Why the love story of Akbar and Jodhaa Bai?
While I was working on Swades, my friend and the writer of Jodhaa Akbar, Haidar Ali, came to me with this story about a Rajput princess and a Mughal emperor. My immediate reaction was: how come no one has ever thought of making it into a film? We know Jodhaa married Akbar and that Jahangir was born to them and then came Shah Jahan and so on. We always discuss the dynasty, the lineage, but never how they got married. I found that very fascinating. For quite some time, I wanted to make a love story and was looking for contemporary stories. When the story of Jodhaa Akbar came about, I thought why not try and attempt it? While choosing a character from history, his relevance and the story you are telling around him becomes the key. What I found attractive in this story was how these two cultures and religions came together 450 years ago. Then, it was a story about Akbar. There are only two emperors in India whom we call ‘great’ — Ashoka and Akbar. Why is Akbar great? What did he do? These questions attracted me but I told Haidar that it’s too huge a subject and we need time. So while making Swades, we worked on its screenplay and that’s how the film came about. 

What have been your factual sources and what are the fictional liberties you have allowed yourself in telling this story?
The facts are that King Bharmal’s daughter Jodhaa was married to Akbar, and then Jahangir was born. However, what happened in their chamber or between the two of them, their evenings and their days, is not written about anywhere. There’s a gap there, though we have accounts of what kind of lifestyles the Rajputs and the Mughals had. So I have used that generic information and pieced together my story, which, we can say, is 70 per cent imagination and 30 per cent history. For facts, I referred to Abul Fazl’s Ain-i-Akbari and Akbar Namah, Badayuni’s Muntakhab al-Tawarikh, works like Jadunath Sarkar’s A History of Jaipur, The Kachhawas Under Akbar and a whole lot of Rajput history. I also met professors like Irfan Habib sahab and Shireen Moosvi of the Aligarh Muslim University, who are top-notch historians on Akbar. I met the Jaipur royalty and discussed the script with them before starting the film because Jodhaa was from that family.  

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