Kanhaiyalal

The moneylender of Mother India (1910-1982)

Kanhaiyalal was born in Varanasi in 1910 and came into films as an extra, getting his break in Mehboob Khan's Ek Hi Raasta (1939) - the same film that made Sheikh Mukhtar, his co-star here. A year later Mehboob cast him as Sukhilala, the moneylender in Aurat (1940), and seventeen years after that remade Aurat as Mother India and brought him back to play the same man again. He is the only member of that cast who did, and it is thought to be the first time in Hindi cinema that an actor reprised a character in a remake. The performance is why people remember Sukhilala rather than merely the film: a small, soft-voiced, entirely patient predator. He worked in something between 105 and 122 films - the sources differ - and his daughter Hemaa Singh made a documentary about him in 2022. In this film he plays the pickpocket - the thief Amar marries his sister to - and filmindia's review in the month of release called it the best performance in the picture under the heading 'Kanhayalal lives his part'. Sixteen years before Mother India, the notices were already going to him. In Aurat (1940) he is Sukhi on the film's own cast card: the moneylender himself, seventeen years before Mehboob Khan remade the picture as Mother India and brought him back to play the same man under the fuller name Sukhilala.