The Lavish ‘Mughal-e-Azam’ Tours North America

As a visual spectacle alone, it’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen. So, the fact that it also works to evoke distinct memories for nostalgic viewers, while immersing newcomers in its story, makes it an unmissable experience (for those who don’t speak Hindi or Urdu, two screens near each corner of the stage provide rolling English translations). Its plot, of Akbar preserving tradition by disapproving of Salim’s union with a woman of lower status, yields melodrama of Shakespearean proportions, and eventually, a war between father and son. Along the way, its tale unfurls through ecstatic musical numbers, sans live instrumentation—except for the ringing of the dancers’ ghungroo, or bell-laden anklets—but sung live by Anarkali (Priyanka Barve/Neha Sargam) and her rival courtesan Bahar (Rushpa Mukherjee/Aashima Mahajan). Their dueling qawwali track “Teri Mehfil Mein Kismat Azmakar” (“In Your Presence We Test Our Luck”), during which they vie for Salim’s affection, is a particular highlight, as one of the songs with which familiar audiences tend to clap and sing along.

In keeping with the movie’s enormous sets, the depth of the stage allows for several layers along which elements of both blocking and production design enhance and reflect the story being told. In some scenes, characters are surrounded by more emptiness and isolation than one might be used to in a Broadway show, but in others, rear projections lengthen the confines of the Mughal palace, as a set of stairs combine to form a high platform upstage, atop which an ensemble of classically trained Kathak dancers appears. Their vivid costumes are lined with intricate details, so that even when they flow like water as the dancers spin, the fabrics constantly reflect shimmering light in all directions. It’s a show whose every musical number and every interlude feels alive.

"Mughal-e-Azam" tells the love story between courtesan Anarkali and Prince Salim.

Courtesy of Mughal-e-Azam

The lighting design, while dreamlike when it passes through foggy atmosphere, always seems to exist in a tangible reality, grounding it in a physical place. It either streams as if through the palace backdrop’s numerous digital windows, or is literally filtered through the jalis (or carved stone curtains) typical of Mughal architecture, casting specific patterns on the characters, which place them in a distinct space and time. However, there’s a dueling sense of which time period the audience is being granted access to in the first place. As much as the details evoke the Mughal empire in the late 16th century, 1960—the year of the film’s release—is just as important. The show is preceded by a recorded audio introduction from the late Lata Mangeshkar, the prolific playback singer of Mughal-e-Azam and more than a thousand other Indian films, who died just last year after lending her angelic voice to practically every major Bollywood actress the industry has ever seen. This greeting from Mangeshkar, whose disembodied voice is instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with Hindi movies, situates the audience in the relative technological modernity of the Indian movie musical, thus folding it into the history of Indian cinema.