‘You can see the Amar Chitra Katha in my Akbar and Jodhaa’

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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