Khan struggled for years as an assistant choreographer before getting a break in 1974 with the thriller “Geeta Mera Naam,” the directorial debut of the actress Sadhana, who was a fan of her work.
Another daughter, Kuku Khan, died in 2011. Her survivors include their daughter, Sukaina Khan a son, Raju Khan, also a choreographer and grandchildren. Khan’s children from her relationship with Mr. In 1975, she married Sardar Roshan Khan, a businessman, taking his surname. Sohanlal refused to give them his surname, and he left the family in 1973 to return to his first wife in the city of Chennai. She referred to the relationship as a marriage, but it is unclear whether it was legally recognized. Sohanlal, who was 43 and married, became a couple, though she was only 13 at the time. “He made me work very hard, I had to remain in the same posture for hours at a time, but he turned me into a good dancer.”
“When he started teaching me, I realized that I can’t keep a posture, I don’t know how to do this,” she recalled in the documentary. Most classical dancers spend years studying under a teacher before they ever perform in public, but with a family to help support, that was not an option for Ms. I will get paid only after a week.’ He said, ‘I have 200 rupees right now, please take it.’ I’ll never forget it, that money helped me so much.” “I went to him and told him, ‘Tomorrow is Diwali and I have nothing at home. “I had just finished one song with him, I was the group dancer,” she said. Khan worked up the courage to ask the matinee star Shashi Kapoor for help. Khan described how her mother struggled to feed her and her siblings, and how they often went to bed hungry. In a 2012 documentary, “ The Saroj Khan Story,” Ms. She had small roles in a number of films before becoming a background dancer at age 10, appearing in the 1958 classic “Howrah Bridge,” starring the actress Madhubala. To supplement the family’s income, her father managed to get her work in Mumbai’s booming film industry as an actress at the age of 3, under the name Saroj. She recalled dancing with shadows there as a toddler, fascinated even then by what would become her calling. Khan was born in that room, the first of six children. He and his wife, Noni, moved to Mumbai, where they started over in a tiny room in a slum. Her father, Kishanchand Sadhu Singh, had been a prosperous businessman in Karachi, in what is now Pakistan, but lost everything in the violent partition that divided the two countries in 1947.
Saroj Khan was born Nirmala Nagpal on Nov.