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Saturday, July 22

Mughal-E-Azam

by Mike on Sat 22 Jul 2006 04:12 PM EDT

While I am slightly acquainted with some very basic material regarding the modern history and political environment in India, I have quite a bit to learn regarding Indian culture and I am certainly interested in knowing more. A couple of weeks ago, we visited a new Indian marketplace in the Dayton area and I checked out their selection of DVDs. I had never seen any Bollywood movies before, and I was very intrigued by their selection of films. I quickly settled on Mughal-E-Azam, which boasted a rather lofty claim on its front cover: "The Biggest Indian Film Ever."

The film is set in feudal India during the reign of Mughal Emperor Akbar. The tale chronicles the tragic romance of Akbar’s son, Prince Salim (played by Dilip Kumar), with the palace maid Anarkali (played by Madhubala) . It is a love story for sure, but it is filled with drama, intrigue and action. There is obviously much more to the story (there must be, because it runs close to 3 hours), but I certainly wouldn’t want to give away the ending to anyone who might be interested watching the film. I will say that the ending is bittersweet and when I shared my feelings on this with a friend from South Asia, he made this rather appropriate point: “There could not be a happy ending because how could a feudal despot accept a female slave as his son's wife?”

When the film was originally released in 1960, only 15% of the movie was in color. At one point, Director K. Asif had opted to shoot some reels in color after having filmed a good deal on black and white stock. He even went so far as to re-shoot certain black-and-white segments in color with the intent of ultimately filming the entire picture on color stock. But financial constraints and related pressures forced him to release the final product as a combination of black-and-white and color scenes. The 2005 re-release of Mughal-E-Azam has been digitally restored and colorized and although it is easy to discern the differences between the colorized scenes and the scenes that were originally filmed on color stock, this certainly does not diminish the viewing experience.
Madhubala

The film is a musical and I found most of the music to be quite enjoyable. My two favorite songs from the movie are Teri Mehfil Mein Kismat Aajmakar and Zindabad Zindabad. Although I don’t speak Urdu ( I have also read a description of the dialogue as "Persianized Urdu") the English subtitles and some subsequent correspondence with friends has given me a good understanding of the meaning of these songs. I am told that Teri Mehfil Mein Kismat Aajmakar is a song in a style called "Qawwali" and that the style is such that the words and poetry of the song are emphasized more than its rhythm and music.

The cinematography and effects for the film are very well done. In recent decades, special effects have improved exponentially from year to year, but the big battle scene in Mughal-E-Azam deserves credit as an early cinematic achievement on a grand scale. And of course, the scene in the Sheesh Mahal (Palace of Mirrors) is a scene that is beautifully shot and stands out as one of the most significant achievements of K. Asif in this particular work.

In discussing Mughal-E-Azam with some friends from South Asia, I have come to understand that they do not share my enthusiasm for this film. Of course, they have lived most of their lives with some degree of awareness of the film, as it is widely hailed as a "classic" throughout the region. For me, however, this film was an entirely new and exciting experience. When discussing aspects of poplar Greek culture with Greeks and Greek-Americans, I often find that certain things which are fascinating to me seem rather ordinary and substandard to them. I can certainly understand this. If someone from outside the US wrote to me singing the praises of American "classics" like Gone With the Wind and Titanic, I would probably be less than enthusiastic in my own assessments of these films.

Nevertheless, Mughal-E-Azam was an experience which was both exotic and enchanting for me. I am happy to have seen it and I gladly recommend the movie to others who are interested in Indian films.