Asif’s Mughal dream was launched way back in 1944 at Mumbai’s Minerva Movietone Studio. The producer was Shiraj Ali Haque, owner of the famous Mahalaxmi Studio. Sapru and Nargis were cast as the doomed lovers, Salim and Anarkali. Chandramohan easily slipped into the shoes of a tyrannical Akbar while Himalaywaalah was signed on to play the prince’s friend and trusted lieutenant, Durjan Singh.
Only a few scenes had been canned when communal fires sparked off across the country leading to the Partition. Loyalties were being questioned... choices had to be made. Shiraj Ali Haque crossed the border and became a citizen of the new-founded Pakistan. Asif opted to stay back in India and the city of dreams. The decision cost him his Mughal dream.
Disappointed but not disheartened, Asif bided his time. A couple of years later, when things had settled down, he took his project to Shapoorji Palonji. The owner of a flourishing construction empire, Shahpurji was not interested in show business where the risks far exceeded the profits. He however was fascinated by the history of Akbar and abhorred the idea of leaving any work incomplete. So, after long hours of deliberation, the elderly tycoon gave the nod to Asif. And in 1951, Mughal-e-Azam was revived.
| Sholay was re-released at a time when there was no flow of products. Mughal-e-Azam is coming at a time when supply far exceeds demand
- Ramesh Sippy | |
Asif’s script hadn’t changed but his principal actors had. Himalayawallah had followed Shiraj Ali Haque to Pakistan and was replaced by Ajit who till then was known only for his stunt films but had impressed Asif with his impeccable Urdu diction. Following Chandramohan’s death in ’46, Prithviraj Kapoor was the new Akbar. Dilip Kumar who insisted he didn’t look like a shehzada (Prince) reluctantly agreed to step in for Sapru and was packed off to London to be fitted with a special wig. Dilip Kumar’s entry paved the way for Nargis’s exit who by then was working almost exclusively for Raj Kapoor. She was replaced by Madhubala who looked ethereal but lacked Nargis’s star power.
Shooting started...Not just at Mohan Studios on K Asif’s sets but at Filmistan and Central Studio too. S Mukerji had launched Anarkali with Pradeep Kumar and Bina Rai and Kamal Amrohi who was one of Asif’s script writers, started his own Anarkali with Meena Kumari. Asif was unfazed by the competition. In fact, it only egged him on to aspire to new heights.
A dazzling Sheesh Mahal rose from the studio floors. It did not emerge overnight but took two years to complete. Thirty-five feet high, 80 feet wide and 150 feet long, it was made from glass especially imported from Belgium. The palace cost Shahpoorji Rs 15 lakh and almost gave the old builder a cardiac arrest when an expert flown in from Europe told Asif that it would be impossible to film scenes within it let alone a song.
The walls and pillars of the Sheesh Mahal had been inlaid with millions of coloured mirrors and, the expert pointed out, they would reflect the lights. “If I can’t picturise the set I’ll destroy it,” Asif told the man grandly. When the words were repeated to his producer an enraged Shahpoorji ordered the palace to be dismantled and sacked Asif with immediate effect.
The story goes that Sohrab Modi was persuaded to take over the reins of the epic extravaganza that had already dragged for almost eight years. Modi was told to wrap up the film in 30 days flat. It was a challenge but the maker of lavish period pieces like Pukar and Jhansi Ki Rani accepted it.
The next day when Modi accompanied by Shahpoorji stepped into the glass palace to discuss the possibilities of a new set they were cut short by a voice booming, “Whoever dare break my Sheesh Mahal will end up with a broken leg!” They turned to find Asif swaying on Badshah Akbar’s takht. Shahpoorji saw red, and realising that he had crossed the lakshman rekha, Asif apologized to Sohrab Modi and begged his producer to give him a last chance. He asked to be allowed to shoot one scene in his Sheesh Mahal. The negative would be sent to London for processing. If the lab approved of the result, he should be retained to complete the film otherwise he would quit on his own accord. Shahpoorji despite his show of temper couldn’t say “no”. And Asif was back behind the camera.
Asif quickly discovered a way to surmount the problem the mirrored set posed. He played around with the lights and using reflectors manage to keep the dancing images thrown back by the glass away. A scene was shot as promised and dispatched to the Queen’s city. The unit waited tensely for the verdict. A cable finally arrived from the London lab. The result was fantastic! Asif started to dream again...
The Sheesh Mahal today is immortalized in memory with Madhubala’s piece de resistance, ‘Pyar kiya to darna kya...’ Even today, this song springs to the lips of defiant lovers.
In 1957, colour technology had entered Indian cinema and Asif decided to add a splash of colour to his black-and-white classic through this evergreen Naushad tuned melody. When the processed song was screened for a select few there was an echo of wondrous “oohs” and “aahs” swept across the room. Asif himself was left wide-eyed by his daring experiment with reel 10. He went ahead and shot the remaining three reels in colour too. The effect was magical. The earlier monochromatic frames seemed pale in comparison to the vibrant hues that lit up the film towards the end. Observing the difference Asif decided to scrap what he had shot and remake the film in colour. This time not just his producer, even the film’s distributors who had waited impatiently for almost a decade for the perfectionist director to deliver on his grand promise, staged a vehement protest.
| Mughal-e-Azam should be screened at sprawling, single ‘screen theatres and not matchbox multiplexes for three or four generations of film buffs to appreciate K Asif’s grand spectacle
- Nester D’Souza | |
The distributors categorically told Shahpoorji and Asif that they weren’t willing to wait any longer. Though Kamal Amrohi had been persuaded to shelve his Anarkali, S Mukerji had released his Anarkali in 1953 and it had busted the box-office. Way back in 1935 RS Choudhury had directed another Anarkali for Annasaheb Mayekar and the Imperial Film Company starring Sulochana, D Billimoria, Jiloo and Asooji. If Asif wanted to play around with his Anarkali he could, but he would have to make another film. The distributors threatened to release Mughal-e-Azam in its existing form (85 per cent black-and-white and 15 percent colour) themselves, with or without the consent of its whimsical director.
Mughal-e-Azam was finally released on August 5, 1960 at Mumbai’s Maratha Mandir. It drew a full house. Everyone who mattered was there, from Chief Minister YB Chavan to movie moghuls, glamorous filmstars and poker-faced dowagers. At 9 p.m. sharp the epic unveiled.
For a while there was awed silence. Then smothered yawns and not-so-smothered whispers filtered through the darkened auditorium. By the end of 19 reels the atmosphere was positively funeral. When the unit congregated at Asif’s Forjett Street residence for a pre-planned champagne party, no one felt like raising a toast. The verdict had been passed. The film was a disaster. Only Asif was untouched by the cloud of gloom that had descended on his team. “Wait a week, the film will pick up,” he prophesised. No one believed him.
Mughal-e-Azam opened the next day to 150 near-empty theatres across the length and breadth of the country. But after the thanda initial response, the collections, suddenly, miraculously, picked up. By the end of the first week the film had netted in Rs 40 lakh. The film remains amongst the top 10 grossers of Hindi cinema.
Shahpoorji’s Rs 1.50 crore gamble paid off after being in the making for almost 10 years. Later, in retrospect, the builder-producer wished he had listened to Asif and made the film in colour. The thought haunted him. One day, he promised, Asif’s technicolour dream would come true. It has.
Sixty-four years after Mughal-e-Azam went on the floors and 44 years after it first exploded on screen, Mughal-e-Azam is ready for a grand revival. This Diwali, the epic extravaganza will unfold in colour. Deepesh Salgia, the project manager who has overseen the restoration over a three year period, is confident the film will be a smash hit again. “We have been having test runs and have screened the digitally mastered, all colour, wide screen version for around 500 people from different walks of life. And everyone from the age of 16 to 70, be he a chowkidar or an industrialist, has felt the magic. I know when the two-hour-57-minute spectacle opens to the public on November 12, entire families of sons, fathers and grandfathers will flock to see it,”Deepesh says with complete conviction.
The project has been undertaken by the original production company and the heirs of Shahpoorji Palonji. It is rumoured to have cost Sterling Investment Corp. Pvt. Ltd. as much as Rs 10 crore. Restoration includes digitalizing the 300,000 frames of film at 2K resolution. Gamma, contrast and fungus correction, scratch and pinhole removal, digital stitching of torn frames and stabilisition work has been carried out on the original negatives. The sound has been upgraded and the music re-recorded. “Ask any director and he’ll tell you that he has always dreamt to making a Mughal-e-Azam. The film is a classic with the kind of production values that leaves you awe-struck even today,” Deepesh insists.
The newly restored Mughal-e-Azam is Deepesh’s brainwave. In 1996, inspired by the revived Hollywood classics, he came up with the idea of colourising the film for TV and DVD output. “But, on second thoughts, I realised that touching up the film for the small screen alone would be making a big film small. After 40 years, if people were going to see Mughal-e-Azam in colour, the spectacle had to unfold in the theatres,” he muses.
It was an ambitous and audacious idea and one that needed a overflowing coffer. “It was too big a gamble to risk at that stage so I put my extravagant project on hold,” the project manager continues his narrative.
Three years ago, it sprouted wings again when Dilip Kumar who plays Prince Salim, himself urged the original producers to fall in with Deepesh’s plans. And after 18 months of intensive research, Sterling gave Deepesh the go-ahead to undertake the Herculean task of colouring 300,000 frames, each containing 10 MB of data.
Deepesh immediately got in touch with restoration specialists working on high-end PCs in Hollywood and was told that his mission impossible could be brought to life. But it would cost him $12-15 million. “It was crazy! We didn’t have that kind of funds,” he sighs at the memory.
Deepesh then decided to develop the software in India to cut costs. He took his proposition to the Indian Academy Of Arts And Animation. The Academy started work on Deepesh’s Mughal dream around two-and-a-half years ago.
It was tedious work because many of the frames were damaged and work had proceeded at a snail’s pace, frame-by-frame, shot-by-shot, depending on the condition of the negative. Mughal-e-Azam is a film rich in sets, clothing and exquisite jewellery. A software had to be specially written to incorporate these features.
| Even at Rs 100 a ticket, Mughal-e-Azam is complete paisa vasool
- Deepesh Salgia | |
It took almost 18 months to develop the software following regular discussions with historians of the Mughal era and careful perusal of research material. The ‘Natural Colourization’ process as it is called has got underway only in the last 10 months.
The technology is customised in such a manner that it accepts only those dyes that match the gray shades of the original input that was shot in Technicolour and not Eastman colour way back in the ’50s. This ensures that the colours selected are as close to the original as is possible and were in use when the film was shot. That the Academy was on the right track was proved when a coat worn by Prince Salim in the film was discovered in the Mughal-e-Azam godown. It was the same colour as that in the restored negative.
Enthused by the success of his experiments with colour, Deepesh decided to upgrade the sound too. For the first time in the world an old, 6.1 mixed track has been digitally mastered for the Dobly surround sound system. The film’s original composer, Naushad Ali has been involved along with a younger colleague, Uttam Singh in re-recording the music. Though the voices of the original singers like Mohd. Rafi, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan. Shamsad Begum and a very young Lata Mangeshkar have been retained, the instruments have changed and a real Dolby effect has been created.
Huge amounts of manpower, effort and money have been lavished on the epic extravaganza. The estimated cost of restoration is in the range of around Rs 10 crore. It’s a huge investment and distributor Ramesh Sippy admits that he’s apprehensive about the production company’s chance of breaking even. “The film will have to do a business of at least Rs 15 crore to cut costs and though Diwali and Eid that follows three days later, is boom time for the trade, I don’t see Mughal-e-Azam generating that kind of earnings,” Sippy avers.
His lack of confidence stems from the fact that unlike Sholay, Mughal-e-Azam is a period film that would have little appeal for the youth who make up for 70-80 per cent of the theatre-going audience today. “Sanjay Leela Bhansali did a smart thing by not staying faithful to the orginal Devdas but modernising the film in terms of sets, costumes and jewellery. He took liberties like turning the zamindar’s bungalow in the village into an eye-catching palace and wooing the audience with visual aesthetics,” Sippy points out.
Devdas, he adds, also has Shah Rukh Khan, Aishwarya Rai and Madhuri Dixit...Contemporary icons and huge box-office draws. Even Sholay for that matter has Amitabh Bachchan, Dharmendra, Hema Malini and Jaya Bachchan who are familiar faces on the small and big screen even today. Since the generation next has been seeing them for the last decade, identification was not a problem. But Dilip Kumar has been out of circulation since Saudagar in the ’90s. And Madhubala is just a face from the past. “It remains to be seen if the bond of connectivity is as strong with Mughal-e-Azam as it was with Sholay,” Sippy muses.
His biggest worry however is the scarcity of theatres that Mughal-e-Azam could face coming during the festival of lights with Yash Chopra’s cross-border love story, Veer-Zaara, Subhash Ghai’s web of deception, Aitraaz and Ram Gopal Varma’s eye-opener of a musical and Naach. Dr Arindam Chaudhury’s campus caper, Rok Sako To Rok Lo is also jostling for playing time in the same week. “Sholay was re-released at a time when there was no flow of products. Mughal-e-Azam is coming at a time when supply far exceeds demand,” Sippy warns.
Exhibitor Nester D’ Souza who is the manager of one of Mumbai’s biggest and oldest city theatres, Metro Cinema agrees that the Mughal dream might have to sacrifice on screens with the Yashraj banner flooding the market with 550 plus prints of Veer-Zaara.
D’Souza however has no doubts about the film’s commercial viability. He is sure youngsters will flock to see the film and will be as mesmerised by Madhubala’s beauty as their fathers and grandfathers were way back in the ’60s. “But the film has to be positioned and marketed well,” he advices. “And Mughal-e-Azam should be screened at sprawling, single screen theatres and not matchbox multiplexes for 3-4 generations of film buffs to appreciate Asif’s grand spectacle and enjoy the music they’ve grown up hearing.”
D’Souza says that he would have loved having Mughal-e-Azam play at Metro cinema and would have taken 18 shows out of 21, so confident is he of the film drawing full houses. He insists that he would have recreated the ambience of the period in the film’s foyer so people could relive the experience. “Metro is a theatre that draws both the classes and the masses, from Colaba to Bhendi Bazar. I’m confident that Mughal-e-Azam is one film that will appeal to everyone because it has everything from grandeur to great dialogue, romance to action. But unfortunately, I’m already committed to another film this Diwali,” he rues.
Deepesh is unfazed by the news that Metro is out of bounds for him. He is also untouched by speculations in the trade about his magnum opus. The film, he insists, will work because earlier, whenever it has been released in the Eid week it has packed in the crowds. People have come out rhapsodizing about Madhubala’s ethereal beauty, Dilip Kumar’s soul-stirring passion, Prithviraj Kapoor’s arrogant tyranny and the grandeur of the sets. “It is the biggest film in Indian cinema. A film the likes of which we’d not seen before or since. It’s a must-see for every lover of celluloid dreams,” Deepesh asserts.
You talk economics with him and he shuts you up by pointing out that he’s not expecting to earn his revenue over the next 12 months. The returns will come from royalties that flow in over the next 50 years. “The film has tremendous potential. It is the first film in the world to be colourised for a 35 mm release. It will be a star attraction on the festival circuit,” he insists.
Its satellite and DVD/VCD rights should also fetch good money, Deepesh is confident. And even Hollywood and overseas distributors are showing interest in the colour version. “A distributor who markets only Hollywood films saw a trial show recently and came out raving about the ‘awesome’ war sequences. It’s a great film, I was told,” Deepesh exults.
How is the trade in India reacting to his grand experiment? Reportedly, he is asking for a price of Rs 2 crore per territory. Is anyone biting the bait? “Oh, we’ve been getting good MG offers and are even being offered excellent sharing ratios. The success of Sholay has come as a blessing in disguise,” says a well-pleased Deepesh. At the time of going to press we learned that the East Punjab- and DelhiUP territory has fetched him an impressive Rs. 1.5 crore. Ginni Arts who’ve bought the rights are planning a big release.When Mughal-e-Azam was first released, Deepesh recalls, people told Shahpoorji that it was a Rs 1.5 crore investment gone bad. But over the last 44 years, he points out, the film has brought in huge returns and made money everytime it has been released in the theatres or on TV. “People are laughing today, saying I’ve lost my mind. Let’s wait and see what tomorrow brings,” Deepesh smiles.
The competition he is up against doesn’t bother him either. “There will be drop-outs,” he maintains. And of the films that make it to the theatres, some are going to run out of steam once the reviews are out and the four-day weekend that includes Diwali (Friday, November 12) and Eid (Monday, November 15) holidays, runs out. “But Mughal-e-Azam doesn’t have to fear the critics. People know what the film is about. The curiosity will be only about how it looks in colour. And even at Rs 100 a ticket, the film is complete paisa vasool,” Deepesh promises.