By Ganesh Saili
A list of the films shot in Mussoorie would end up being a book as thick as a phone directory. But a list of the ones that came close to being shot here but did not happen might be even longer.
Bhola Singh Rawat (later Chairman of the Municipal Board from 1971 to 1976) remembered how, in the days of his youth, in 1958, he had seen Barbara Rush, Stewart Granger, and IS Johar check into the Hakman‘s Grand Hotel. They hung around the hotel lobby, hoping to get permission to shoot Harry Black & the Tiger in the forest of Kansro. With permissions not forthcoming, they relocated to the forests around Mysore. During the shoot, they were assisted by Donald Anderson, son of the Scottish hunter and author Kenneth Anderson, who was no mean hunter. He ended up as a stunt double for Steve Granger. Sadly, at the end of his life, he turned recluse and died in penury, denied the considerable royalties accruing from his father’s eight jungle books.
In 1967, Gurbachan Singh Sestian had come from Sestian in Iran as a trousseau with a new bride, Bibiji, to help her with the accounts of the Savoy Hotel. He would often talk of seeing Yul Brynner and Trevor Howard hanging around the Bar while waiting for permission to shoot an adventure film called The Long Duel – an epic swashbuckler loosely based on the life of Sultan Singh, a.k.a. Sultana Daaku – our Indian Robin Hood – whose writ ran a hundred years after William Sleeman had stopped the thuggee stranglers in the 1830s.
The mid-sixties, however, were troubled times, especially along our western borders. Naturally, the administration refused permission, and instead, the crew and the actors shot the film in Spain.
Swashbuckling Sultana rode a horse named Chetak, accompanied by his pet dog, Rai Bahadur. What could have turned a promising young man into a reckless brigand? Arrested, he and his clan were put away in a settlement, from which they escaped by scaling the walls of the mud fort. With his band of a hundred followers, he wandered around the forest of the Terai Bhabar, launching raids that took them from Gonda in the east to Saharanpur in the west, and often spilt over to Punjab.
Perhaps he knew what it was to be poor? During his confinement at the Nizamabad Fort, he had seen the grind of poverty, and it made a warm corner in his heart for all oppressed people. It is said of him that throughout his career, he never robbed the poor, never refused a charity appeal, and paid twice the price of what he bought from small shopkeepers. A special task force consisting of three hundred handpicked and armed-to-the-teeth soldiers set out to hunt him down. They were led by Colonel Samuel Peace and Freddie Young (not to be confused with Capt Frederick Young and the founder of Mussoorie).
This Freddie Young of the Imperial Police Service was rumoured to have weighed over two hundred kilograms, making him the heaviest policeman in India. When he finally caught up with his quarry to find him asleep on a stringed cot, he sat upon the brigand, pinning him down. Later, during the trial, Freddie’s petition to the British government to forgive the dacoit was denied. On the eve of 5 July 1924, a day before the hanging, he visited Sultana on death row. The condemned man asked him to look after his seven-year-old son and bring him up as a sahib. Freddie sent the lad to England, and Sultana’s descendants settled in Bhopal, where Freddie was the Inspector General of Jails.
Jim Corbett, who lent a hand to Freddie in tracking Sultana, wrote: ‘I cannot withhold a great measure of admiration for the little man who set at nought the might of the government for three long years and who by his brave demeanour won the respect of those who guarded him in the condemned cell.’
What happened to the made-in-Spain film?
It sank like many others of its ilk—without a trace.
(Ganesh Saili, born and homegrown in the hills, belongs to those select few whose words are illustrated by their pictures. Author of two dozen books, some translated into twenty languages, his work has found recognition worldwide.)
