27 September,2026 09:08 AM IST | Mumbai | Komal RJ Panchal
Meena Kumari in Pakeezah
Midway through our conversation about restoring Pakeezah, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur's phone rang. "Mr [Amitabh] Bachchan is calling me," he said, stepping away for a moment, for Bachchan to compliment him. It was a small, fitting reminder of how much Kamal Amrohi's 1972 classic still means to people, more than 50 years on.
For Dungarpur, this one was personal. He grew up watching Pakeezah - his grandmother loved it - and had wanted to restore it for years. That finally became possible after he met Amrohi's children, Tajdar and Rukhsar, and, through their son Bilal, convinced the family to let him take it on. Nearly two years later, he calls it one of the most fulfilling restorations of his career.
The first roadblock was simple but severe: there was no original camera negative. What survived was third-generation material - copies of copies, each one having bled away detail. "The original camera negative is the most important, it's called the mother for that reason," Dungarpur explains. "It's the material that came directly out of the camera." He compares it to the difference between a high-resolution photo and a version that's been screenshotted and reshared a dozen times over. "If you have the source, you have the origin."
With nothing but degraded copies to work from, the team went almost frame by frame, pulling out whatever information they could. He'd faced a similar problem restoring Sholay (1975) - but Pakeezah's tangled colour history made this one harder still.
Pakeezah actually began life as a black-and-white film before the switch to colour, eventually shot on Eastman Kodak stock in CinemaScope. But decades on, the surviving prints couldn't be trusted to show what those colours actually were. The clearest case was Meena Kumari's costume in Inhi Logon - the prints had faded so badly that nobody could agree what shade it was even supposed to be.
Rather than guess, the team went back to old photographs and worked with the Amrohi family to match the dress to its real, original tones. For Dungarpur, that's the heart of restoration: not repainting a film in whatever colours look good now, but doing the research to get back to what audiences actually saw on release.
Part of what makes Pakeezah so tricky is that it didn't get made in one continuous stretch - the production dragged on for roughly 14 years. It started in black and white, including the earliest version of Inhi Logon, before shifting to colour partway through. The delay even reshaped the cast: Ashok Kumar, originally attached to the film, had aged out of his part by the time shooting resumed, and Raj Kumar stepped in as the lead. Restoring the film meant preserving something that had physically passed through several different eras of Indian cinema before it ever reached a screen - which is part of why Dungarpur sees it as a film that shaped generations after it, from Sanjay Leela Bhansali onward.
For Dungarpur, restoration isn't about making an old film look new. It's about keeping what made the film feel the way it did - grain included. "Grain is like the bloodstream in your body," he says. Strip it all out chasing a spotless digital image, and you lose something essential. That matters more now that audiences are used to the over-sharpened look of streaming platforms. "What does your eye see when you open your eyes, and what does your Amazon or Netflix show you? What they show isn't what you actually see. There's a difference." Celluloid, he says, came closer to how the eye naturally perceives things - so the goal with Pakeezah wasn't to make it look freshly shot today, but to bring back its lost detail and colour while keeping its original texture intact.
That same philosophy shapes how Dungarpur thinks about AI in restoration. He doesn't dismiss it outright, but he's wary of calling something "restoration" when it's really recreation.
His analogy: if a piece of the Taj Mahal's original marble falls off, the instinct should be to track down the real marble first - not swap in a nicer-looking replacement just because it's available. "There are shops outside selling even better marble than that. We could do that too. It won't match."
If the original element still exists, he says, use it. If it's truly gone, AI might have a role to play - but the line between restoring and recreating has to stay clear. "There's a lot of manual work in film preservation right now. Maybe AI evolves into something more. Whether that makes things better, we'll have to see."
He points to the runaway success of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey - shot on celluloid, no digital effects, no AI - as evidence people haven't lost their appetite for the real thing. He sees the same pull in how audiences are responding to restored classics like Sholay at Film Heritage Foundation screenings. "There must be a reason people want to connect back to their roots."
International première
The restored 4K version of the 1972 classic Pakeezah is set to have its world première at the Festival Lumière in Lyon, France, in October, followed by a screening at the BFI London Film Festival in the United Kingdom.
The original negative is gone
Pakeezah's original camera negative - the closest surviving source to what was filmed - was unavailable for the restoration. Dungarpur's team had to work with much poorer, third-generation material.
That "pink" costume may not have been pink
The surviving prints had faded so severely that the colour of Meena Kumari's costume in "Inhi Logon" was difficult to establish. The team referred to photographs and consulted the Amrohi family to recreate the original colour tones.
14 years, two leading men
Pakeezah took around 14 years to make. It began as a black-and-white film and later switched to colour. During the prolonged production, Ashok Kumar aged considerably, and Raj Kumar eventually came on board as the male lead.
