I already put up part 1, which covered the earliest Bombay generations. Now it’s time to move forward and bring us to the present day.

Usual Disclaimer: I don’t know these people, I have no special knowledge, this is just how it appears to me based on the generally available information.

Soni Razdan, Mahesh’s second wife, deeply understood that feeling of good times that can’t last. She was British Indian, daughter of a Kashmiri refugee on one side, and a German refugee from the Nazis on the other side. She was born in Birmingham, England’s industrial city of immigrants. As a young woman, she trained to be an actress and eventually made her way to Bombay. She married Mahesh in Bombay at age 30, and two years later gave birth to their first daughter Shaheen, five years after that at age 37, she gave birth to Alia. She kept working regularly through out her daughters’ childhood, mostly on TV serials. And recently in Raazi she returned to her family roots, playing a Kashmiri woman and mother of a Kashmiri daughter, Alia. And I wonder, when Anupam Kher turned down the role in My Dear Friend Hitler, was it because the wife of his old friend Mahesh Bhatt, the man who gave Anupam his first film role, asked him not to be in a movie about the man who drove her mother out of Germany?

Aashiqui was the big hit that started Vishesh films but it was Pooja Bhatt who kept them going. She was 18 when she had her first lead role in a major film, Dil Hai Ki Manta Nahin. For the next 8 years, she played every role required and did whatever was needed for the family business. The Bhatt’s sold her as peppy, sexy, young and modern. She did photo shoots in blue jeans, and permed her hair, and gave interviews about how “fun” film shoots were. And she ended her acting career in Mahesh’s new autobiographical film, his return to the painful parts of his past not in an attempt to heal himself, but to heal the country, the appropriately named “Zakhm” or “Wound”. Pooja plays the younger version of her own grandmother, a Muslim woman who falls in love with a Hindu small time film producer and spends her life not able to be fully with him or fully with her own community. Mahesh took his personal story and set it within a national setting, the riots of 1993. And a man who was raised Hindu but swore to his mother he would bury her with Muslim rites, even if it risks his own life to hold a Muslim funeral in public at this moment.

The Vishesh Studio was an odd duck then and still is now. It combined silly sexy fun movies with great songs, the kind that Nanabhai used to make for companies like Wadia Movietones back in the 1950s, with the occasional risky brilliant film like Zakhm. As time went by, those brilliant films became less and less common, especially once Pooja stopped acting and the Bhatts had to find a new muse. And that muse was Emraan Hashmi. Famous for giving a lip-to-lip kiss in his very first shot onscreen, famous for the sexy love songs, the seductive glances, the bad boy public statements. And with him as the lead star, that is what Vishesh Films was known for as well, the catchy songs and the sexy scenes.

The darkest secret of Emraan Hashmi, is that he doesn’t actually have any dark secrets. As a young man of 23, already engaged to his college sweetheart, he went to visit his mother’s cousin Mahesh Bhatt to ask for a job. Mahesh put him to work as an assistant director, and made him a star 25 by telling him “you need to kiss onscreen, it will make you different”. A year later, Emraan married his college sweetheart, 4 years after that they had a son, and year years after that his son was diagnosed with cancer. Emraan tried to arrange filming around his chemo treatments, but couldn’t always manage it. His son went into remission, and Emraan wrote a book about the experience. His son is 9 now, they never had any more children. Emraan’s mother was an actress, stage name “Purnima” and the sister of Mahesh’s mother (perhaps it was on the set of one of her films that Mahesh’s mother met and fell in love with her married producer true love?). His father was a businessman, a Muslim who chose to leave Pakistan and return to India post-Partition. Emraan’s mother died in 2016, Emraan took one day off work and returned to filming the next day. That’s the Bhatt way, they work hard and they keep their heads down and they put the film before everything.

It wasn’t just Emraan. Mahesh found a place for all the strugglers in his family, especially the Muslim side as public sentiment in Bombay turned harder and harder against them and made work harder to come by outside of the film industry. Vishesh Films may have a seedy sexy reputation, but at heart it is more of a family company than any other studio. Mahesh and Mukesh’s full sister married a Muslim man, and her son Mohit Suri was brought in by Mahesh to be their new flagship director, making their cheap and fast hits with his cousin Emraan Hashmi, Zeher and Kalyug and Woh Lamhe. And the sexy lead of some of those films, Uditi Goswami, became Mohit’s wife. His sister acted briefly, but didn’t like it, so she married a nice man instead and stopped being a public figure. Milan Luthria is another cousin of the family, grandson of another sister of Mahesh’s mother. The Bhatt’s gave him his start, and he repaid the family by giving Emraan two of his best roles of his career, Once Upon a Time in Mumbaii and Dirty Picture. The Bhatt’s practice “nepotism”, sure, or else you can think of it as trying to give a helping hand to struggling relatives, and seeing all those who work with you as relatives.

After acting, Pooja found a new way to help the family as a producer. Not a showy producer who uses her name to gain attention for the film, but a grubby one who works unnoticed and untalked about in the Vishesh offices. She also directed the occasional film, mostly ones that put female desire ahead of all other concerns. It’s not a very respectable way to promote feminism in India, but it is extremely effective.

Pooja married an actor and restaurant owner that she met on a film shoot, not a famous actor but a quietly hard working one. They bought a house on the beach and got a couple of dogs and had a good happy life outside of the public realm. Happy for a while at least, until the family curse raised it’s head and Pooja fell pray to the same alcoholism that she had saved her father from. Her marriage ended amicably, perhaps because of the alcohol and perhaps not, and Pooja eventually entered into recovery. She is an interesting celebrity, she makes announcements like that of her divorce, or her one year anniversary of sobriety, on social media. And when she learned of a fan who spent ten years in India wanting to meet her, she went to meet him. She isn’t in hiding, but she also isn’t interested in putting herself forward. Fame has no power for the Bhatt family, they’ve seen it come and go and chew up everyone from Meena Kumari to Vinod Khanna to Parveen Babi, what is there in it that has any worth?

From the whispers and aside comments, especially the tossed off remark on Koffee about how Deepika and Alia’s sister both have “that thing”, it appears that Mahesh lived to see mental illness appear in both his lover and, later, his daughter. If Alia’s sister truly has the same “thing” that Deepika has, then she has depression (as Deepika openly does). She makes almost no public appearances, quietly works for her father’s company, and lives unmarried with Alia.

Before moving on to Alia, the latest sprig on the Bhatt family tree (not counting Emraan’s adorable little cancer son, and Mohit and Udita’s two kids), let’s go back and briefly remember Mahesh’s only son, Rahul. In most families it is the son who has the greatest opportunities, the greatest focus. In the Bhatt’s, it is poor Rahul who was left behind a bit. He was younger than Pooja, his life damaged at a more fragile time by the break up of his parents’ marriage. He grew up lost, tried to be an actor but didn’t have the talent or work spirit to earn a chance from his family. Instead he started haunting the gyms and other hide outs of the film industry, a sad hanger on and proof that even the Bhatts have a limit to the relatives they can take on. And that was how he met David Headley, one of the planners of the 26/11 attack on Bombay. Rahul wasn’t complicit and was never accused of anything, but it is a reminder of how close the Bhatt family is, still, to the broken edge of society.

And the Bhatts give back to the society that accepts them. Not in the big fancy splashy way at the press conferences and so on, but in the hardwork on the background. Mahesh was president of the producer’s guild for years, helped so many other films be released despite government pressure in the way no one stood up for him, tried to keep ticket prices low, speech free, and artists able to work at what they love.

And now, Alia! She had a normal Bombay upbringing, went to a good local high school, not the overseas studies that the newer entries to the film industry enjoyed from their wealthy parents. She dated and went to dances and sweet shops and movies and enjoyed a normal Bombay teenage life. When she was 17, her mother brought her to an audition for Karan Johar and Karan saw something in her. Karan told her if she lost 30 pounds, she could have the role. Alia worked hard and lost the weight and her mother brought her back. Alia sat in a corner and ate a cupcake (her reward for her dieting) while her mother and Karan negotiated the contract. During the shoot of Student of the Year, Sidharth and Varun took turns driving her home every night, they were gentleman and she was too young to travel alone. After Student of the Year, she could have taken any role she wanted, and she chose Highway. A very difficult film with a very difficult director, Imtiaz Ali. Imtiaz directs like Alia’s father does, requiring a deep internal struggle from his stars until they bring in something real to their performance. For Highway, Alia’s co-star Randeep Hooda refused to speak or even look at her, even after pack-up, so as to stay in character. Alia dug deep and found the natural actress within. After an agonizing year long shoot, they premiered in Germany, homeland of Alia’s grandmother, and her career was made. Student of the Year showed she was a star, but Highway showed she was an actress. And she was a Bhatt, never easily categorized, never following the straight path, and putting personal happiness above any other concern.