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Daboo Malik and composer Anu Malik are both sons of yesteryear composer Sardar Malik, who was known for composing music in devotional films. But his career came to a standstill after he had an altercation with Lata Mangeshkar. Daboo said that his father was blacklisted by the industry, and the impact that this had on his life and career was irreparable.
In an interview with Siddharth Kannan, Daboo recalled what his father went through, and recalled the ‘exact moment’ when he became paralysed after years of loneliness and disappointment. He said, “We came of age when we realised that our father was dealing with a lot. It was really horrible. By the time my father hit his 40s, his story was over. One of the major blows that he got was that he had an altercation with Lata Mangeshkar. During a recording, another person, a very popular poet, said something about her… What happened after that was he was blacklisted. The small-budget religious films that he used to do also stopped coming his way. It became a hand-to-mouth situation. We were literally living in a chawl.”
He said that his father was distraught, and he wowed to never let his children become musicians in the film industry. Daboo said that he still wakes up at night from nightmares that he has of that time, and that he is still haunted by a melancholic song that his father used to sing at home about loneliness. “Nobody was coming to meet him, and there was no connection to the outside world,” he said, adding that his father had a tragic end as well. “A man who lost in life also lost in death. When he was 80, he opened SCREEN, and there was a full-page ad of Yash Chopra, Lata Mangeshkar, and Madan Mohan’s son were releasing the music of Veer-Zaara. That day was the last day of my father.”
Daboo explained, “He looked at that picture, he held me, and he broke down. He said, ‘I’m very sad today. I have so many songs, but none of them was released. Look at my contemporaries; their music is still being released 30 years later.’ I reassured him that I would record an album with him. Exactly at that moment, he looked at me and said, ‘Daboo, I can’t get up, I’m done’. I went and hugged him, and he was paralysed. That was the last day he ever got up. He had nobody; he suffered alone. We did everything we could in the next seven months, but he never recovered. And that was the last phase of his life.”
Daboo has been telling stories about his family and his own life on his own YouTube channel. In one video, he recounted his father’s life story and struggles, and said, “We had a house near Juhu beach. A lot of illustrious personalities lived in that area. Yash Chopra ji was a neighbour. Farah Khan, Sajid Khan, me and Anu bhai, we all grew up together. Coincidentally, each of those families was going through financial challenges. All of us kids were witnessing incredible struggles at home. To help out at home, Daboo took up a job, and earned Rs 500 in the first month. He decided that he would buy his father a good pair of shoes, because he didn’t have any.”
Recently, Daboo’s son, composer Amaal Mallik, also spoke about the family’s hardships. In an episode of Bigg Boss, he said, “Sardar Malik, who owned a pink Ambassador, faced so much poverty that he had to shift to a small room in a chawl.” Amaal also implied that his grandfather’s career was sabotaged by competitors. “Because of this one person, our house saw famine, there was no food left. That person declared that whoever will give work to Sardar Malik, I will not step in that studio. He misused his power so much,” Amaal said.
Recalling the worst phase of his father’s career, Daboo said in an earlier video, “He was prepared to work as a musician even. He asked his brother-in-law Hasrat Jaipuri for some work, because he had to earn a living somehow. The same man who worked as a music director was now ready to work as a musician in the same very same studio,” he said. The musicians wouldn’t hear of it. They respected Sardar Malik too much to see him humiliated. They gave him Rs 300 and told him that he shouldn’t sit among them and play instruments. “He didn’t accept the money, of course, but he wasn’t allowed to be a musician either.”
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