The title Mughal-E-Azam means "The Great Mughal", which is in reference to the emperor Akbar, known as Akbar the Great. Akbar means "The Great". "Mughal-E-Azam" therefore means "The Great The Great The Great". A movie would have to be pretty good to live up to such an overweening appellation. Fortunately, Mughal is the Indian Gone with the Wind, a grandiose epic spectacle which subsumes any silliness into itself like the Yellow River flooding over an impudent field.
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| This opening goes harder than the combined cinemas of most countries. |
The real Akbar was almost as effective as he was ambitious, conquering vast areas for the already powerful dynasty he inherited. He took a Hindu wife and designed to bring Hindus and Muslims together under his syncretic vision of the Dīn-i Ilāhī. His son Jahangir did, as in the movie, lead an uprising against him, but it wasn't for love - like all real-life revolutionaries, he was just a prick who wanted power for himself. Jahangir's rebellion was put down but his stepmothers bailed him out in an act of shameless enabling upon which he squandered no reflection; his own son Khusrau would attempt to coup him in turn, to which Jahangir showed none of his father's forbearance - he had his own son blinded for his disobedience. Worse still, his other son, Khurram (later Shah Jahan), rebelled as well, and Jahangir made peace. And you thought your parents played favourites.
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| What a cunt. |
Mughal, then, is somewhat of an inversion of George Fatfuck Martin's Cheetodustcore soap opera G*me of Thr*nes in that it glosses over a grimdark cutthroat historical reality with a romantic myth that compels sympathy for the upstart prince if you don't give any thought to the thousands of innocent men who die in the setpiece battle just so he could try to bang Anarkali (Madhubala), the Helen-of-Troy of the drama.
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| "um sweety my eyes are down here" - madhubala |
So the film's morality might be a little unorthodox, but you're going to pretend to care now, after cheering for Gone Girl and the bugs from Star Ship Troopers? Film is an amoral medium and if you think otherwise, you've been programmed. Hitchcock made this point repeatedly, such as in Strangers on a Train, in which he has the villain drop a piece of evidence he plans to use to frame the hero down a drain, at which point you and every other viewer started rooting for the villain to retrieve it. Mughal even anticipates and rubbishes the moralistic critique in the following exchange:
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| Media literacy soyjaks rekt AGAIN. |
More to the point, Mughal shames most Hollywood period epics with its lavish set and costume design, and the colourisation (which was undertaken in accordance with the director's original vision; belay your epic bacon Orson Welles quote on Ted Turner's crayons) only renders it more psychedelic still.
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| Among their many crimes, the Beatles must answer for making this uncool (in hell). |
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