‘Sanjay Khan felt Zeenat Aman was cheating on him, and then the incident happened’: Co-star recalls alleged public assault

Asked to clarify the truth about his relationship with Zeenat, and whether she was seeing Sanjay at the time, he said, “When I met Zeenat, she was on the verge of a split. I was doing Insaf Ka Tarazoo with Zeenat, and when were were shooting, she was on the verge of a separation. She had her personal reasons, mostly related to finance.” He said that Zeenat was investing her own money in a film being directed by Sanjay, and that she felt that the production was getting out of hand. It was during this time that she was summoned from Khandala by Sanjay to Mumbai, and confided in Deepak to cover for her. She told him that she would return later that same night, and would be ready for an early morning shot at 4 am.

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However, Zeenat failed to return to set. “You could say that I was a very close friend, someone who offered his shoulder to cry on… This was misunderstood by Mr Abbas (Sanjay), who felt that she was two-timing. “Then, of course, that incident happened… By 11 am, a call from Mumbai came. She had gone to meet him, and there they had an altercation. She was either pushed or beaten, I have no idea. She just told Chopra saab that she was harassed and that she gotten injured. She didn’t say anything about being beaten with a shoe, or a stick or a sword. She was to dignified to say anything like that. Zeenat said that Sanjay and his wife were both there.

Zeenat had spoken about the ‘brief’ but traumatic chapter in her life with Sanjay Khan in an appearance on Simi Garewal’s show. Asked about the physical abuse that she faced publicly, he said, “For many years, in my mind, it’s been obliterated because I think that’s what the human mind does. When there is something distinctly unpleasant, you just close your mind to it and pretend that it never happened and you promise yourself that it will never happen again. And that’s how you cope.” The alleged assault left her injured in one eye. In an Instagram post, Zeenat said that she was able to regain sight in her injured eye only years later. “This injury caused my eyelid to droop and obstructed my vision. Forty years later, medical advancement has made it possible for me to regain my vision,” she wrote.

Zeenat Aman and Sanjay Khan were rumoured to be dating each other

In an interview with Hrishikesh Kannan, Sanjay Khan was asked about the ‘Zeenat Aman incident’, and why he chose to ignore it in his autobiography. He said, “I was so pained and horrified with the one-sidedness of the entire story because nobody even asked me that what happened. This was a well planned PR attack against me which came like a blitzkrieg.” He added, “I was even accused of her eye going out… she is losing her eye which is not right. If you see ’81, ’82, ’83, ’84, she has done several films. There is evidence to the fact that she has perfect eyes. Later on in life she became a little squint because her mother was squint a little bit. It was a hereditary thing that was labelled one me that I slapped her, I never slapped her, and this was blasphemy.”

Sanjay Khan’s son, Zayed Khan, addressed his father’s affair with Zeenat, and told Zoom in an interview, “It wasn’t just at my dad’s house but was happening in every actor’s house. Every person was highly eccentric except one or two oddballs who were really sincere and grounded; the rest of them… phew! When I was young, I used to see these guys partying and dressing up in those jazzy Versace shirts and their things. It was a whole different era back then. They were real personalities.”