As it completes 29 years since it hit the big screen, Subhash K Jha revisits Sunny-Salman-Karisma-Tabu’s Jeet.
When director Raj Kanwar’s Jeet was on release, this writer reminded Karisma Kapoor that her mother Babita had also done a film titled Jeet with her future husband, Karisma father, Randhir Kapoor.
Karisma had reacted rather strangely. “This Jeet is very different from my mother’s Jeet, not that I’ve seen my parents’ Jeet. But that was so long ago. Our Jeet is actually a fresh take on Devdas.”
Actually, producer Sajid Nadiadwala and director Raj Kanwar’s entertaining potboiler couldn’t hope to be that ambitious. In truth, Jeet was directly inspired by Prakash Mehra’s Muqaddar Ka Sikandar , with Sunny Deol playing the unstoppable lover Karan originally done to death (pun intended) by Amitabh Bachchan.
Karisma stepped into the role of Kajal the pristine object of Deol’s adoration (played by Rakhee Gulzar in the Bachchan film) while Tabu , with her two left feet played the tawaif Tulsi who lives and dies for Karan while he lives and literally dies for Kajal.
When I asked why he cast his dear friend Tabu in a dancer’s role, producer Sajid Nadiadwala replied, “Meena Kumari played a tawaif in Pakeezah and she couldn’t dance to save her life.”
Agreed, but it wasn’t her own life Meena Kumari wanted to save in Pakeezah. The actress toiled through her illness to save Pakeezah. Tabu sleepwalks through this cliché-ridden quadrangle which threw in Salman Khan for no reason except that he wanted to be in a blockbuster Salman signed on this film knowing he enters very late in the story. This was his first of many films with producer Nadiadwala , and he signed it at a time when he was going through a lean phase. Jeet was a successful and entertaining potboiler. But it did nothing for any of any of the actors. Raj Kanwar who directed a series of hits before his untimely death never reaped the benefits of any of his hits: for Andaaz , producer Suneel Darshan got all the credit. For Jeet it was producer Sajid Nadiadwala.
