Naseeruddin Shah interview: The British looted us, The Mughals gave us so much

On a recent trip to Nainital, a local bookseller showed me a picture of Naseeruddin Shah and Ratna Pathak Shah visiting her son’s makerspace farther up the hillside. Shah is thrilled to talk about it when I mention it during our chat. “It’s housed inside a more than hundred-years-old bungalow where we spent a lovely day,” he says. Shah, 72, studied at the elite St Joseph’s College in Nainital. The school, and Nainital in general, is deeply tied up with his life. “I have lots of memories associated with that place, and not all of them are pleasant.”

Nostalgia humoured, we resume talking about Taj: Divided by Blood, an upcoming 10-episode series where Shah — having played everyone from Mirza Ghalib to Mahatma Gandhi in the past — has taken a swing at Mughal emperor Akbar. The veteran was initially hesitant to take up the role — for obvious reasons. Anyone who embodies the great 16 ^th Century monarch onscreen gets compared, inevitably, with Prithviraj Kapoor. “I consider Mughal-e-Azam (1960) a great movie and I feared we’d try to do a poor man’s version of it.”

His doubts were assuaged by director Ron Scalpello and writers Christopher Butera, William Borthwick and Simon Fantauzzo’s treatment of the period and characters. The Akbar we see in the trailer of Taj: Divided by Blood is furious but frail, cagily presiding over a succession battle amongst his squabbling children. Shah was invested in a complex portraiture of Akbar, showing us a flawed, ruthless conqueror who also patronised the arts and was an icon of Indian syncretism. “I don’t think there ever was a completely benevolent ruler,” he says. “Perhaps only Humayun among the Mughals, who is the least remembered of the lot.”

Of course, the significance of fronting a big-canvas series on the Mughals in today’s India is not lost on Shah. A previous attempt, The Empire, on Disney+ Hotstar, waded into controversy (it’s unclear if the show will get a second season). The Mughals are subjects of political and cinematic grotesquery, portrayed as evil invaders who looted and subjugated a great nation. Conversely, any sanitised, sympathetic portrayal is dismissed as a glorification of centuries of Muslim rule.

“The sad part is because Nadir Shah was a Muslim, and because Taimur (Timur) and Mahmud Ghaznavi were Muslim, people can’t distinguish between them and the Mughals. They were the actual marauders,” Shah says. “And if we are talking about slavery, then we should hate the British more than we hate the Mughals. The British looted us while the Mughals gave us so much — our economic systems, our military systems, our architecture, our paintings.”

The current frenzy to revise India’s past deeply angers him, confesses Shah. “I feel disgusted because it’s completely ignorant of history to claim Tipu Sultan was a traitor and we should not celebrate him. It’s nonsensical to ask us to choose between Tipu Sultan and the Ram temple.”

Shah’s Akbar on a royal trot in a still from ‘Taj: Divided by Blood’
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Shah concedes that, as systematised by the British, Indian history textbooks have fixated unduly on colonial and pre-colonial history. As a young schoolboy in Nainital in the ‘50s, that’s all he and his classmates ever read about. “We didn’t read about the Guptas, the Mauryas, the Cholas… We didn’t read about the great Vijayanagara Empire.” It’s this aspect of our learning that needs to be remedied instead of a blanket villainisation of the Mughals, Shah feels. “The fact remains that Akbar was truly a man who respected all faiths. He was not a wahabi; he was in fact more influenced by the Sufis. He was surrounded by Buddhist pupils and Jain monks and Zoroastrian priests. His closest and most trusted advisers were Raja Man Singh and Birbal.”

There was also the saint and mystic Shaikh Salim Chishti, who is played by legendary thespian Dharmendra in Taj: Divided by Blood. Shah and Dharmendra go a long way back, to the heyday of hardcore action films like Ghulami (1985) and Tahalka (1992). The actors represent contrasting schools of performance— Sholay and Nishant were released in the same year—but have maintained a genial friendship. “I have seen Dharmendra in his alcohol phase and without alcohol phase,” Shah says. “He has always been the same person, a real salt-of-the-earth type guy who remains unaffected by his massive success.”

Shah is deferential towards Prithviraj Kapoor’s Akbar, calling it a performance ‘too large for a screen’. He is less effusive about Hrithik Roshan’s version, in the 2008 romance Jodhaa Akbar. “I quite liked the film and thought Hrithik was fetching to look at. But that’s not how Akbar actually looked. He was physically strong but short of stature. The film interpreted him as this sexy-looking man. I mean, the hundreds of concubines he kept, it’s not like they had a choice!”

Taj isn’t the only politically potent project Shah has recently lent his name to. Earlier in February, Dibakar Banerjee told Deadline.com that his Tees (formerly titled Freedom) has been shelved by Netflix. Led by Shah and Manisha Koirala, the film narrates the story of ‘a middle-class Muslim family across three generations’. Netflix has reportedly scrapped the film’s release and is not allowing Banerjee to screen it at festivals.

Shah says he does not know about the development but did expect the film to get into trouble. “It was quite plucky of (Dibakar) to make it in the first place. I don’t know what can displease people these days.” The film, Shah argues, is a work of speculative fiction and not a direct commentary (one of the storylines concerns an author struggling to get his novel published). 

“We are talking about a futuristic thing,” he says before catching on to the irony. “We are talking about something that may happen and there is every likelihood it will happen.”

Taj: Divided by Blood releases on ZEE5 on March 3.