Book Excerpt | Breathing Life into Muzaffar Ali’s 'Umrao Jaan'

The movie now returns to the big screen in restored 4K and will be accompanied by a commemorative collector’s book. 

What is it that draws you to a place? A piece of culture, distilled into all its shades—walls that have held the secrets of countless dawns and dusks, of colours and hues, of words and thoughts, of ragas and rasas?

If anything embodied that for me, it was Umrao Jaan. It went beyond the novel, beyond the customs and rituals. It was how we lived—with joy and pain, beauty and ugliness. It was the making of cinema, people coming to life.

There are films that are made. And then there are films that are born of memory, silence, longing and music. Umrao Jaan was not just a film—it was a prayer wrapped in a ghazal, a tribute to a world lost to the tides of time. It was born from my own encounters with the soul of Lucknow, from the whispered verses of Urdu poets, from the grace of courtesans who lived between love and exile. A mosaic of moments—of decisions made in candlelight, of fabrics chosen with trembling reverence, of songs composed in silence, of glances that said more than words ever could.

Every image you see here is a part of that living world—hand-drawn sketches, set designs, forgotten reels of film, quiet portraits, letters exchanged, and costumes that still carry the scent of the era. I offer it to you not just as a recollection, but as an invitation: to walk with me into the world of Umrao, to feel her pain, her pride, her poetry. Because somewhere, in each of us, there is a part of her that still sings.

I still remember the first time I imagined her—not just as a character, but as a presence. Umrao wasn’t walking out of a page. She was emerging from a fragrance, a note in a thumri, the glint of a mirror in an old haveli. She belonged to a world that was fading, yet refusing to be forgotten. The camera didn’t just follow her, it entered her world—a world built not with grand sets, but with silences, glances, shadows. Every scene was a revelation. Every frame, a doorway.

And behind those frames, there were people. Dreamers. Craft-creators. Poets. Each one brought their own breath into the film. Rekha didn’t just act—she became. Khayyam didn’t just compose—he evoked. Every note, every gesture, every costume was a thread in a tapestry that told not just Umrao’s story, but the story of a culture fighting to survive in memory.

Cinema, for me, has always been about preservation—of feeling, of time, of truth. Umrao Jaan was an attempt to hold on to a vanishing world, not with nostalgia, but with grace. And it began long before the film, before the script, before the cast, before the camera rolled. It began in Lucknow—in its crumbling havelis and sunlit courtyards, in the echo of footsteps on stone corridors, in the scent of attar and old paper. And it began in Aligarh—in its poetry-laden evenings, in the rhythm of Urdu on young tongues, and in the quiet rebellion of thought.

These weren’t just places. They were moods. Temperaments. They were cities that taught me how to listen—to silence, to longing, to language itself. Lucknow wasn’t history for me: It was a lived emotion. The tehzeeb wasn’t in books—it was in the way tea was poured, in the way a sentence curved, in the way sorrow dressed itself with dignity. Aligarh, on the other hand, gave me reflection. It taught me that beauty and rebellion often share the same heartbeat. That poetry wasn’t escape—it was resistance. It shaped my gaze, made it linger longer, question deeper.

I made the first half of the film while I was still with Air India, and the second half at Mehboob Studios, after I resigned. The making of Umrao Jaan was a cerebral journey. The journey of poetry. The journey of the screenplay. It was time for Umrao to step out of the corridors of Aligarh University’s Urdu Department—where Shahryar had taught this classic novel—and find her place in the make-believe world of cinema, where stories become larger than life.

She had to enter the changing light and shade of time through a painter’s canvas. It was no ordinary task to create a dream on celluloid. Nostalgia had to transform into art. Colours, seasons, textures: each had to speak the Urdu of an anguished soul. In timeless whispers where every decibel mattered. Where silence was needed—to hear the heartbeat.

There was no better dreamer than Shahryar to co-create this odyssey of a mid-19th-century girl. I had forgotten I had made a film before or would make a film afterwards. I was living in a bygone era: Awadh at its zenith, just before its plunge into decline with the exile of one of its most cultured kings. 

Uprooted from my roots in Lucknow, I had made poetry my tour de force. The transition from book to screenplay traced the trajectory of a helpless girl-child in a callous world, turning to creativity as a form of expression. Javed Siddiqui and Shama Zaidi’s carefully and sensitively crafted screenplay became the architecture of the film—the foundation on which I could arrange my dreams and memories, imagination and nostalgia.

My own understanding of femininity, and the beauty and harshness of times, were already disappearing from our lives. Out of this turmoil, method began to emerge from madness. Shahryar held my hand, and together we forged Umrao’s path with poetry. I replaced the original ghazals with new verses—poetry born of a creative mind grappling with life, optimism, infatuation, love, passion, disappointment and disillusionment. From ‘Dil Cheez Kya Hai’ and ‘In Aankhon Ki Masti’ to ‘Justuju Jiski Thi’ and ‘Ye Kya Jagah Hai Doston’, Umrao became a complete woman of poetry. She made me live life through her, and gave Khayyam the intoxication he needed to create his unforgettable melodies. This was the longest, and most beautiful part of our journey.

It drew Asha Bhosle into the zenith of Awadh’s culture—Lucknow in the mid-1800s. She made me read the book to her, so that she could be transported into a world away from Bollywood. She even agreed to sing a scale lower than usual, to become the Umrao of our dreams. Each ghazal, each sher took us into an unknown realm—and left us there.

Umrao Jaan was all about getting the architecture of a dream just right, and inspiring each contributor to go beyond themselves.

The face that brought the collective cinematic effort together was Rekha. It meant more than anyone could have imagined that she would remain vivid and alive in the public memory, even four decades later. Her art has kept her vibrant and young at 70. Her eyes continue to exude the same mystery I saw when I first cast her. She continues to live and breathe every word she once spoke on screen.

It was Kumudini Lakhia’s lyrical choreography that brought us to the threshold of exquisite expression. For me, it was the start of a new journey into the world of Kathak—a journey that continues even now. She showed me a gentle inroad into Kathak—an inner Kathak, a Sufi Kathak—where the bhav became a graceful narration of profound, deep, emotions, taking khayal to new heights.

Costumes, too, spoke their own language, one which came organically to artists working with light, movement and music. To me, Umrao Jaan was the discovery of my secret Awadh—and Lucknow—its sorrow, its romance, its anguish and its beauty. The film emerged from my memories and my way of doing things with finesse. My mother mentored me in understanding the feminine feudal culture that became the film’s patina.

I was born and raised in Qaiserbagh, where the walls still whispered the secrets of Wajid Ali Shah’s Parikhana, its creative history and its tragic decline in 1857. I did not know then that a film was brewing within me. And that it would be made while living in Kotwara House, Qaiserbagh. Today, that house is an archive of my work and of my cinema secrets.

This is an excerpt from “Prologue: Breathing Life into Umrao Jaan” by Muzaffar Ali in Muzaffar Ali’s 'Umrao Jaan' edited by Meera Ali and Sathya Saran, published by Mapin Publishing, Ahmedabad, in association with SK Jain & Sons and Kotwara Studios Pvt Ltd.