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Days after being appointed as a non-executive director at Sona Comstar, the auto components manufacturing firm chaired by her late husband Sunjay Kapur, Priya Sachdev has made changes to her social media profile, reflecting certain updates. Her bio on Instagram now identifies her as a ‘non-executive director’ of the firm, while her handle now reads ‘Priya Sunjay Kapur’, a change from the ‘Priya Sachdev Kapur’ that she went by previously. Sunjay died in a freak accident some weeks ago, when he went into cardiac arrest after swallowing a bee while playing polo in England. His last rites were performed in New Delhi. Since then, a dispute over his estate, estimated to be worth thousands of crores, has been unfolding in the public.
A few days ago, Sunjay’s mother, Rani Kapur, wrote a letter to the board of directors ahead of the company’s annual general meeting, alleging that she was “compelled to sign various documents without explanation” after her son’s death, and that “certain people” were positioning themselves as representatives of the family. While she didn’t name anyone, it was believed that she was making a reference to Priya, with whom Sunjay shares one son, Azarius, and a daughter from her previous marriage, Safira. Safira, who went by her father Vikram Chatwal’s name on social media previously, now simply identifies her by her first name.
After joining the entertainment industry as a model in the early 2000s, Priya played a cameo in the film Neal ‘n’ Nikki. Her marriage with Vikram Chatwal ended after a long custody dispute in 2011. She married Sunjay in 2017, after his separation from actor Karisma Kapoor. Sunjay has two children with Karisma, daughter Samaira and son Kiaan. He reportedly took out bonds worth Rs 14 crore for each of them, and gave Karisma the ownership of a house.
In an interview conducted mere weeks before his passing, Priya spoke about Sunjay and Karisma’s marriage. She admitted that Sunjay and Karisma’s marriage was ‘not conventional’, and said in an interview on the Kin and Kindness YouTube channel, “Sunjay’s previous marriage was not a conventional marriage. He had two beautiful children from that marriage. We love them dearly and today we are one beautiful blended family.”
Last week, filmmaker Suneel Darshan also spoke about having witnessed the decline of Karisma’s relationship with Sunjay up close. Asked in an interview with Vickey Lalwani if Sunjay treated Karisma like a ‘trophy wife’, he said, “I think that’s where the problems came from, for the family. That’s what she had become. She was placed into a world that was not hers. Delhi has its own culture, and she wasn’t fitting into that culture. They lived in a huge, palatial house, with an endless number of cars. She had seen everything, she was Raj Kapoor’s granddaughter; fame, success, she was the number one heroine for a duration. When she decided to recede, she wanted to live the life of a wife.”
