Bollywood veteran Dharmendra’s ancestral land in Punjab will not pass to his children, Indian media reports.
This is due to a decision the Sholay star made publicly some years ago.
The late actor, who died on 24 November at age 89 at his Juhu home, reportedly transferred the property to his relatives in the village who had been caring for and farming the land after he moved to Bombay in the 1950s.
Current estimates value the house and fields at roughly 5 Indian crores, according to local reports, but the transfer was completed well before his recent passing.
When Dharmendra visited his native area in 2015, he formally handed over the holdings to nephews who had been maintaining the fields for decades.
As his nephew Buta Singh explained to The New Indian Express, “Dharmendra uncle was my father Manjit Singh’s cousin. The last time he came to the village was in 2019 when his son Sunny Deol fought the parliamentary elections from Gurdaspur.
"I also went to Gurdaspur to campaign for him. Before that, he came to the village in 2015-16 when he transferred 19 kanal and three marla land to my father Manjit Singh and my uncle Shingara Singh (now deceased).”
"Buta Singh added context for the transfer: “As he had left decades ago for Mumbai, our family has been taking care of his land, and we have been tilling it. He never forgot his roots and us,” he said.
Dharmendra, born Dharam Singh Deol in Nasrali and raised in nearby Dangon, maintained ties with his birthplace over the decades even as his career in Hindi cinema flourished. He is survived by six children, including actors Sunny Deol and Bobby Deol (from his marriage to Prakash Kaur) and daughters Esha and Ahana (with Hema Malini, whom he married in 1980).
Reports around his death indicated he had been unwell in the weeks prior and had been hospitalised briefly in early November before returning home to family care; his funeral and prayers drew numerous colleagues and contemporaries from the film industry.
The decision to pass the ancestral plot to cousins rather than to his own children reflects a longstanding, practical connection between the land and the relatives who physically worked it for years.
Regardless of the estate’s distribution, tributes since his death have emphasised Dharmendra’s long career and the private ways he tended to family and roots.