Shyam Ramsay, one of the seven Ramsay Brothers known for cult horror films such as Puraani Haveli and Tahkhaana, died in a hospital here on Wednesday, his family said. He was 67.
Shyam Ramsay died of pneumonia on Wednesday morning at a city-based hospital. “He was hospitalised two-three days ago as he was not feeling well. He passed away in the hospital due to pneumonia at around 5 am today,” a relative told.
The origins of the horror empire set up by the band of brothers can be traced back to a modest radio shop in Karachi in undivided India. The shop’s proprietor, Fatehchand U Ramsinghani, had relocated to Mumbai after the Partition and decided to get into the business of film production. It was Ramsinghani who adopted the last name Ramsay and went on to make films such as Shaheed-E-Azam Bhagat Singh (1954) and Rustom Sohrab (1963), which featured screen icons Prithviraj Kapoor and Suraiya.
The films worked like magic on the box office and Ramsinghani pulled all seven of his sons — Kumar, Tulsi, Shyam, Keshu, Kiran, Ganguly and Arjun — one-by-one into filmmaking and Ramsay Brothers were born. But they suffered losses when Ek Nanhi Munni Si Ladki (1970), starring Kapoor and Shatrughan Sinha bombed at the ticket window. According to Amborish Roychoudhury’s book “In A Cult of Their Own: Bollywood Beyond Box Office”, Tulsi and Shyam Ramsay watched the film in a theatre with the audience and realised the people reacted most strongly to a particular scene. In the scene, Kapoor’s character, wearing a mask and a grotesque costume, enters a museum to steal something.
“The Ramsays realised 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,’ Roychoudhury wrote. (PTI)
