EXCLUSIVE: Batwara 1947 writer Asghar Wajahat on why Jis Lahore Nai Vekhya, O Jamya E Nai took 37 years to reach the screen; “Funding was a little difficult”
Some stories take years to reach the screen. Asghar Wajahat’s Jis Lahore Nai Vekhya, O Jamya E Nai took nearly four decades. Written in 1989, the acclaimed play has now been adapted into Rajkumar Santoshi’s Batwara 1947, with Sunny Deol in the lead and Shabana Azmi playing the elderly Hindu woman who refuses to leave her Lahore home. The long wait, however, had less to do with the story and more to do with the sheer scale of Santoshi’s cinematic vision. Speaking about why the screen adaptation took so long to materialise, Wajahat reveals that Santoshi was never interested in making a straightforward, modest adaptation of the play. The filmmaker wanted to recreate the world of Partition with a strong sense of realism. However, that ambition demanded substantial financial backing, which the project did not easily attract. “Santoshi wanted to make a film according to his own concept,” says the 80-year-old scholar, novelist and playwright to Bollywood Hungama. “His concept was that he rea...