National award winning choreographer Saroj Khan passes away

Saroj Khan, who rose to fame from a background dancer to most successful choreographer, passed away on Friday, 3rd July ‘20, early morning. She was instrumental in getting respect to choreography and of course choreographers. In fact her firebrand campaign saw every technician in the film industry getting respect. Saroj Khan was a favourite choreographer of many leading ladies including Sridevi. But Saroj ji’s favourite dancer-actor was Madhuri Dixit. It was Madhuri’s love and respect for ‘Masterji’, Saroj ji used to be referred by Masterji by film industry people, which brought her back on film sets as she choreographed Madhuri’s song in ‘Kalank’.

Saroj Khan, whose original name is Nirmala Kishanchand Singh, had a tumultuous life. In fact she belonged to a well to do family from Pakistan.They moved to india after partition where Nirmala was born. In those days working in films was not considered very respectable, so her father asked her to change her name so that his orthodox family would not know the truth about his little daughter working in films as a dancer. She learnt professional dancing while working under film choreographer B Sohanlal. Incidentally she married, at the age of 13, her ‘guru’ who was 28 years older to her. Also she was unaware that he already had four children from his previous marriage.