42) However, his heart was not in his law studies. Kumar was educated at Presidency College of the University of Calcutta, Kolkata, where he studied to become a lawyer. Thus, Ashok Kumar has no blood relationship with Kiara Advani but he is related to her in her family tree. Geneviève married a Sindhi businessman named Jagdeep Advani. By this second marriage, Bharati also acquired step-daughters, Geneviève and Shaheen, who were Hameed's daughters by his first wife Valerie Salway, a woman of Scottish, Irish, Portuguese and Italian heritage. Later, and much against the wishes of all her relatives, Bharati married Hameed Jaffrey, a Muslim, the brother of the actor Saeed Jaffrey. By this marriage, she had one daughter, the actress Anuradha Patel, who is married to the actor Kanwaljeet Singh. Kumudlal's daughter Bharati married twice. She acted as a comedienne in several Hindi films during the 1970s and 1980s and died unmarried in 2012. The youngest daughter, Preeti Ganguly, was the only one among his daughters to enter the film industry. His second daughter, Rupa Verma, is the widow of the actor and comedian Deven Verma. The eldest daughter, Bharati Patel, is the mother of the actress Anuradha Patel. He then made a career in the corporate world. Aroop Kumar Ganguly worked in only one film, appearing as hero in Bezubaan (1962), which flopped at the box office. They were the parents of one son, Aroop Ganguly, and three daughters named Bharati Patel, Rupa Verma and Preeti Ganguly. Their lifelong marriage was a harmonious and conventional one, and despite his film career, the couple retained a very middle-class outlook and value system, bringing up their children with traditional values in a remarkably simple home. While still a teenager and well before he had even given thought to a career in films, the young Kumudlal was married to Shobha, a girl of his own Bengali Brahmin community and similar family background, in a match arranged by their parents in the usual Indian way. In fact, he stopped celebrating his birthday after his youngest brother, Kishore, died on that day in 1987. Although the eldest by several years, Kumudlal outlived all his siblings. Youngest of all was Abhas (b.1929), whose screen name was Kishore Kumar, who became a phenomenally successful playback singer of Hindi films. Next was his brother, Kalyan, more than 14 years younger (b.1927), who later took the screen name Anoop Kumar.
His only sister, Sati Devi, a few years younger to him, was married at a very young age to Sashadhar Mukherjee and became the matriarch of a large "film family". Kumudlal was the eldest of four children. His father, Kunjlal Ganguly, was a lawyer while his mother, Gouri Devi, was a house wife.
Ashok Kumar was born Kumudlal Ganguly to a Bengali Hindu Brahmin family in Bhagalpur, Bengal Presidency, British India (present-day Bihar, India).