Chetan Anand

Chetan Anand (3 January 1915 – 6 July 1997) was a Bollywood film producer, screenwriter and director from India, whose first film, , was awarded the Grand Prix Prize (now Golden Palm) at the first ever Cannes Film Festival in 1946. Later, he co-founded Navketan Films with his younger brother Dev Anand in 1949. Biography Early life Anand was born on 3 January 1915 in Lahore, British India, to a well-to-do advocate, Pishori Lal Anand. He went to Gurukul Kangri Vishwavidyalaya to study Hindu scriptures and graduated in English from Government College Lahore. He remained a member of Indian National Congress in the 1930s, subsequently worked for the BBC and taught at the Doon School in Dehradun for a while, before going to Bombay to sell a film script. Career In the early 1940s, while he was teaching history, he wrote a film script on king Ashoka, which he showed to the director Phani Majumdar in Bombay. Anand failed to qualify for the Indian Civil Service (ICS) exams in London. As luck would have it, Majumdar cast him as a lead in his Hindi film, Rajkumar, released in 1944. He also became associated with the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) in Bombay.