industry. She acted as a comedienne in several Hindi films during the 1970s and 1980s and died unmarried in 2012. Kumudlal's daughter Bharati married twice. Her first marriage was to a Mr. Patel, a Gujarati gentleman. By this marriage, she had one daughter, the actress Anuradha Patel, who is married to the actor Kanwaljeet Singh. Later, and much against the wishes of all her relatives, Bharati married Hameed Jaffrey, a Muslim, the brother of the actor Saeed Jaffrey. By this second marriage, Bharati also acquired step-daughters, Geneviève and Shaheen, who were Hameed's daughters by his first wife Valerie Salway, a woman of Scottish, Irish, Portuguese and Spanish heritage. Geneviève married a Sindhi businessman named Jagdeep Advani. Their daughter is actress Kiara Advani. Thus, Ashok Kumar has no blood relationship with Kiara Advani but he is related to her in her family tree. Kumar was educated at Presidency College of the University of Calcutta, Kolkata, where he studied to become a lawyer. However, his heart was not in his law studies. Ganguly was more interested in cinema, in which he dreamt of working as a technician. Career Early career (1936–42) Kumudlal's father wanted him to become a lawyer and got him enrolled in a law college. However, Kumudlal failed his exams and, to escape acrimony at home, came to live with his sister in Mumbai for a few months, until the exams were held again. Kumudlal's sister Sati Devi had been married at a very young age to Sashadhar Mukherjee, who lived in Chembur in Mumbai and worked in a fairly senior position in the technical department of Bombay Talkies, a pioneering Indian film studio. Kumudlal wanted to earn some spending money for himself, and at his request, Sashadhar Mukherjee used his influence to get him a job as laboratory assistant at Bombay Talkies. This was in the early 1930s. The salary was quite decent; furthermore, Kumudlal was successful at his job and found the work interesting, which had not been the case with law college. He tried to convince his father that he would not become successful as a lawyer and that he would be able to earn a living as a technician or lab assistant. His father would not hear of this, and it required the intervention of Sashadhar Mukherjee before he finally reconciled himself to the situation and agreed to let Kumudlal abandon his law studies. Thus began