Vijay Anand

Mumbai, Feb. 23: Filmmaker Vijay Anand, who served as chairman of the censor board, died this morning. He was 71. He is survived by his wife and son.

The director was admitted to a private hospital here after a heart attack on Saturday.

The younger brother of actor Dev Anand and the late director Chetan Anand, Vijay is regarded as one of the finest directors of mainstream Hindi cinema.

“It’s not a personal loss to me or my family. It’s a loss to the entire industry,” said Dev, for whom his brother had directed several films, like Guide, Jewel Thief and Tere Mere Sapne, under the Navketan banner.

“He was a very successful director, but that is less important. He has left his own mark,” said lyricist Javed Akhtar, who credited the director with developing a new aesthetic in mainstream cinema. “His film Guide brought a new refinement in visuals. In Johnny Mera Naam, there was a new refinement in screenplay,” said Akhtar. “He was very good when it came to picturising songs. Every frame had its own feel. Even the not-so-memorable film Blackmail had a memorable picturisation of the song Pal Pal Dil Ke Paas,” he said.

“He was my favourite director,” said Madhur Bhandarkar, the director of Chandni Bar. He said not only he, but an entire generation of filmmakers from Raj Kumar Santoshi to Sanjay Leela Bhansali must have been influenced by him.

Says Amit Khanna, who heads Reliance’s entertainment cell: “Vijay Anand was a cult director and an auteur. Perhaps no other filmmaker except Guru Dutt picturised songs with so much ingenuity. Vijay Anand was also an excellent film editor and most of his films have an arresting visual construct.

“I had the privilege of working with him during my long association with Navketan in the seventies. He was a warm person and I spent many hours discussing all kinds of things with him. They don’t make them like him any more,” Khanna said.

A heavyweight from parallel cinema like Mani Kaul describes Vijay as a fine craftsman.

Film writer Rauf Ahmed, who was close to the director, said he was not only the “best commercial filmmaker”, but also excelled in all departments of cinema.

“He made watchable films without pandering to the lowest common denominator. He wrote and edited his own films,” said Ahmed. “His ear for music was phenomenal. He hardly made use of a choreographer, except if it was a dance sequence like Hothon Pe Aisi Baat in Jewel Thief.”

Vijay was never tired of narrating how he got his break in filmmaking. As a student in St Xaviers’ College, Mumbai, he was dying to get on with the films growing inside him. But he was scared of his brothers Chetan, who was like a father, and also Dev, who was 10 years older.

Dev apparently listened to the script of Nau Do Gyarah while driving to Mahabaleswar, with Vijay reading it aloud. When they reached Mahabaleswar, the elder brother called a studio in Mumbai to say that a new film would be launched, called Nau Do Gyarah, to be directed by “Goldie”. That was 1957.

The brothers continued to work together till 1970 till Johnny Mera Naam, with Vijay directing and Dev acting. After this, they parted ways and Dev directed Prem Pujari. They remained close in their personal lives.

“He was never comfortable working outside the Navketan banner. He was not comfortable working with the stars either,” said Ahmed. The handful of star-studded films, like Ram Balram or Rajput, which he directed in the eighties, didn’t work out.

Vijay had also tried to find solace at Osho Ashram, but returned “disillusioned” after two years, a friend said. “He didn’t take things lying down,” said the friend, pointing out how he resigned as chairperson of the censor board because of disagreements with government policies.

His last project was Jaana Nahin Dil Se Door, a film on Chetan on which he was working again with Dev, but it is incomplete.