When Sir Garfield Sobers Almost Became Bollywood’s Son-in-Law: The Untold Anju Mahendru Love Story

Sir Garfield Sobers’ forgotten Bollywood connection: the West Indies cricket legend’s engagement with actress Anju Mahendru, and how Rajesh Khanna’s return changed the course of their love story.

Sir Garfield Sobers-Anju Mahendru (Image Source: Google)

One of the greatest cricketers of all time, Sir Garfield Sobers of the West Indies, has passed away. While the media has focused on his extraordinary cricketing achievements, another side of Sobers is his charisma, flamboyant personality and remarkable ability to connect with people beyond the boundary.  

Sobers played two Test series in India and was captain in 1966–67. His popularity soared during the 1966 tour. In those days, acceptance in Bollywood circles was considered a celebrity status, and Sobers achieved that within weeks of arriving in India.  

The most talked-about story is his brief romance, which quickly turned into an engagement, with model and actress Anju Mahendru. It was one of the earliest high-profile crossovers between international cricket and Bollywood. Sobers was already a global sporting icon, while Anju was among Bombay’s most glamorous young models making her way into the films.  

During the tour, at one party, he met Anju, who was then around 20 years old, confident, modern in outlook and already well known in modelling circles. Sobers was immediately drawn to her personality and charm. They came close to each other.  What followed was almost like a Vaibhav Suryavanshi T20 innings.

After a few meetings, Sobers proposed to Anju one evening. She accepted the proposal, reportedly impressed by his personality, fame and warmth. In hindsight, this engagement appears to have been a spontaneous decision taken without fully considering the long-term implications.  

Then why did they never marry?  This is where the Rajesh Khanna factor becomes crucial. Anju was already in a relationship with him, but this relationship was going through a turbulent phase. In a later interview, she admitted that during that period of estrangement, she became involved with Sobers. When she and Rajesh Khanna reconciled, she telephoned Sobers from Rajesh Khanna’s house and ended the engagement.  

Rajesh Khanna was then emerging as Bollywood’s biggest heartthrob, and his return to Anju’s life effectively ended the Sobers chapter. Even otherwise, the Sobers-Anju relationship faced significant practical obstacles. Sobers was constantly traveling for cricket commitments, while Anju was building her career in Bombay and was not inclined to leave India. In the 1960s, maintaining a long-distance international relationship was not easy.  

So, it implied that Anju accepting Sobers’ proposal may have been an impulsive decision. It’s of credit to both that they never spoke ill of each other and the relationship ended without public acrimony.  

Sobers later married Australian Pru Kirby in 1969. Some accounts suggest that before his marriage, he spoke to Anju to ensure that there were no misunderstandings between them.

Later, this story became more intriguing because, in his autobiography, Sobers offered a different explanation and wrote that Anju’s parents were deeply opposed to the match and were horrified by the idea of their daughter becoming engaged to a Black West Indian cricketer.  All these twists give this Sobers-Anju episode the texture of a ‘masala’ Hindi film.

It had a glamorous heroine, a global sporting superstar, a future Bollywood megastar, a broken engagement, parental opposition and lingering public curiosity.  The sub-plot is equally dramatic. Anju Mahendru and Rajesh Khanna had known each other from his theatre days, when he was still Jatin Khanna and had not yet become the phenomenon called Rajesh Khanna. Their relationship of several years has been extensively documented in Yasser Usman’s Rajesh Khanna: The Untold Story of India’s First Superstar.  

Rajesh Khanna eventually married Dimple Kapadia in 1973. One of the most popular anecdotes is that he deliberately diverted the route of his wedding procession (Barat) so that it would pass by Anju’s house, as a symbolic gesture to show that he had moved on.  

Perhaps the most revealing account comes from Anju herself, in an interview with The Times of India, ‘To tell you the truth, at that time I was in a relationship with Kaka. We had a fight over something, and then I had an affair with Gary. But it doesn’t mean that I disliked Gary Sobers. I don’t know what would have happened if Rajesh Khanna hadn’t come back into my life.’  

That single statement probably explains the entire triangle better than any rumour. Sobers came into Anju’s life at a moment when her relationship with Rajesh Khanna was in flux. When that relationship revived, the Sobers' engagement came to an end.