Mukul S. Anand

Director of big-scale Hindi action: Agneepath, Hum, Khuda Gawah · 1951–1997

Mukul S. Anand was born in Bombay on 11 October 1951 and spent the late 1980s and the 1990s making some of Hindi cinema's biggest, best-lit action films. His first film as director was the suspense thriller Kanoon Kya Karega (1984), inspired by Hollywood's Cape Fear. He then directed Amitabh Bachchan three times: Agneepath (1990), Hum (1991) and Khuda Gawah (1992), the last of them shot partly in Afghanistan. A friend's tribute says he always thought of himself as a technician first and a hit director later.

In Maha-Sangram (1990), with Vinod Khanna, Madhuri Dixit and Aditya Pancholi, he is credited as 'Anand S. Mukul'. Indiancine.ma singles the film out for Pancholi's angry portrayal of a Thakur. It reunited him with the producer Nitin Manmohan and Vinod Khanna after Insaaf (1987), and the songs, after the original composers were replaced, are Anand-Milind's.

He came from a family of film writers: he was the nephew of the scriptwriter Inder Raj Anand and the cousin of the actor-director Tinnu Anand, who directed Major Saab (1998), another film on this site. Mukul Anand died of a heart attack on 7 September 1997 while making Dus. The film was never completed, and the title was later used for a different film in 2005.