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Only one play and lasting fame
 WRITER,
PRODUCER AND LEAD ACTOR OF A SINGLE PLAY
Babban Khan has staged only one play throughout
his life. But during the last 35 years, he has performed
it 10,000 times in 60 countries, before an audience
of over 300 lakhs.
The play, Adrak ke Panje, directed
in the delightful dakhni dialect of Hyderabad,
has fetched Babban Khan a citing in the 1984 edition
of the Guinness Book of World Records.
Babban's father Ghouse Khan was a lowly paid
clerk, and mother Sughra-Unnisa Begum was a typical
Muslim housewife. His four brothers and two sisters
died in infancy and he was the only surviving child
in the family. The family's hand-to-mouth existence
was further endangared with the death of Babban's father.
Still a student, he tried hard to earn a livelihood,
but to no avail.
In sheer desperation, Babban wrote a play titled Adrak
ke Panje and managed to put it on boards at Hyderabad's
Ravindra Bharati on September 22, 1965. The play
failured miserably. Undeterred, Babban Khan performed
it again and again until finally, things began to work
for him.
The play depicting the  travails
of a Hyderabadi couple with eight children, and a string
of commoners trying to get their long-pending bills
settled, was laced with such earthy humour that it soon
picked up and began to draw full houses. The play was
translated into 27 languages and for years together
Babban Khan, wearing the same black sherwani and
carrying the same umbrella and tiffin-box,
regaled audiences the world over.
Today, Babban Khan - the writer, producer and lead
player - has rung the curtains on Adrak ke Panje. He
is working on its sequel Adrak ke Panje-2 and
another play on pollution and environment, Gumbat
ke Kabootar.
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5:10:18 PM 
