Most of us have been complaining about the “Urduization” and “Secularization” of Bollywood, as there has always been a tendency in Bollywood to glorify “peaceful religion” and look down upon Hinduism. That’s because Bollywood has been controlled by a small group of “peaceful” elements based in Saudi, who have their own larger agenda.

For example, when we consider music, it cannot be denied that there are tons of Qawwallis & Sufi based songs, but hardly any Hindu bhajans or chants. This phenomenon was noticed by a young fruit juice seller, who was a deeply religious and proud Hindu, and wanted to fix this gap in Bollywood. He was Gulshan Kumar. Apart from his regular fruit juice business, he started a small cassette shop where he sold Bhajans and Chants which became instant success, because there was such heavy demand for it from Hindus, and thus Gulshan became an overnight sensation.

Riding this new wave of success, he founded a cassette company called “T-Series”, in which T stood for “Trishul”, reinforcing his mission of reviving Hinduism & Bhakti aspect in the music industry. He handpicked & groomed his own set of young artists (including Anuradha Paudwal & Sonu Nigam) who would sing bhajans with deep devotion, and Gulshan would sell them under T-Series label for almost cost price thereby penetrating rural markets as well. Not only did he revive the Hindu devotional music segment, but also donated generously to Hindu Temples from his profits.

This apparently didn’t go down well with the Bollywood underworld which felt he was becoming an obstacle to their larger “peaceful” agenda, and thus started harassing him through all possible ways. Although he boldly resisted their provocations, the tipping point was when upon demand of extortion money, he publicly said that he would rather donate that money to a Temple, than to get cowed down by such threats and extortion.

Such a bold attitude of openly promoting Hinduism through bhajans, and refusing to budge to underworld’s agenda, turned out to be his vulnerability. One early morning, as he stepped out of a Temple after his usual worship, the underworld shot several bullets and “got rid of him”. They intentionally chose to shoot him at a Hindu Temple because they wanted to send out a “strong message” even to future entrepreneurs that any attempt to revive anything related to Hinduism through Bollywood, would meet similar fate. Thus, with Gulshan’s exit, all hopes of Hindu renaissance in the 20th century Bollywood came to an abrupt end.

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