Mahal (1949 film)

Mahal
Film poster
Directed by	Kamal Amrohi
Produced by	Ashok Kumar Savak Vacha
Written by	Kamal Amrohi
Starring	Ashok Kumar Madhubala Zohra Kumar Vijayalaxmi
Music by	Khemchand Prakash
Cinematography	Joseph Wirsching
Editing by	Bimal Roy M. Shanker R. M. Tipnis
Release date(s)	1949
Running time	165 min.
Country	India
Language	Hindi / Urdu

Mahal (Hindi: महल; Urdu: محل; English: The Mansion) is a 1949 Indian Hindi film directed by Kamal Amrohi and starring Ashok Kumar and Madhubala.

Produced by the famous Bombay Talkies studio, it is also the movie which launched both playback singer Lata Mangeshkar and leading lady Madhubala into super-stardom. The songs, particularly "Aayega Aanewaala" (English: He will Come) sung by Lata Mangeshkar, are perennial favorites. Rajkumari sang two other well known songs from the film 'Mein woh dulhan hon' and 'Yeh raat phir na aayge'. The lyrics were written by Nakshab. Rajkumari also sang these songs live on a Channel 4 (a UK TV station) programme called 'Mahfil' aired on 24 March 1991.

The movie was a groundbreaking supernatural suspense thriller and one of the earliest known films dealing with reincarnation. Mahal became one of the biggest box office hits of 1949 in India ^[1] and paved the way for Indian gothic fiction.^[2]

Influence

Bimal Roy, who was the editor for Mahal, would later go on to direct Madhumati,^[2] which itself went on to become the source of inspiration for many later works dealing with the theme of reincarnation in Indian cinema, Indian television, and perhaps world cinema. It may have been the source of inspiration for the American film The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975) and the Hindi film Karz (1980), both of which dealt with reincarnation and have been influential in their respective cultures.^[3] Karz in particular was remade several times: as the Kannada film Yuga Purusha (1989), the Tamil film Enakkul Oruvan (1984), and more recently the [[>Ashanti nags Om Shanti Om Mumbai Mirror, 7 August 2008.</ref>^[4]

References

1. ^ Mahal (1949) Classic Films at upperstall
2. ^ ^{a b} Mishra, Vijay (2002), Bollywood cinema: temples of desire, Routledge, pp. 49–57, ISBN 0415930146 
3. ^ Doniger, Wendy (2005), "Chapter 6: Reincarnation", The woman who pretended to be who she was: myths of self-imitation, Oxford University Press, pp. 112–136 [135], ISBN 0195160169 
4. ^ Shah Rukh, Farah Sued: Writer Claims SRK stole his script for Om Shanti Om

External links

• Mahal at the Internet Movie Database