Once Upon a Cinema: Ramsay Brothers – An origin story

Fatehchand U. Ramsinghani had a radio shop in Karachi. He called it the Radio and Electric Company. Most of his customers happened to be British, and they had a hard time pronouncing his full name, so they shortened it to just Mr. Ramsay. As the Partition carved a rift through the middle of the subcontinent, Fatehchand relocated to the teeming metropolis of Bombay, and opened a new radio shop at Lamington Road.

In the 60s, the Hindi film industry was going through a flux. Filmmaking had been concentrated in a handful of large studios thus far, but now it was breaking up and becoming more democratic. Many individual investors and businessmen were embracing what they saw as a new, emerging business opportunity. They were financing small, modest films which were making good money in the smaller territories, especially in the villages and small towns. This gave rise to a parallel industry which almost always made money. This led to the growth of low-budget films, which we today refer to as B-movies. The Dara Singh films were a great example of this. Modestly-budgeted action films, they were set in different backgrounds but often had very comparable storylines. Fatehchand, using the Ramsay moniker that his British friends had given him, decided to sink his teeth into film production.

He made films like Shaheed-E-Azam Bhagat Singh (1954) and Rustom Sohrab (1963), which starred Prithviraj Kapoor and Suraiya. Rustom Sohrab was a success, and F.U. Ramsay decided he had found his new vocation. He plunged into this business with great passion. He gave it everything he had, including his seven sons – Kumar, Tulsi, Shyam, Keshu, Kiran, Gangu and Arjun, the ‘Ramsay Brothers’. But that term was yet to become a legend because it hadn’t yet found its voice. For a while, it was all hunky-dory. Rustom Sohrab had made them some money and then the Sindhi film Nakuli Shaan (1971) also fared well. But what dealt an almost lethal blow was the failure of the one big film they made in 1970, Ek Nanhi Munni Ladki Thi, starring Prithviraj Kapoor and Shatrughan Sinha. But the ruins of this film were to form the foundations of the Ramsay empire. Tulsi and Shyam Ramsay watched the film in the theatre with the audience, and realized that there was just one particular scene to which they reacted most passionately. Prithviraj Kapoor, in a mask and a grotesque full- body costume, entered a museum to steal something. As soon as they set their eyes on him, the audience shrieked. Ramsays realized that many people actually came in to watch that particular scene and left. It was then that the truth finally dawned on them.

The audience loved to be terrified. It was horror that gave them a high, more than anything else. Back from the theatres, the brothers had to now convince their father to start making horror films. F.U. Ramsay was disillusioned with the movie business and wanted to bid adieu to filmmaking for good. But the boys were successful in persuading him to try their hand at this genre. They were already fans of films like Dracula, The Mummy and The Curse of Frankenstein, and had a sketchy idea of how to go about it. Instead of just producing or writing, they now wanted to make a film all by themselves by distributing the major functions of filmmaking amongst the brothers. They obtained the one book on filmmaking that was to become their Bible, Joseph V. Mascelli’s The Five Cs of Cinematography. Reportedly, the brothers locked themselves in a houseboat in Srinagar and conducted a three-month long workshop among themselves, to learn the basics of movie-making. Thus was born their first Cult Horror: Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche (1972).

Name one horror genre and the Ramsays have made a film on it: zombies, vampires, werewolves, reanimated corpses, snowmen, and even Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street. Do Gaz Zameen ke Neeche was India’s first zombie film. They cast Surendra Kumar, who debuted with their earlier film Ek Nanhi Munni Ladki Thi, and introduced two more actors: Shobhana and Imtiaz Khan. Imtiaz was Amjad Khan’s younger sibling. He went on to appear in films like Yaadon Ki Baraat (1973) and Dharmatma (1975) but it was the Ramsays who gave him a break.

The entire cast of the film was bundled into a bus and they drove to the Government Guest House in Mahabaleshwar, where they canned the entire film in all of forty days, at a modest budget of Rs. 3.5 lakhs. With this film, they devised a model that was to see them through the next few decades of making financially successful horror films. The departments were split among the brothers—Kumar wrote the script, Kiran was in charge of sound, Gangu manned the camera, Keshu assisted on cinematography while doubling up as the production guy, while Arjun handled post-production and editing. The remaining two brothers, Tulsi and Shyam Ramsay, were to direct the film. Their mother and wives cooked food for the cast and crew, while also handling makeup. It was the perfect family model of filmmaking, and they made it work successfully for many years to come. They termed this model ‘Tiffin Box Production’. The scenes were mostly shot in the jungles and, of course, in the graveyard nearby.

There’s also an apocryphal story that the brothers dug up a body by accident. It was the mother of all ironies, considering the title of the movie they were shooting. They were rounded up by local toughies in no time, and they had to calm them down, and bury the body back again, leaving an earthen lamp on the grave as a mark of respect for the dead. Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche (1972) was released with an A rating, as are most Ramsay movies, for the generous sprinkling of gore and sex throughout. The film, and the underdog in that week’s race, turned out to be a sleeper hit. The Ramsays orchestrated a radio spot on Vividh Bharati which worked as a preview of the film, full of the signature screams and suitable noises. The voice artist Sheel Kumar was roped in to do the voice over—he urged listeners to watch Do Gaz Zameen Ke Neeche, and to shut their doors and windows. This piqued people’s curiosity even more, and the film ended up garnering more than Rs. 40 lakhs at the box office.

This was just the beginning. Ramsay Brothers kept churning out film after film from what seemed like a virtual conveyor belt of horror flicks: Darwaza (1978), Aur Kaun? (1979), Saboot (1980), Andhera (1975), Guest House (1980), Dahshat (1981), Sannata (1981), Hotel (1981), Ghungroo Ki Awaaz (1981), Maut Ka Saya (1982), 3D Saamri (1985), Tahkhana (1986), Purani Haveli (1989), Bandh Darwaza (1990) and so on. Back in the eighties, the whole industry was monitoring their moves—they were hiring A-list composers like Bappi Lahiri, Rahul Dev Burman and Usha Khanna, and actors like Shatrughan Sinha, Rakesh Roshan, Deepak Parashar, Navin Nischol, Bindiya Goswami and even Rekha. Ghungroo Ki Awaaz is still considered among R.D. Burman fans as one of his most underrated albums. Hotel was noted for its music as well as its stellar cast. The brothers were also known for introducing and frequently collaborating with new faces: Imtiaz Khan, Puneet Issar, Archana Puran Singh, Hemant Birje and Mohnish Behl, among them. With this amazing prolificity and almost always striking gold at the box office, the Ramsays became an institution and a brand unto themselves.

Amborish is a National Film Award winning writer, biographer and film historian.

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