As a child K.L. Saigal occasionally played Sita in the Ramleela of Jammu. He dropped out of school and started earning money by working as a railway timekeeper. Later, K.L. Saigal worked as a typewriter salesman for the Remington Typewriter Company, which allowed him to tour several parts of India. Meanwhile, Indian Gramophone Company had released K.L. Saigal’s record consisting of couple of Punjabi songs composed by Harishchandra Bali. The first Bollywood flick in which Kundan Lal Saigal had a character to enact was the Urdu movie titled “Mohabbat Ke Ansoo”, followed by “Subah Ka Sitara” and “Zinda Laash”, all of these movies were released in the year 1932.However, these films did not do very well at the box office. It was in 1933 that K.L. Saigal’s four bhajans for the film “Puran Bhagat” created a sensation throughout the nation. Other films that followed were Yahudi Ki Ladki, Chandidas and Rooplekha. In 1935, K.L. Saigal played the character of the drunken man in Devdas, based on Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s novel of the same name and directed by P.C. Barua. His songs in the film, Balam Aaye Baso Moray Man Mein and Dukh Ke Ab Din Beetat Naahi, became popular in the whole country. In December 1941, he moved to the city of dreams Mumbai to work with Ranjit Movietone.
There K.L.Saigal acted and sang in a number of successful films. ‘Bhakt Surdas’ and ‘Tansen’ were hits during this period. But slowly it was witnessed that alcohol made it’s close place in Saigal’s life and it is also said that this had begun affecting his work and his health. As a dredaful result, K.L. Saigal died in his ancestral city of Jalandhar on 18 January 1947, at the age of 42. However, K.L. Saigal acted in 36 feature films 28 in Hindi, Urdu, 7 in Bengali, and 1 in Tamil.
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