Chandigarh 12 march 2025: Imagine a film production so vast and huge that it disrupts the wedding industry of a bustling metropolis like Mumbai. Sounds outlandish, doesn’t it? But this happened exactly as written a little over two decades ago, and the ‘culprit’ was Sanjay Leela Bhansali. The filmmaker’s magnum opus – Devdas – actually caused hundreds of weddings in Mumbai to be postponed in 2001.
Devdas was an adaptation of Sarat Chandra’s novel of the same name, starring Shah Rukh Khan in the titular role, alongside Aishwarya Rai and Madhuri Dixit. Binod Pradhan, the film’s cinematographer, recently spoke to Friday Talkies, about his experience of working on the film and the production’s massive scale.
How Devdas got weddings postponed in Mumbai
Pradhan spoke about the almost 1-kilometre-long set of Chandramukhi’s kotha, built in Mumbai, and said, “My entourage of assistants, we went to see how the set was being constructed, and we were shocked. We were wondering how to light it. I took a round of the set from the lakeside and told my assistant to put a 100-watt bulb at the end. That’s how we started lighting the set. They say that I used all the available generators in Mumbai for that set.”
Pradhan added that many weddings got postponed due to his ‘monopoly’ over the generators. “It was such a big area that we had to use so many generators. They used to say Binod ji caused so many weddings to be cancelled because there were no generators to be used in the weddings,” the cinematographer revealed.
All about Bhansali’s Devdas
Devdas was made on a budget of ₹50 crore and was the most expensive Indian film made at that point in time. After a premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002, it was released worldwide in July 2002. The film was a blockbuster, earning ₹168 crore worldwide.
Summary: A Shah Rukh Khan blockbuster led to hundreds of postponed weddings in Mumbai and triggered an unexpected shortage across the city.