Don't Disturb the Dead: The Story of the Ramsay Brothers

By Shamya Dasgupta

Everyone knows about the Ramsays - even those who have never watched a Ramsay film. But who were they really? Where did they come from? Why did they make the films they did? And how? How, really, did they pull it off? In India, the Ramsay name remains synonymous with horror movies. Still, all these decades later.Don't Disturb the Dead is the story of their cinema, their methods and madnesses, the people and the processes, arguments and agreements, about horror cinema as a business model, and more. It is also an open-minded and affectionate ode to the 'disreputable' Ramsay films, and to a family that was once a genre in itself, one whose contribution to cinema deserves to be recognized.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: May 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9789352644315

Shamya Dasgupta

Shamya Dasgupta has worked with The Indian Express, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Tehelka, ESPN, Headlines Today and NewsX, and is currently senior editor with Wisden India. He has authored Bhiwani Junction: The Untold Story of Boxing in India and Cricket Changed My Life: Stories of Hope and Despair from the IPL and Elsewhere.

Book preview

SELLING RADIOS, SCRIPTING A PLAN

A dilapidated mansion. Or an old mansion of some sort. (In a forest, ideally.) In a pinch, any desolate location would do. Graveyards. Rain. Fog. A young man and a young woman. Or a group of young things. Lost, possibly. Or out on a picnic or a holiday. The women wear sheer-ish and small-ish clothes most of the time, or bikinis or swimsuits to bathe in – even in the shower. Some risqué action. Violence. Monster. Monsters. Loud, atmospheric music. A lot of blood. Ghastly sprouts on the body and the face. Running. Fighting. Shouting. Screaming. Crying. An ancient curse. Decapitation. Death. Gory death. Thunder and lightning. Rituals, witchcraft, sorcery, magic, voodoo; cults that repose their faith in an old Satan-like figure. A tantrik or a ghostbuster of some fashion. And, two-and-a-half hours later, a resolution.

Throw in a few plot tweaks, and that was the typical Ramsay brothers film.

There was some horror in Hindi films already. But after much digging around and asking those in the know, I could not find a full-fledged horror film that preceded Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche in Bombay. You had elements of horror here and there, like in Mahal (Kamal Amrohi, 1949), which is regarded by many as India’s first horror film. It certainly has all the usual tropes of the genre – a ghost, a haunted old house, apparition-like women, graveyards, the possibility of death – even if the surprise ending does not fit in entirely.

Yet, as Rachel Dwyer, professor of Indian Cultures and Cinema at SOAS, argues in her piece titled ‘Bombay Gothic: On the 60th Anniversary of Kamal Amrohi’s Mahal’ in Beyond the Boundaries of Bollywood: The Many Forms of Hindi Cinema, elements of horror do not a scary movie make. ‘Mahal is not a horror film, despite its concern with death and darkness and mysterious goings on as it does not frighten the audience and the hero himself is never scared,’ she writes.

Journalist-poet-author Jerry Pinto, who edited that collection of essays with Dwyer, however, disagrees when I ask him. ‘Mahal is always held out as the first horror film and, in a way, I suppose it is,’ he says. ‘There is a ghost, there is a young man, an old abandoned palace, an increasing obsession that may end in death. But Mahal ends with a not-very-credible scientific-legal ending. There were other women in white who wandered through cemeteries and kabrastaans but they were almost always explained away.’

Sajid Khan, film-maker, all-round Hindi film obsessive and funny man, is with Dwyer on this. ‘There was no horror genre. Perhaps there were a couple of horror films, but they were driven by the stars and the stories, like Mahal and Woh Kaun Thi (Raj Khosla, 1964). But they were not proper, real horror films.’

Sticking with Hindi cinema, there was Bhoot Bungla (Mehmood, 1965), a comedy. There were the occasional films around the ‘nagin’ theme, a few ghosts and the odd reincarnation plot. But horror, unadulterated, unapologetic, pure horror; not quite (apart from the couple of films Rajkumar Kohli made). Vikas Desai and Aruna Raje’s (as Arunavikas) possession flick Gehrayee (1980) did rather well too. The rest, whatever their grades, came much after the Ramsays.

‘Jaani Dushman (Kohli, 1979) and Nagin (Kohli, 1976) were the two biggest horror movies which involved stars. Then came Raat (Ram Gopal Varma, 1992) and that was the game changer. Raat redefined horror and made it acceptable,’ says Pinto. ‘Raat was a possession story and its frisson came from the fact that it happened to a young college-going giggly girl. Could that be you?’

That game changer came only in 1992, twenty years after the Ramsays had set the rules of the game with Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche. In 1972, with Rajesh Khanna still ruling the roost, Amitabh Bachchan’s Zanjeer a year away and romance very much the main genre of choice, the Ramsay brothers stepped in with their first offering. It would be incorrect to say that they took the Hindi film industry by storm. Far from it. But they chipped away at the established order. The brothers – Kumar, Gangu, Tulsi, Arjun, Keshu, Shyam and Kiran – each specialized in one or more aspects of moviemaking. Possibly the only such film-making family in the world, in terms of the sheer number of people involved, working together, as a team; certainly so in the Hindi film industry.

Oh, there are many major film families in Bombay and elsewhere, and beyond this country’s borders too. The Kapoors are certainly the biggest and best known of the lot in Hindi cinema, with Prithviraj starting the ‘lineage’, propped up by his sons Raj, Shammi and Shashi (the last two even married actors, as would others in subsequent generations); then the third generation of Randhir, Rishi and Rajiv, the sons of Raj, and Shashi’s children Kunal, Karan and Sanjana, and the fourth, led by Karisma and Kareena, Randhir’s daughters, and Ranbir, Rishi’s son. Along with being prominent actors, many of them have, at some point or the other, produced as well as directed films. And RK Films is about as iconic a studio as can be.

The Ramsays can’t, possibly, match up in terms of popularity or even quality of work, but think: father – producer; seven sons, among them producers, directors, editors, sound engineers, cinematographers and writers; among their children, actors, producers and directors and scriptwriters. At various stages, up to ten family members, including the seven brothers, have been credited for something or the other in a single film. No Filmfare Awards in the family cupboard, but their body of work – which we will talk about as we go along – cannot be ignored.

The Ramsay brothers, once they found their feet, a formula and an audience, created movies with horror as the raison d’être, and explicitly sold their cinema as horror films. So you had monsters and zombies, graveyards and haunted houses, stakes and trishuls, crosses and oms. There were Christian rituals as well as a heavy dose of Hindu mythology and iconography. A clash of the ancient and the modern, with the modern often responsible for disturbing the dormant ancient, was the recurring theme, which served as a pivot for most of the violence and gore.

Cheap, some people called them. Quality aside, they were, quite literally, cheap. Made on shoestring budgets through the 1970s and 1980s, when Bachchan and multi-starrers, and shooting in Paris and Tokyo and Interlaken were expected of every major film. Family members manned all the key aspects of the film-making; non-actors, small-timers and freshers, as well as some regulars, did the talking and running and screaming and killing; costumes and make-up were done in-house … thus was a Ramsay film made.

It wasn’t always easy to get these films released. The big banners controlled the distribution system in those pre-corporatized days, and the budgets the Ramsay films were made with meant that they couldn’t, or didn’t, always manage to pay their way to

good exhibitions.

The Bombay film industry revolved around Navketan and RK and Yash Raj and BR Films, the old ones, as well as the relatively newer MKD Films of Manmohan Desai and Prakash Mehra’s Prakash Mehra Productions; the movies of Khanna, Bachchan and Dharmendra. Stories of people who tried to get a share of the pie but couldn’t are legion.

The Ramsays chose not to walk that path and, instead, targeted a niche market, distributing their films at low costs to the lesser theatres in urban India and, in a concerted fashion, in the non-urban centres.

Mohnish Bahl, who played the lead in Purana Mandir, the Ramsay brothers’ biggest hit, remembers the story of how the movie almost didn’t get a release in Bombay’s old Metro cinema. ‘Yash Chopra had released Mashaal (1984), and if I remember right, the movie was doing well, the first of his films to be doing well after a few unsuccessful films. We were booked at Metro for Purana Mandir, but people from Yash Raj Films spoke to the Metro guys and said they wanted to run Mashaal for longer. That’s how these things used to work. And, compared to us, Yash Raj Films was huge. So the cinema authorities shifted Purana Mandir to a 10 a.m. slot, and gave the four main slots to Mashaal. Thankfully, we got at least that one slot.’

That was in the initial days. As the film picked up steam, so did interest among exhibitors. As journalist V.P. Sathe, writing in a 1984 edition of Filmfare, noted: ‘A non-star cast horror adult film like Purana Mandir has been released in as many as twenty-three theatres’, and ‘at most of the theatres, the picture drew full houses’.

The Ramsay business model is not easy to make sense of. But, importantly, they did make profits. Small amounts at times, big at others. Sometimes, like in the case of Purana Mandir, even trade pundits who would rather ignore these films, had to slot the movie among the top grossers for the year.

‘We made a lot of money,’ says Arjun Ramsay, nodding his head, still in a state of mini-wonderment after more than thirty years. Tulsi Ramsay says, offhand, that the movie made more money than Prakash Mehra’s Sharaabi, the big Bachchan release of the year.

Bachchan also had Inquilab (T. Rama Rao) releasing in 1984. Admittedly, his career was going through a bit of a trough around that stage, but that wasn’t true of Jeetendra and Mithun Chakraborty, among others. Other films from that year which must have more recall value than Purana Mandir were Chakraborty’s Boxer (Raj Sippy) and Kasam Paida Karnewale Ki (B. Subhash), Ghar Ek Mandir (K. Bapaiah) with Shashi Kapoor, Moushumi Chatterjee and Chakraborty, Mashaal of course, Sunny Deol’s Sunny (Raj Khosla) and Sohni Mahiwal (Umesh Mehra, L. Faiziev and Biala Kanwal), and Rekha’s Utsav (Girish Karnad).

Kartik Nair, in his ‘Fear on Film: The Ramsay Brothers and Bombay’s Horror Cinema’, writes that Purana Mandir ‘finished as the second-biggest money-maker of 1984 […] trailing only BR Chopra’s Aaj Ki Awaaz’, which was another surprise hit, starring Raj Babbar and Smita Patil.

Most of the money came in from the B, C and D centres, non-metropolitan India, and the films were also classified as B-grade, or worse, with ‘A’ ratings. Didn’t matter. For around two decades, the Ramsay brothers ran a horror factory like no other – comparable, perhaps, to the films churned out by Hammer Studios in the UK from the late 1950s all the way into the 1970s.

The Hammer effect

The film company launched by William Hinds and Enrique Carreras in 1934 started out with romances and crime thrillers but, in 1957, James Carreras, Enrique’s son, stumbled across the big idea, that of resurrecting old favourites – Frankenstein’s monster and Count Dracula the most popular among them.

Sinclair McKay, whose A Thing of Unspeakable Horror: The History of Hammer Films is a definitive ‘biography’ of the genre, writes in The Telegraph that so big had their films become that, for the longest time, the only way to make a horror film was the Hammer way, even if the Hammer films themselves weren’t quite mainstream. ‘Indeed, when the Hammer Horrors first appeared with The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957 the critics rose up like a torch-bearing mob, horrified by the (minimal) shots of blood. The word Hammer became synonymous with the shocking limit of cinematic nastiness – and how we loved it,’ he writes.

McKay talks about youngsters, like himself, going off to the tacky local cinemas, ideally with an arm slung around the girlfriend, to watch the latest Hammer flick. He calls the films a ‘rite of passage’. And in school, children would be talking about having watched a Hammer film ‘all the way through’ – of course, in the middle of the day.

There were all the usual tropes, the regulars in lower-end horror films – monsters, scary faces, fangs, the works. ‘In their defence,’ McKay writes, ‘the films were nothing if not consistent: there were the saucy vamps in low-cut gowns; Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein, endlessly bestowing electrical life in gruesome laboratories; mummies rising from sarcophagi; even, on one occasion, a werewolf in the shape of Oliver Reed, making his feature film debut in 1961.’

Being of a more permissive public culture than 1970s and ’80s India, nudity and sex were a big part of the Hammer horrors, McKay specifically mentioning Madeleine Smith and Ingrid Pitt in their shimmering nighties, and out of their shimmering nighties, in The Vampire Lovers. ‘And Hammer at least made the sex rather larkier,’ he says. ‘The naffness actually wears rather well today.’

Everything McKay says about the Hammer films is true of the Ramsay films too, nudity and Victorian or Edwardian era opulence aside. They were a rite of passage, in a way, in the 1970s and 1980s; you dared one another to sit through one of them, the over-the-top make-up, the naffness, the titillating costumes of the women … the consistency (and shoddy continuity), and, crucially, the lack of warmth in the reception the films received.

The posters, the dripping blood or garish yellow font, the make-up, the masks, skin and gore … little wonder that the Ramsay brothers took flight in the early 1970s – with Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche – around the time the Hammer films were starting to become popular in India.

The Ramsays acknowledge their debt to the Hammer films. Dracula and Frankenstein were their favourites, often watched together – all the brothers as well as their father – more than one of the surviving brothers say. Love, revenge, death, the eerie atmosphere, the country mansions, the gothic architecture: those were all Hammer staples, and the Ramsays’ too.

Arjun explains how the formula was Indianized: ‘Graveyards – every film; old haveli – every film; thunder, lightning and fog – every film; every film used the rain machine and the wind fan, and the toofan effect.’

More? Arjun elaborates: ‘Only around 20 per cent of our shoots would be outside, in the graveyards and open areas, often for the climax, while 80 per cent would be shot indoors. And, within that, 60 per cent would be in the night and 40 per cent in the day. We shot indoors partly because it was cheaper; not in sets but in actual old houses. But also because, when you are indoors, the feeling

of fear is more acute. Outdoors, you can escape, but indoors, you feel trapped.’

Prithviraj Kapoor, and the big idea

Strange it may sound, but the brothers had it all figured out in 1970 while watching, of all things, Prithviraj Kapoor stealing an object from a museum in a movie – also a family production, made by F.U. Ramsay. (So there’s a teensy Kapoor–Ramsay connection there.)

Let’s hear the story from Tulsi Ramsay, one half of the team that got credited most often in the ‘directed by’ bit of the rolls.

The story starts some years before India’s introduction to the Hammer experience.

‘The family had a radio and electronics business in Karachi before Partition, and when we came to Bombay in 1947, Dada [which is what everyone called F.U. Ramsay] launched the same business. But his friend and he, at some stage, thought that they could invest in the movies – the times were different, there was a lot of josh after independence, and patriotic films were doing well. It was difficult not to get swayed … everyone felt some sort of change was in the air. There was a wave of patriotism. And they, Dada and his friend, whose name I have forgotten [no one in the family could remember the name, but everyone agreed that he was involved in the planning and was a rich man], chose Bhagat Singh.

‘So many people have made films about Bhagat Singh. Then and even of late. Manoj Kumar became famous as Bharat Kumar after making Shaheed (S. Ram Sharma, 1965). But my father made it so many years before Manoj Kumar – F.U. Ramsay made the first movie on Bhagat Singh in 1954. Jagdish Gautam (credited as Jagdish Gautama) was the director. We had Jairaj in the lead role. At the time, the scars were fresh. All the passion and emotion were still fresh. But the movie didn’t do too well. It did okay-okay business. India–Pakistan, violence, anger … all this was big at the time. But we didn’t make money on the film. I think people wanted to forget about Partition and all the drama. We didn’t get anything out of it, we didn’t make any money. Ghar banaya, gaadi kharida, aisa kuchh nahin hua. (Built a house, bought a car, nothing like that.)’

As we will discover, Tulsi has a pretty fascinating worldview, and his basic concept of a successful film versus a not-so-successful film centres on the same theme: did he/they manage to buy a car or a house with the money from the film. Yes – successful. No – failure; ‘mazaa nahin aaya’ (no thrill).

A quick aside here – P. Jairaj starred as Bhagat Singh in Gautam’s Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh in 1954, a film produced by Poonum’s Production, with Prem Adib, a stalwart of the time, as Sukhdev Thapar, Bhagat’s friend, fellow revolutionary and fellow martyr. But F.U. Ramsay is not credited anywhere in the film. ‘I don’t know for sure,’ Tulsi says, sounding more than a bit confused. ‘Picture toh Dada ne hi banaayi thi, par… (But Dada did make that film…).’ None of the others in the family is any wiser.

For a decade after that, F.U. made no further film-making forays, focusing instead on his bread and butter – radios. By the early 1960s, though, the movie bug had bitten Kumar Ramsay, the eldest of F.U. and Kishni Ramsay’s children. In his mid-twenties then, Kumar, who wanted to be a writer and not necessarily of films, had taken Urdu and Farsi classes, and was churning out stories by the day. In one of his Farsi classes, Kumar heard the story of Rustom–Sohrab, an episode in the tenth-century Persian epic ‘Shahnameh’ by Ferdowsi, the fabled Persian poet. The story of the hero Rustom unknowingly killing his son Sohrab in the great battle between Persia and Turan struck a chord with Kumar, as, one suspects, it did with whoever read the touching tale. But, not satisfied with just admiring the story, Kumar went to F.U. and proposed it as an idea for a film.

After Bhagat Singh, Rustom and