In Your Neighbourhood: Mumbai’s Hollywood lane that was home to legends from K L Saigal, Kapoor family, Manna Dey, Madan Puri and many others

Situated across the VJTI college and Mahajan lane, the quiet, leafy lane of Matunga’s R P Masani road is witness to many such tales involving the stalwarts of the Indian film industry. For the R P Masani lane served as the address to legendary names of Bollywood, from the 1930s until the early 1960s, in what has earned it the moniker of ‘Hollywood Lane’.

Mumbai’s Hollywood lane (Express Photo by Amit Chakravarty)

Amongst those who called R P Masani their home, besides K L Saigal, included the entire family of Prithviraj Kapoor including his sons and actors, Raj, Shammi, Shashi, actor and director Manmohan Krishna, actor Madan Puri, director-producer J K Nanda, singer Manna Dey, composer Anil Biswas and actress Ashalata amongst many others. For a brief period, actors like Mithun Chakravarty lived in the back lanes of the gully.

In his book, ‘My Father, the Villian’, Kamlesh Puri – son of Madan Puri – who grew up in the gully shares that it was not uncommon to see Bal Thackeray, then a cartoonist, and even Lata Mangeshkar, frequent the Hollywood lane – oft to visit K L Saigal.

It was in the year 1939 that the Kapoor family led by Prithviraj Kapoor first moved into a five room apartment in the quiet Matunga lane. Their move coincided with the development of Matunga as a suburb which had emerged in the 1930s owing to the Dadar-Matunga-Wadala scheme. Sanjay Joshi, a historian and resident of Matunga who worked in the neighbourhood for decades said, “Since Matunga had just been developed, it was the perfect place for newer residents who could not find space in Southern Mumbai. As most of the families had migrated during partition and they knew members in this lane, they landed here in this gully.”

Following the Kapoor family’s move, many others including the Puris, the Saigals, the Singhs and more. In Rauf Ahmed’s book ‘Shammi Kapoor: The Game Changer’, Kapoor says: “I remember many more people migrating directly to the Kapoor house after partition and joining my father’s Prithvi Theatres.”

Mumbai’s Hollywood lane (Express Photo by Amit Chakravarty)

With the maximum number of the residents being of Punjabi heritage, it soon came to be recognised as ‘Punjabi Gully’.

In what would usher in fans aplenty into the lane, the actors and their families would all congregate to celebrate festivals with pomp, particularly Lohri, Holi and Diwali. Residents recall that everyone lived in harmony, like a family.

“We had an old Austin car to drop us off at the school. Being very old, it would stop very frequently and our neighbours like Prithviraj Kapoor would come down to push the car and give it the nudge of start. Such incidents were frequent occurrences in our lane. All the residents of the lane were like a tight knit family. Bohot closeness aur apnapan tha hum sab mein (There was a lot of closeness and togetherness amongst us all),” a resident of Sethi Niwas, an Art Deco building along the R P Masani lane said.

By the late 1950s, however, most residents of the neighbourhood started to relocate to Bandra where large, spacious bungalows developed. Some who continue to reside at Matunga’s R P Masani lane include families of Manmohan Krishna, J K Nanda and Madan Puri.

“Even now, we are in touch and live like a family. But the character of the gully has changed a lot now. Many of the older grand buildings have been replaced by up and coming high rises. And that has made it very difficult to speak to them all, so we barely know our new neighbours,” says a resident of Sethi Niwas.

Even with the rising tide of redevelopment in the vicinity, the lane continues to host old emblems like the original gate outside the refurbished Krishna Niwas which is Madanmohan Krishna’s family, that are a nod to its glittering past.