K. Asif's Mughal-e-Azam Opened at Mumbai's Maratha Mandir on 5 August 1960, Sixteen Years After He Conceived It, With a Mirror-Hall Set, Naushad's Score and a Song in Technicolor

K. Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam opened at the Maratha Mandir theatre in Mumbai on 5 August 1960. Cinemaazi, the film archive of the Indian Cinema Heritage Foundation, dates his first plan for it to 1944, so the film took 16 years to reach the screen. Filmfare’s winners list, under the year 1961, names it Best Film, and gives awards to its cinematographer R. D. Mathur and to its four dialogue writers.

In Cinemaazi’s credits, Prithviraj Kapoor plays Akbar, Dilip Kumar plays Salim and Madhubala plays Anarkali, with music by Naushad and lyrics by Shakeel Badayuni. Sterling Investment Corporation, a Shapoorji Pallonji company, was the banner. A colour version returned to cinemas on 12 November 2004.

A 1922 play and a film that started over

Asif drew on Imtiaz Ali Taj’s Urdu play Anarkali, written in 1922, Cinemaazi says. Film versions of the story already existed: a 1928 silent film with Sulochana and D. Bilimoria, a sound remake in 1935 and a Hindi Anarkali of 1955 with Bina Rai and Pradeep Kumar. His own version began as a 1944 project, with Kamal Amrohi, Wajahat Mirza and Amanullah Khan lined up to help with the screenplay.

Neither the first cast nor the first financier lasted. Cinemaazi names Chandra Mohan, D. K. Sapru and Nargis as the original leads, while Eastern Eye names Chandramohan, Veena and Nargis. Both agree Chandramohan died in 1949. According to Cinemaazi, the original producer, Shiraz Ali Hakim, migrated to Pakistan after Partition and recommended Shapoorji Pallonji Mistry as his replacement. Eastern Eye says production resumed in the early 1950s with Dilip Kumar, Madhubala, Prithviraj Kapoor and Nigar Sultana, and that the footage shot before 1949 was wasted.

Casting Anarkali took time. An advertisement in Screen on 8 February 1952 asked for a girl between 16 and 22, Cinemaazi reports, and none of the eight women shortlisted played the part. Madhubala did. Dilip Kumar’s own career is covered in Dilip Kumar and the tragedy king.

Sources disagree on how long the shoot ran. Nine years is Cinemaazi’s figure, and the Sunday Tribune says almost nine years with more than 500 working days. Eastern Eye also gives more than 500 shooting days, against the 60 to 125 it says were usual for a major Hindi film then. AFP, reporting in 2004, says about a decade of production.

The mirror hall that took two years to build

The Sheesh Mahal, the palace of mirrors in which the film’s best-known song is set, was built as a studio set. It took more than two years, used glass imported from Belgium and artists from Firozabad, and measured 150 feet by 80 feet, says Cinemaazi. Agha Shirazi was the mirrorwork master, according to the University of Iowa’s Bollywood Cinema pages. Cinemaazi adds that the set stood at Mohan Studios for over three years. Shoma A. Chatterji, writing in The Space Ink in 2023, gives the dimensions as 150 by 80 by 35 feet and puts the cost at about Rs 15 lakh (Rs 1.5 million).

At first the mirrors threw the cameras and lights back at themselves. Eastern Eye says the set sat idle for months before Mathur found a fix, and both Eastern Eye and Chatterji describe a wax coating on the mirrors. Chatterji adds strips of cloth to bounce the light, and Cinemaazi describes bounce lighting. The accounts differ in detail and agree that Mathur controlled the reflections and the song was filmed.

Chatterji also notes that the Sheesh Mahal of Lahore Fort, which the set copies, did not exist in Akbar’s reign. For the emperor and his court, see Akbar and the machinery of the Mughal state.

Colour for the mirror-hall song

The release print was mostly black and white. Cinemaazi’s credits list the format as black and white, 35 mm, on 20 reels. Technicolor was prohibitively expensive for Indian filmmakers, say the University of Iowa pages, so Asif kept it for two climactic musical scenes in the Sheesh Mahal.

“Pyar kiya to darna kya” is the sequence Cinemaazi names as shot in Technicolor. It says Asif wanted to reshoot the entire film in colour and that distributors objected, so the film was released partly coloured. Eastern Eye describes the colour as a few key scenes and one song. Filmsite’s Tim Dirks calls the film part colour and part black and white.

Naushad, a hundred singers and a classical master

Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Lata Mangeshkar, Mohammed Rafi and Shamshad Begum are the playback singers in Cinemaazi’s credits. Naushad and Badayuni went through 105 drafts of the opening line of “Pyar kiya to darna kya”, Cinemaazi says. For “Aye Mohabbat Zindabad”, Cinemaazi and the Sunday Tribune both say Rafi sang with a chorus of about a hundred. The two singers have their own pages: Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammed Rafi.

A classical vocalist, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan is reported to have opposed singing for films. Cinemaazi says he was offered Rs 25,000 for a thumri and accepted, when top playback singers were reportedly paid Rs 1,000 to 2,000 a song. Chatterji, citing the writer Shakil Warsi, also gives Rs 25,000 for each of his songs and puts Lata Mangeshkar’s and Rafi’s fee at Rs 400 a song. The two accounts do not agree on the playback rate.

Naushad’s later honours are on official lists. A Gazette of India notification dated 26 January 1992, published on 28 March 1992, names Naushad Ali Wahid Ali (Music, Films) among the Padma Bhushan recipients. He is also the 1981 Dadasaheb Phalke Award winner, the 29th, on the Producers Guild of India’s list.

What the Filmfare list records

Filmfare’s list files Mughal-e-Azam under 1961 and shows it as Best Film. R. D. Mathur won Best Cinematographer (Black and White), and Aman, Kamal Amrohi, Wajahat Mirza and Ehsan Rizvi won Best Dialogue. Best Music Director that year went to Shankar-Jaikishen for Dil Apna Aur Preet Parai, and Best Actor to Dilip Kumar for Kohinoor.

Opening night and the box office

Eastern Eye says the foyer of the Maratha Mandir was styled as a Mughal palace, and the Sunday Tribune and Eastern Eye both report that the prints arrived at the premiere on an elephant. Dilip Kumar was absent, according to Cinemaazi and Eastern Eye, which put it down to a rift with Asif. Tickets were sold weeks ahead, seven weeks by Eastern Eye’s account and ten by Chatterji’s. Chatterji adds that the first-night audience was silent and that the film opened in 150 theatres at once, which she calls a record for the time.

Money figures are the least settled part of the record. For the budget, the Sunday Tribune gives Rs 1.5 crore and Chatterji gives Rs 10.5 million (Rs 1.05 crore), while Filmsite gives about $3 million. Dawn’s 2004 AFP report says the colour version cost twice what the original production cost, and it prices the colour work at 30 million rupees, which fits the Rs 1.5 crore figure.

Koimoi puts the original run at about Rs 5.60 crore and says the film passed Mother India, which it puts at about Rs 4 crore, as the highest earner in Hindi cinema. It says the record lasted 15 years until Sholay. Eastern Eye also says the film held that position until Sholay, released in 1975, while Koimoi dates the change to 1976. Koimoi names no source for its figures, and no audited tally appeared in any page used here, so the sums are one outlet’s estimate.

The 2004 colour version

The colour version reached cinemas on 12 November 2004, Diwali that year according to the Sunday Tribune. Business Standard wrote in 2007 that it was the first film digitally coloured for a theatre re-release. The work was done by the Indian Academy of Arts and Animation in Mumbai for Sterling Investment Corporation.

The project’s director, Deepesh Salgia, told the Sunday Guardian in 2018 that the frames were scanned at high resolution and restored at Acris Lab in Chennai, then coloured at the academy under technical director Rajeev Dwivedi. The colour balancing of the whole film was done at Rajtaru Studio in Mumbai, and the film was converted from 35 mm to CinemaScope at the same time. Salgia says checks were run by technical staff, an art director and a historian to keep the colours close to the originals. Dwivedi told AFP in 2004: “We first developed software to convert films from black and white to colour specifically for this film.”

Leslie D’Monte reported in Business Standard in 2007 that the film’s 300,000 frames took more than 100 professionals around 10 months to colour. Salgia’s account is longer, with about 18 months of research and 15 months of main work. AFP reported that finding the copyright holder and a surviving print took over a month. The soundtrack was rebuilt as well. Salgia says the voices were restored in Los Angeles, the songs were re-recorded by a fresh orchestra under Naushad’s supervision with Uttam Singh working on the tracks, and the original singers’ voices were kept.

The cost is reported three ways. Business Standard gave Rs 5 crore in 2004 and, in D’Monte’s 2007 piece, around Rs 10 crore reportedly, while AFP gave 30 million rupees (Rs 3 crore). D’Monte adds that quotes from Western firms had ranged from Rs 45 crore to Rs 60 crore.

Business Standard’s 2004 report, citing the trade magazine Trade Guide, says the colour version grossed Rs 79.26 lakh in Mumbai and Rs 30.66 lakh in Delhi in its first two weeks, over Rs 1 crore between them. It says 150 prints opened in week one and 176 played in week two. The Sunday Guardian describes a 25-week run, while Chatterji writes in 2023 that the coloured version was a flop. Cinemaazi records that Feroz Abbas Khan adapted the story as a stage musical in 2016.