The Death of a Bollywood Heroine
My new novel, The Pinnacle, revolves around the murder of Sweety Sahota, a fictional Indian actress and the Queen of Bollywood. While the book is a satire (and hopefully a damn funny one) on aspects of modern India, and all characters and events are entirely fictional, it touches on issues in a number of real-life cases that are as tragic as they are enlightening.
One of them involves the death of a young Bollywood actress called Jiah Khan. Jiah was born in the USA, but to all intents and purposes, she was British. Her parents divorced when she was young, and she moved with her mother to Britain and grew up in West London.
Her dream was to make it big in the greatest and most popular film industry in the world – not Hollywood, but Bollywood – and, after leaving school, she moved to New York to study drama. It was there, at the age of seventeen, that she was ‘discovered’ by Bollywood, and in 2007 was offered a role opposite India’s most famous actor, Amitabh Bachchan – ‘the Big B’– in the film Nishabd.
It was a dream debut. Jiah played a Lolita-like teenager opposite a much older man. Her performance was described (by the film’s male director) as ‘spunky’ and ‘spirited’, all of which gives you an insight into the culture that permeates the industry to this day.
After that, Jiah starred in a couple of other films, and while her career hadn’t taken off in quite the way she might have hoped after her debut, by 2013 she was still working in the industry and living in a Mumbai apartment with her mother.
She seemed happy enough. In early June, her sister, Kavita, was due to visit her from London. The two sisters texted incessantly till Kavita boarded the plane. Jiah was excited to see her. Her mum certainly thought so, when she left Jiah at the flat and headed out to dinner that night.
She came back two hours later, to find Jiah hanging from the ceiling fan in her room, strangled with one of her own cotton scarves. By the time Kavita’s plane landed, all of India had heard about the death of Jiah Khan.
The police arrived and the tributes poured in, and as they did, a narrative took hold – one that seems to be deployed every time a female actor dies in mysterious circumstances in Bollywood: she was depressed; she’d been dumped by her boyfriend; she couldn’t cope with the pressures of the industry.
Police sources suggested suicide, but Jiah’s mum and family didn’t believe it. That wasn’t the woman they knew. And then things got complicated. There was no suicide note – none that the police could find anyway, but then a week later, her sister, Kavita found a six-page letter. It was in Jiah’s handwriting, undated and unaddressed, but it seemed clear Jiah had been writing to – or at least about – her former boyfriend, Sooraj Pancholi. Sooraj was the scion of a famous Bollywood family, the son of actors Aditya Pancholi and Zarina Wahab. His dad had been a bit of wild man in his youth. According to the CBI (India’s equivalent to the USA’s FBI), the letter set out Jiah’s claims about her ‘intimate relationship with [Sooraj], the physical abuse, the mental and physical torture which she experienced, [that] allegedly led [her] to commit suicide’. Sooraj denied claims that he was violent. He was charged by the CBI with abetting Jiah's suicide, a charge he denied, and the case proceeded to trial.
But Jiah’s family weren’t convinced. They still couldn’t accept that Jiah had killed herself, and there was evidence to suggest they might be right. The police officer who’d been first at the scene had found the hanging suspicious – Jiah had injuries on her face and arms indicative of blunt force trauma. There were unexplained spots of blood. But he changed his tack the next day. And then there was the missing evidence: the scarf she’d used to hang herself – that key piece of the puzzle – was mysteriously lost. And the clothes she’d been seen wearing on CCTV thirty minutes earlier? Well, they were never found at the scene.
Another thing that was missing was fingerprints. Not a single one was found in the room where she died – not even her own. And then there were the bruises on her neck: the knot marks from the ligature weren’t consistent with the soft fabric of the scarf she supposedly used – the one that had subsequently gone missing. The police don’t seem to have worried about any of that. What they did uncover was that Jiah, unbeknownst to her own mother, had undergone an abortion at Sooraj’s home five months earlier.
Jiah’s family believe she was murdered and that the scene was then set to make it look like suicide. Sooraj always strongly denied any involvement in Jiah’s death.
We might never know what happened. What we do know is that Sooraj deleted Jiah from his contacts that night, deleting all messages between them. We also know that Jiah spoke on the phone to her mum at 9.37 p.m. At around 10 p.m., the CCTV in her apartment block shows a florist delivering a bouquet to the building. A little while later, Jiah is seen handing the flowers to the gatekeeper, telling him to chuck them in the bin. The flowers were from Sooraj.
In 2023 at trial, Sooraj was acquitted of the charge of abetting Jiah’s suicide. These days he’s back in the acting game. Bollywood newspapers and websites have run pieces about the torment he went through. They don’t write much about Jiah Khan, though, or the other female actors who’ve died under mysterious circumstances.
