Ms. Khan was born in that room, the first of six children. She remembered dancing with shadows there as a child, fascinated even then by what would become her vocation. To supplement the family’s income, her father managed to get her job in Mumbai’s burgeoning film industry as a child actress at the age of 3, under the name Saroj.
She had small roles in several movies before becoming a background dancer at the age of 10, appearing in the classic “Howrah Bridge” starring actress Madhubala.
Soon after, Ms. Khan’s father died suddenly. In a 2012 documentary, “The Story of Saroj Khan,” Ms. Khan described how her mother struggled to feed her and her siblings, and how they often went to bed hungry.
On the eve of the Diwali holidays, Ms. Khan mustered the courage to ask for help from the morning star Shashi Kapoor. “I had just finished a song with him, he was the dancer in the group,” she said. “I went to him and told him that tomorrow is Diwali and I have nothing at home. They will pay me only after a week. He said, ‘I have 200 rupees right now, take it.’ I will never forget it, that money helped me a lot. ”
Ms. Khan never formally trained as a dancer. Most classical dancers spend years studying with a teacher before performing in public, but with a family to help, that was not an option for Ms. Khan.
When she was still a child, she became an assistant to choreographer B. Sohanlal, working with him on some of the greatest films of the time. He taught her the basics of kathak, a classical Indian dance.
“When he started teaching me, I realized that I cannot maintain a posture, I don’t know how to do it,” he recalled in the documentary. “It made me work very hard, I had to stay in the same posture for hours, but it made me a good dancer.”
