Gulshan Kumar

Gulshan Kumar was the son of a fruit juice seller in Darya Ganj market in Delhi. Twenty-three-year-old Gulshan, son of a Punjabi refugee family, moved up from selling fruit juice in a roadside shop when his family acquired a shop selling records and cheap audio cassettes. Excited by the possibilities, he started producing cassettes himself. Gulshan proved to be a born businessman. By the time he was 30, he was a millionaire. Gulshan founded Super Cassette Industries Ltd., a small videocassette pirating operation which soon grew to be very big.

Later he started a music production company in Noida, near Delhi. To counter exorbitantly priced poor-quality audio tapes which used to be marketed by reputed music companies, Gulshan introduced in the late 1970s music cassettes with adequate quality at cheap rates. He exported quality music cassettes when his business grew. Gulshan Kumar, having risen to the top of the music business, believed he could do the same in Bollywood and moved to Bombay. Gulshan Kumar produced his first film Lal Dupatta Malmal Ka in 1989. The film was quite popular, mostly due to its romantic melodious songs which became quite a rage.

On August 12, 1997, he was assassinated outside the Jeeteshwar Mahadev Mandir (a Hindu temple) in the Juhu suburb of Mumbai. The police accused Nadeem of the music duo Nadeem-Shravan of having paid for the assassination. However, on January 9, 2001, Abdul Rauf confessed to being the assassin. On April 29, 2002, Sessions Judge M L Tahilyani sentenced Rauf to life imprisonment (stating that he was not imposing death penalty because the prosecution had failed to prove that Rauf was a contract killer). Gulshan Kumar’s son, Bhushan Kumar, is now in charge of Super Cassettes Industries Ltd.