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.