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A belated applause for Mughal-E-Azam

Prakash.Gowda Prakash Gowda | Articles |

While every critic worth his salt was busy proclaiming Dabangg to be the biggest thing to happen in Indian cinema, especially single theatres, here I was, taking a U-Turn from the multiplex and heading for Aradhna, a single screen theatre in Vadodara to watch Mughal-E-Azam.

It’s time I must confess that I never was able to watch this film despite catching up on every classic engraved on the history of Indian cinema. Reason: I thought it had too much of melodrama, which has been used and abused time and again by our filmmakers.

For instance, the moment Jodha Baai (Durga Khote) closes her eyes while prince Salim (Dilip Kumar) arrives, you are reminded of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas, where Devdas’ mother (Smita Jaikar) goes berserk on hearing the arrival of Devdas (Shahrukh Khan).

The moment Salim confronts his father Akbar (Prithviraj Kapoor), you are reminded of the mighty Shakti moments of Dilip Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan. The moment you see Salim kissing Anarkali’s (Madhubala) lips behind a flocculent feather, one can’t help being reminded of countless gags we’ve been watching on TV and recent films post Dil Chahta hai (remember, ‘Woh ladki hai kahan?’).

Furthermore, the war scenes seemed too outdated for someone who worships Troy and Gladiator. Nevertheless, I made up my mind to watch Mughal-E-Azam with the comparisons notwithstanding.

The first half an hour of the film was enough to make one feel guilty for applauding at dialogues of Once Upon A Time In Mumbai, hailing Rajat Arora as the best dialogue writer ever born in India. Those dialogues seemed so shallow, when Madhubala receives thorns from Dilip Kumar after a Qawwali session, while her rival Bahar (Nigar Sultana) receives rose petals. Madhubala, with an illuminating smile, accepts her gift from the prince saying: “Jaahe Naseeb, kaanto ko murjaane ka khauf nahin hota.” There are more of such wow moments like when Jodhabai tells Salim: “Hamara Hindustan koi tumhara dil nahin hai jispar ek laundi hukumat kare,” to which Salim responds: “Toh mera dil bhi aapka Hindustan nahin hai, jo aap uspar hukumat kare.” Kudos to Aman, Kamal Amrohi, Wajahat Mirza and Ehsan Rizvi – the writers of the film.

Although the theatre had ten odd people, nobody could resist applauding to the scene. Ditto for the songs especially, ‘Pyar kiya to darna kya’ and ‘Mohabbat zindabad’. For the trivia buffs, here’s something I found on the Net about Mughal-E-Azam, which might interest you. As for the rest, I’d suggest you to buy an original DVD of the film. I assure you it’d be worth it, especially watching it with your parents and grandparents. I bet they’d have much more stories to narrate about the film than the trivia you can ever surf on google or wikipedia. The only flipside of watching this film: It might become difficult to applaud to the dialogues of Dabangg or Once Upon a Time In Mumbai. After all, by then the bars would’ve already been raised. So here’s a round of ‘belated’ applause to Mughal E Azam.

Interesting trivia:

The song “Ae Mohabbat Zindabad” had singer Mohammed Rafi with a chorus of 100 singers.

The song “Pyar Kiya To Darna Kiya” was written and re-written 105 times by the lyricist, Shakeel Badayuni, before the music director, Naushad, could approve of it; and in those days of sound recording, editing and mixing, as there was no way to provide the reverberation of sound, Naushad had Lata Mangeshkar sing the song in a studio bathroom. It was shot in the renowned Sheesh Mahal (Palace of Mirrors).

This song, ‘Pyar kiya to darna kya’ has more to it, than actually appears.

It is said that the small engraved mirrors in the area where the song was shot, would sparkle under the camera’s intense lights and made it impossible to shoot. Anything that would be shot would be completely white light. Director K.Asif thought of an idea: all those small mirrors, roughly in thousands, would be covered in a very thin covering of wax, so that they did not reflect any light and still you can see as clean as it can be without any blur. This alone cost the film, more importantly, time.

Prithviraj Kapoor would look into a mirror as tall as himself before each shot. When Asif asked him why he did so, he replied, “I do so to get under the skin of the character.”

For the battle sequence-  2,000 camels, 4,000 horses and 8,000 troops were used, many of them soldiers on loan from the Indian Army. This was arranged through special permission from the Indian Ministry of Defence -a rare occurrence today. The soldiers came from the Jaipur regiment of the Indian army.

The movie was originally shot three times, once each for lips moving for Hindi, Tamil and English dialogues. The Tamil version of the movie did very poorly, so the dream of having Shakespearean actors from Britain doing the dubbing in English was dropped.

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