Producer Mahesh Bhatt talks with Subhash K Jha about Srijit Mukherjee’s 2017 Begum Jaan, starring Vidya Balan, in this in-depth, exclusive, inspiring, fascinating interview.
When and how did you decide to produce Begum Jaan, the Hindi version of Srijit Mukherjee’s Rajkahini?
I woke up to the brilliance of Srijit Mukherjee inside the preview theatre buried in the quiet, dust-soft suburbs of Andheri. Rajkahini flickered before me like a dream remembered from another life, a dream stitched in smoke and soul. A film made with a kind of fragile magic that only someone who speaks in the tongue of shadows and light can conjure. Someone who believes not in money but in the fire. And when it ended and the lights came on, I saw him standing outside the door like a schoolboy awaiting his exam results. He had invited me, yes—but perhaps he had also summoned something long dormant in me. Something I had buried under years of compromise and fatigue.
You mean Rajkahini was a kind of awakening for you?
Yes absolutely. I walked to him, and I embraced him—tight. I whispered into his head, “We still have hope. We shall have hope.” And at that moment, I knew it: the plural spirit of India—aching, magnificent, and many-voiced India—would rise. Not in politics or pulpits but in the hearts of its storytellers. In the irreversible truth of plurality that cannot be censored, only sung. Or woven into stories. Stories like Rajkahini.
Was that when you decided to produce the Hindi remake of Rajkahini?
And then the decision was made to let this tale cross the language of its birth. To let it live again in Hindi, to breathe anew.
How did the casting happen?
So, the hunt began. And it was the luminous Vidya Balan who took the leap of faith. A woman who, like the film, stood firm in storm light. She agreed to shoot in the unkind, hazardous conditions of Bengal’s ragged borders, near Jharkhand, where roads were memory and night arrived too soon. Naseeruddin Shah appeared in a cameo, generous as always—asking for nothing, giving everything. Mr. Bachchan lent his voice to the prologue, like a myth echoing through time.
That was quite a formidable lineup.
That was because of the burning conviction, the persuasive fire of Srijit Mukherjee, who knocked at every door not with ambition but with longing. Our industry, for all its blind glamour and surface noise, still knows when real fire arrives at the threshold. No matter how high the stars climb, when they see a thirst that won’t quit, they make space for it. They give it their light.
Where do you place Begum Jaan in your oeuvre of productions?
I am deeply proud of Begum Jaan. And proud, too, of Kausar Munir—the wonder girl, the child I hold with fondness. She gave the Hindi adaptation its pulse, its salt. Her words, her songs—they were born of some deep place. She didn’t just write; she remembered something that had not yet been said. But you know what was the crowning moment of the venture?
Please tell…
The crowning moment—the moment that still floods me—was when we came to the end, to that aching silence where the credits begin to roll. Sreejit had a song in mind. But I suggested we revisit a forgotten line: not ‘Woh Subah Kabhi Toh Aayegi’—the one everyone knows—but the deeper one, the one Sahir Saab had hidden in plain sight. ‘Woh Subah Hum Hi Se Aayegi’. And then Arjit Singh gave it his voice: wounded, yearning, eternal. A song not of hope alone but of resistance. Of insistence. Each time the credits scrolled, I found myself filled with tears. Not for the film, or the applause, or the journey. But for the possibility that someone, somewhere, would feel less alone.
Were you disappointed when Begum Jaan didn’t do well as Rajkahini?
Begum Jaan did well enough. But it could not eclipse Rajkahini. How could it? A filmmaker making a film in his mother tongue is like a man singing in his sleep: truth flows easier, untranslatable. And yet Begum Jaan remains a shimmering chapter in my long walk through the illusion of cinema. A chapter with cracked windows, burning songs, women who bled for their roles. And a killer, played by Jisshu Sengupta, so chilling in his silence that one wonders what pain he had to carry to walk like that. But most of all, Begum Jaan stands as a testament to Srijit Mukherjee himself, to his fire, to his audacity, to his hope. The film bears his signature not just in craft but in conviction. It is soaked in the defiance of a man who dared to dream in a difficult time, who believed that storytelling—if done with truth—could still shake walls, still stir hearts, still matter. We still have hope. We shall have hope.
