Kuku Kohli was an Indian film director, producer, screenwriter, and editor, known professionally as Kuku Kohli and born Avtar Kohli, who directed the 1991 Bollywood action film Phool Aur Kaante that launched the career of Ajay Devgn and is remembered for the scene in which Devgn made his entrance standing with one foot on each of two moving motorcycles, a moment of stunt spectacle that made the debutant actor an immediate sensation whose screen identity was defined by that image for decades. He died on 25 August 2026 in Mumbai from a heart attack at the age of 77.
He was born Avtar Kohli around 1949 in India and came to Bollywood through years of work under Raj Kapoor, the legendary filmmaker whose R.K. Films studio was one of the most artistically celebrated and commercially significant institutions in the history of Hindi cinema. Raj Kapoor, who had acted in, produced, and directed a series of landmark films from the 1940s through the 1980s, ran a studio whose reputation attracted the most talented people in the industry and whose approach to cinema combined popular entertainment with serious engagement with social themes, particularly the experiences of the poor and the outsider in a rapidly changing India. Working for years in the R.K. Films environment gave Kohli an education in commercial filmmaking at the highest level of the Indian industry’s classical tradition.
Phool Aur Kaante, released in 1991, was a commercial masala action film built around the formulas of romance, family drama, action, and the conflict between good and evil that defined the mainstream Bollywood production of the era. The film’s central casting of Ajay Devgn, then unknown, proved to be the decisive creative choice. The film’s opening sequence, in which Devgn’s character performs the splits while standing with each foot on a separate motorcycle in a chase sequence, combined physical spectacle, choreographic bravado, and screen presence in a way that announced a major new star immediately and without ambiguity. The scene was discussed, replicated, and referenced across the years that followed in ways that made it one of the most recognisable debut moments in the history of Hindi cinema. Devgn went on to a major career spanning more than thirty years, becoming one of the most prominent and commercially successful actors in Bollywood, and when his debut director died in 2026 his tributes were among the most prominent in the outpouring of condolences from the film community.
Kohli directed other Bollywood productions including Kohraam, Suhaag, Haqeeqat, Anari No. 1, Yeh Dil Aashiqanaa, and Woh Tera Naam Tha, working across the action and romantic genres that constituted the mainstream commercial cinema of the period. He married the actress Aruna Irani in 1990. His body was cremated at Andheri crematorium on 26 August 2026 and members of the Bollywood community including Katrina Kaif and Vicky Kaushal attended to pay their respects. He was 77 years old.