Mahesh Bhatt's Nephew Dharmesh Darshan Says His Claims About Being Illegitimate are ‘Dishonest’
Mahesh Bhatt has always been open about his life and had said in the past that he was an ‘illegitimate child’ of Nanabhai Bhatt.
New Delhi: Mahesh Bhatt has always been open about his life and had said in the past that he was an ‘illegitimate child’ of Nanabhai Bhatt. His film Zakhm was also inspired by his life where Pooja Bhatt played her mother. Recently Mahesh Bhatt’s nephew and filmmaker Dharmesh Darshan denied Mahesh Bhatt’s comment of being an illegitimate child and said that his comments might have triggered Dharmesh’s mother Sheila Bhatt’s Parkinson's Disease. Dharmesh is Mahesh Bhatt’s sister Sheila’s son. Mahesh, his elder brother Mukesh, and his younger sister Sheila are the children of Nanabhai and Shirin Mohammad Ali.
In an interview with Lehren Retro, Dharmesh said, “It’s rubbish... There’s very little truth to it. Every truth can be distorted. Mahesh mama is my saga mama (real uncle), and my mother was obsessed with him. In 1939, my grandmother and my grandfather got married. The Hindu Marriage Act came in 1959, and by then my mother was also married. I didn’t even know my grandmother’s name was Shirin until Mahesh mama said it was an issue.”
Dharmesh denied that his grandfather Nanabhai had been absent from their lives due to having another family and asserted that both his wives had been in a harmonious relationship. He stated that he had an exceptional other grandmother, both of whom were legitimate, as he had seen them both. "My grandmother had six children, and the other one had three children," he said. He further stated that his grandmother Shirin had adhered to Gujarati and Hindu customs and that he had addressed her as "mumma" rather than "amma". He also referred to his grandfather as a "great man" who had been "flogged" in public for no apparent reason.
“I believe that in his heart he knows that this is not nice because there are real illegitimate children in this world. You’re mocking them by making a charade of this,” he said about Mahesh. Declaring that his uncle 'should have been more responsible’ about his comments, Dharmesh said that what he said about their family could have triggered his parents’ illness. “My mother got Parkinson’s because she got so worked up and didn’t know what to do. It triggered her illness. And my father got Alzheimer’s.” Dharmesh said in the interview.
Recently, Mahesh told Arbaaz Khan in an interview that he had grown up with the stigma that he was an illegitimate child. He said that he was born in 1948 in post-independent India and that his mother was a Shia Muslim, but they lived in Shivaji Park, where most people were Hindus. “She used to hide her identity by wearing a saree and adorning a tika. When my father came to our home, I felt like an outsider had come. I used to have confrontations with evil men who would sit me down and ask me questions about my father,” Mahesh said. “The first time my father put sindoor on my mother's forehead was when she died and he came with his wife. I remember him putting sindoor on her maang and I said ‘too little too late’. It really broke my heart. She always wanted me to have a picture of him publicly accepting her.”
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