CHETAN ANAND

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Chetan Anand (3 January 1915 - 6 July 1997) was an acclaimed Hindi film producer, screenwriter and director from India, whose debut film, Neecha Nagar, bagged the Palme d'Or (Best Film) award, at the Cannes Film Festival in 1946. He is the eldest brother of the Anand family as he is the elder brother to Hindi film actor-directors, Dev Anand and Vijay Anand. His younger sister, Sheel Kanta Kapur, is the mother of renowned Hindi and English film director Shekhar Kapur. Chetan Anand was born on 3 January 1915, in Gurdaspur in Punjab. After graduating from Government College Lahore, he also 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 Mumbai to sell a film script. 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, but not before his failed attempt to qualify, the Indian Civil Service (ICS) exams, in London. As luck would have it, Phani Majumdar, instead 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. He soon took to film direction with the well-acclaimed movie, Neecha Nagar which bagged the Palme d'Or (Best Film) award, then known as 'Grand Prix', at the Cannes Film Festival in 1946. This film was also the debut film for Kamini Kaushal, and became the first Indian film to gain international recognition and also debut of Pandit Ravi Shankar. He died on 6 July 1997, at the age of 82 in Mumbai. On 27 March 2000, Priya was murdered in his Juhu home, and in 2002, Chetan Anand's sons Ketan Anand and Vivek Anand along with their employees Mala Choudhary and Ashok Chinnaswamy, were given life imprisonment with her murder.