Mughal-e-Azam

Recently, I happened to recall a story which may sound very simple but is extremely interesting to my mind. It is set in the mid 1970s, and it is about a person who told me the story. Well, this person started living in a city all by himself for the first time, and he used to have plenty of time on his hands in the evenings. He would feel very bored, and so his neighbor recommended him to go and watch a film that had been playing in the theaters and had been doing very well.

“Which film?” asked this person.

“Well, Mughal-e-Azam,” said the neighbor.

But Mughal-e-Azam was not a new film at all. Mughal-e-Azam had released in 1960, directed by K. Asif and written by Asif and Kamal Amrohi. Its music was designed by Naushad Saab. Now, what was so definitive about Mughal-e-Azam was that a lot of people who watched the film did not merely see it as a work of art, a work of cinema, even a work of music, but a lot of people were convinced that this film was a true depiction of history.

Anyhow, the person was not to be taken in by such trends. Or so he thought. He told the neighbor, “Well, I don’t really wish to watch that film.”

“Why?” asked the neighbor.

“Well, because everybody seems to be watching it. It’s such a craze, and I’m pretty sure that I’m not going to be very satisfied by this viewing.”

The neighbor was rather disappointed. He thought to himself, “How can you not watch a film that I so loved, that my family so loved, that my neighbors, my society, all the people I know seem to love so much, and here you are saying that you won’t watch it?”

Anyway, after a little bit of grumbling, the neighbor went back. A week passed, perhaps two, and finally this person walked into the movie theater. He watched Mughal-e-Azam once, and then twice, and then yet another time, and probably he didn’t stop watching it there.

Well, such was the impact, the craze of a film that was made in 1960, which continued to play in the theaters in the mid 1970s. Well, it would take another decade or perhaps more for audiences to realize that what they had celebrated as a true depiction of history in Mughal-e-Azam was actually just a work of brilliant cinema, just a work of brilliant imagination. What may seem like history, what may seem like true incidents in Mughal-e-Azam were figments of human imagination.

There is no Anarkali in India’s past, at least not in the way that it is depicted in the film. And another historical inaccuracy, or should I say amazing creative liberty, that the makers took was that Salim never fought against his father Akbar over love, as is shown in the film. All that Salim fought against Akbar was the throne, the empire.