Mushtaq Khan was buried in Mumbai on Friday. He had spent fifty years and more than 500 films in the Hindi industry. Raza Murad went to the funeral, looked around, and then said in public what a lot of people were thinking.
“Koi bada chehra nahi aaya.” No big face came.
What Murad Said
Speaking to ANI, the veteran actor put it more fully: “Afsoos baat yeh hai ki aise mauke par koi bhi star unhe apna aakhiri salaam pesh karne nahi aaya.” The regrettable thing is that on an occasion like this, not one star came to offer him a final salute.
He asked why people in the industry could not spare fifty minutes.
He also said something about Khan that lands harder than the complaint: that Khan “never flattered anyone to move ahead; his work alone earned him this place”. Murad closed by reflecting on how temporary fame and money are, and arguing for humility regardless of where you sit in the hierarchy.
Also reported by India TV and Outlook India.
The Funeral Was Not Empty
This needs stating clearly, because the headline version of this story is unfair to the people who did turn up.
Per ANI’s own reporting on the day, Rajpal Yadav, Sanjay Mishra and Anees Bazmee were among those at the last rites.
So Murad’s statement is not that nobody came. It is that no star came. Yadav and Mishra are character actors of Khan’s own kind, working the same territory for the same decades. Bazmee is a director who has employed that generation repeatedly.
Which sharpens the point rather than weakening it. The people who came were the people from the same tier. The tier above did not.
The Defence, Stated Fairly
Before the pile-on, the honest counter-arguments.
Islamic funeral practice moves fast. Khan died and was buried within roughly a day. There is no three-day window for people to rearrange schedules, and a person shooting in another city genuinely cannot get there.
Attendance is also a poor proxy for respect. Several stars posted tributes. Whether a social media post is worth less than a physical appearance is a real question and not an obvious one.
And there is a version of the celebrity funeral appearance that is worse than absence: the arrival with photographers notified, the white kurta, the solemn face for the cameras, the departure after eleven minutes. Nobody is owed that performance.
The Point That Survives All Of It
And yet.
Khan was in the room for more than 500 films. Some of those films starred the people who did not come. He took the small part, made the scene work, and went home. That is the job and he did it for five decades.
Murad’s fifty minutes figure is the sharpest thing in the statement, because it converts an abstract complaint into an arithmetic one. Not a day. Not a gesture. Fifty minutes, from an industry with a very well documented capacity to clear an afternoon for a brand launch.
The Hindi industry has a specific and long-standing problem with its supporting tier. It is casually cruel about money, notoriously slow about payments, and sentimental about the same actors only after they die, at which point the tribute posts are immediate and the attendance is not.
Why Murad Is The One Saying It
Raza Murad has been working since the early 1970s and has been in a comparable number of films from a comparable position in the credits. He is not speaking about an abstraction. He is describing his own future.
That is also why the statement carries weight that an outsider’s would not. It is not a journalist scoring a point. It is a man of the same generation and the same tier, standing at the grave of his colleague, noticing who was not there, and deciding to say so on the record rather than swallow it.
There is professional risk in that. Not much, at 76, but some.
Bengaluru Baath Take
Murad is right and the defences are also right, and the way to hold both is this: nobody owes a dead colleague a public appearance, and an industry that cannot produce one recognisable face at the funeral of a man who gave it fifty years has told you something about itself that no tribute post undoes.
The fix is not funeral attendance. It is what happens while people are alive. Pay the supporting cast properly and on time. Put their names higher on the poster. Give them the interview. Cast them at 75 in something worth doing, which, to be fair, someone did, because Khan was shooting a first-time director’s debut two weeks before he died.
Do that, and nobody has to count the cars outside the kabristan.
Sources
- ANI, Raza Murad’s full quotes, and earlier reporting on funeral attendees
- India TV, statement coverage
- Outlook India, statement coverage
- Free Press Journal, funeral details
