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The novelized version of the cult film, Mera Naam JokerIt was by all accounts one of the biggest gambles in Hindi cinema of the time: five years in the making, with a running time of over four hours and two intervals, including two of the best-known circus troupes of India and the Soviet Union. Add to that an outstanding musical score. Mera Naam Joker was to be Raj Kapoor's magnum opus. Whetting audience appetite were indications that it would also be the Showman's most autobiographical film. Nothing, it seemed, could come between the film and box-office glory. Shockingly, the film bombed at the box-office - and so badly that RK Films, one of India's foremost studios, was almost wiped out in the wake of that disaster. Interestingly enough, over the last forty years, the film has attained a cult status and is one of the highestselling home videos in India.At the time of the film's release, its writer K.A. Abbas, in an act years ahead of its time, also published the novelized version of the film to great commercial success. Mera Naam Joker: The Complete Story is that book. A perceptive introduction by Suresh Kohli, analysing the tortuous making of the film and the reasons for its failure, also offers an insight into the creative process through which a story transforms into a film.
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Khwaja Ahmad Abbas (1914-87) was a prolific political commentator, short-story writer, novelist, scriptwriter and a film-maker who preferred to call himself a communicator. He published seventy-three books in English, Urdu and Hindi, including an engaging autobiography, I Am Not an Island, and two semiautobiographical novels, Inquilab and The World Is My Village, detailing contemporary Indian history. His works have been translated into several Indian and foreign languages including Russian, German, Arabic, Italian and French. Abbas received several state and national honours, including the Padma Shri in 1969, and was involved in the making of sixty Hindi films. Suresh Kohli (born in 1947) is a poet, writer, translator, editor, literary critic and fi lm historian with more than thirty-five published works including five volumes of poetry and a novel. He is also a short and documentary film-maker, with over a hundred films to his credit that have been screened, apart from India, in Australia, France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and Nepal. He lives in Delhi and is currently working on a long abandoned novel and a collection of short stories.
