Tansen - Jackie Shroff's dream character

For Jackie Shroff, enacting the character of great Mughal musician Mia Tansen on the silver screen is a dream.

For Jackie Shroff, enacting the character of great Mughal musician Mia Tansen on the silver screen is a dream.

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The 55-year-old actor said that the film has to be made by a director like Sanjay Leela Bhansali. "If you ever ask me what my all-time dream character is, my answer will be Mia Tansen, the great composer-musician in Hindustani classical music," Shroff told PTI.

"And ideally the film should be directed by a person like Bhansali who is a great director and has a marvellous sense of classical music," he said.

Shroff's role of Chunilal in Bhansali's big budget Hindi film Devdas based on Bengali novelist Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay's universally-loved classic had earned handsome praise.

For an extraordinary vocalist like Tansen, known as one of the

Navaratnas

in the court of Mughal emperor Akbar, Bhansali would have been the right person to fully bring out the nuances of such a character, Shroff, who came to the city for a role in Nitish Roy's Bengali movie Jole Jangale, said.

In 1943, K L Saigal had immortalised the legendary vocalist by lending his voice to the character in a film directed by Jayant Desai.

"Like Nitish, a good friend of mine, had offered me this role of a rich businessman passionate about collecting wild animals. I liked the novelty of the character. I couldn't turn him down and the shoot was over in two days. For me the request of a friend like Nitish will always matter," he said.