Why Dharmendra Skipped Sunny, Bobby, Esha, and Ahana in His Ancestral Property Will – And Named This Person

Veteran star Dharmendra, who died on 24 November at the age of 89 at his Juhu home, leaves behind not only a towering cinematic legacy but also a family now facing widespread public curiosity about his estate.

Despite the gossip swirling around his inheritance, those close to the Deol household maintain that there is no internal tension. What has surprised many is that Dharmendra did not leave his ancestral land in Punjab to his children. The property, valued in crores, went to someone entirely different while he was still alive.

Why the Ancestral Land Never Went to His Children

Dharmendra, born Dharam Singh Deol in the small village of Nasrali, spent his childhood not far away in Dangon, his family's native village. The agricultural land there originally belonged to his father.

After Dharmendra moved to Mumbai in the 1950s in pursuit of films, responsibility for the fields fell to his cousins and their sons who continued to cultivate and care for it for decades. Today, the land and the house on it are believed to be worth around five crore rupees.

During a visit to his village in 2015, Dharmendra decided to formally hand the property over to the very people who had tended it for years. His nephew Buta Singh Deol recalled the moment, telling 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)."

The Reason Behind His Decision

Buta Singh said the choice was rooted in simple gratitude. "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 explained. The transfer, in that sense, had been settled years before Dharmendra's death and reflected his long held belief that the ones who nurtured the land should own it.

The Family He Leaves Behind

Dharmendra was the patriarch of a large and well known family. He had six children, including actors Sunny Deol, Bobby Deol and Esha Deol. He married Prakash Kaur in 1954 and the two had four children together, among them Sunny and Bobby. In 1980 he married Hema Malini without divorcing Prakash. His daughters Esha and Ahana were born from that marriage. The family remains united publicly, even as conversations continue about the actor's life, legacy and the choices he made long before his passing.

Stories like this tend to echo through time because they show how memory, land and loyalty tie together in unexpected ways.