When it comes to love, they don’t make them like Mughal-E-Azam anymore.
The 1960 sweeping romance, directed by K. Asif and starring the supremely gorgeous pair Dilip Kumar and Madhubala, taught a generation of movie-mad Indians how to love grandly and be defiant in the face of resistance.
The doomed romance between the courtesan Anarkali (Madhubala) and prince Salim (Kumar) also stood for ambition and scale. When Anarkali declared Pyaar Kiya To Darna Kya [When in love, why fear?] and faced her detractors, it catapulted the film into a rarefied space.
Tweaking the original may even be deemed to be blasphemous. But director Feroz Abbas Khan, who has directed acclaimed plays such as Tumhari Amrita, has taken on that challenge of re-creating the greatest love story in Bollywood into a musical, that would rival a Broadway-style show.
“While the scale remains intact, the aesthetics are more contemporary… It’s a live production with live singing and choreographed to reflect the beat and energy of today’s times… I have retained the important memories of the film,” said Khan in an interview with Gulf News tabloid!. It’s a tribute to the original, he adds.
As the 16th century tale gears up to open at the Ductac in Mall Of The Emirates on May 3, here are the excerpts from the interview with the chief architect of the magnum-opus.
What should we expect from Mughal-E-Azam: The Musical?
Mughal-E-Azam is a world-class production from India where you will see the finest quality of work. This production has been blessed with some of the most extraordinary artists who have been true collaborators here.
Choreographer Mayuri Upadhaya has elevated the experience of this play to a different level, while costume designer Manish Malhotra’s artistry is stunning. The period details, the colours and the forms will transport you to the Mughal era. It’s our moment of having created a live musical. There’s no lip-synching here as actors here are singing their own songs. In many ways, it’s a turning point for Indian theatre. Mughal-E-Azam is also inclusive. Even if you don’t know the language, we will have the running translation in English.
What did you discover when you re-visited the original K. Asif directorial Mughal-E-Azam, starring Dilip Kumar and Madhubala?
In 2004, the colourised version of the film had released. During that time, Farooq [Shaikh, the late Bollywood actor from Khan’s Tumhari Amrita] and I were on a trip to stage our play Tumhari Amrita. Both had reservations about watching it in colour because our memories were so sacrosanct and fixed with the black and white film. We thought the coloured version is going to violate that.
But the colourised version gave me a different perspective. Two or three things struck: I thought it was the most perfect screenplay ever written int his history of Indian cinema. Mughal-E-Azam is a piece of literature when it comes to writing. What was interesting was also that I felt it had a theatrical structure which could even be a play. But I also knew that people’s memories are linked to the movie. Mughal-E-Azam gave people the vocabulary to express their love for that generation.
There are so many collective memories linked to the film. Plus, Mughal-E-Azam is about scale and ambition. It took ten years to make the film. So the film stood for unimaginable scale and unlimited time in which you make it. While K. Asif had ten years to make, I just had two and half months to make my musical. But I thought I will challenge myself and go against my temperament of making minimalist plays. Of course, I knew that I was being audacious and that if I took on something like Mughal-E-Azam, then the fall may be very hard and that sound of my fall will be heard far.
What were the challenges that you faced?
I realised that no matter how greatly I make it, the truth of the matter was that I was entering an area which was a minefield. I knew that if I take one wrong step, I could be blown up. Here, the mines were just too many.
You have so many people who are so emotionally attached to Mughal-E-Azam, its characters and the story. Prithviraj Kapoor [actor from the original film] is synonymous with Akbar, Anarkali with Madhubala and Dilip Kumar as Salim. You feel as if the film is a part of history, but it’s a legend. I knew that adapting the film into a play will make everyone look at it through a huge microscope.
A misstep and you will be hauled up and that realisation was overwhelming. Perhaps, it was bravado on my part and I knew that everyone on the first night of the musical will be armed with knives and swords waiting to tear it down. Three or four days before the opening of this play, I thought I had made the biggest blunder of my life. I felt everything was falling apart and had this fear of failure. It’s always there.
The other challenge was the casting. I needed an Anarkali who was beautiful, a good actress and who was an outstanding singer. Finding all of it in one person wasn’t easy. You often get one or the other. Those who came from television couldn’t handle the discipline of theatre. We had to keep changing them. Another challenge was to find someone who would support us. It was here that Shapoorji Pallonji [the original producers of Mughal-E-Azam, the film] came in. They wanted to see if we could carry the legacy forward.
Have you de-constructed or re-interpreted the original film here?
I have not done anything new. All I have done is take the legacy of K. Asif forward into a different medium and that was important to me. In recent times, people have tried to take classics and give it their personal interpretation.
Look at the film Sholay which was re-made, it was actually damaged by the way it was done. If you want to do classics again, it is important to understand that we are taking the legacy forward. We need to come to the classics with the greatest respect, while understanding the contemporary consciousness. Re-interpretation here happens in the way the whole production has been nuanced.
When you see my play, you will find new things in it but the classic remains the way it was. All we did was try to contextualise it in today’s times. You don’t have to change the interpretation, you can always deepen it by adding more heft and depth to it. When you take a classic like Mughal-E-Azam, you don’t have to say or prove that you are better than the classic. You are not. The original creator of Mughal-E-Azam will always remain K. Asif. What I have done is take the legacy forward and pay tribute to it.
What was your brief to your actors?
During the first rehearsal with my actors, I asked them to remove the sounds of the original film from their heads. When you speak those iconic dialogues, the original actors tend to enter your system. You begin to speak like them. So it was important to remove those sounds and empty themselves. I wanted them to make the text personal and intimate to them.
I didn’t want their performances to be bombastic. We also cut down the length to two hours and 20 minutes [the original film was more than three hours and 15 minutes long] and made sure that it moved at a good pace. The play also has a strong female voice. At the end of the day, it was a woman in Mughal-E-Azam who made the statement: Pyaar Kiya To Darna Kya. Even if you look at the symbol of my poster, it is a hand of a woman with her hand in chains. It’s her sacrifice, her voice. She’s ready to die for love.
Don’t miss it!
Mughal-E-Azam runs at the Ductac in Dubai from May 3 to 7. Tickets, starting at Dh250, are available at ductac.com.