This Shah Rukh Khan film forced hundreds of weddings in Mumbai to be postponed, caused a weird city-wide shortage

A Shah Rukh Khan film, touted as the most expensive made in India at that time, caused the wedding industry in Mumbai take a hit.

Updated on: Mar 12, 2025, 12:17:26 IST

By Abhimanyu Mathur

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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. (Also read: Shah Rukh Khan and his family will move out of Mannat soon. Here's why)

Shah Rukh Khan's Devdas was one of his career's biggest hits.

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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Abhimanyu Mathur
Abhimanyu Mathur is Deputy Editor, Entertainment at Hindustan Times. With almost 15 years of experience in writing about everything from films and TV shows to cricket matches and elections, he inhales and exhales pop culture and news. Currently, he watches movies and TV shows and talks to celebrities for a living, while occasionally writing about them as well. A journalism graduate of Delhi College of Arts and Commerce, Delhi University, Abhimanyu began his career with Hindustan Times at the age of 20, swapping classrooms for newsrooms at an early age. He began his journey in the early days of digital journalism, later switching to the madness of print journalism. Work has led him to far off places like Japan and Jordan, as well as to the interiors of Haryana and the Indo-Pak border. He dabbled in city reporting in places like Meerut, Gurgaon, and Delhi, covered the Olympics and Cricket World Cups, before finding his calling in entertainment and lifestyle during the pandemic. A Rotten Tomatoes Certified Film Critic, he is equally at home covering stories on ground as he is interviewing celebrities and studios, and sometimes prefers to shepherd teams in delivering traffic through the day. Even as his role has evolved from reporter to supervisor over the years, his first love remains writing (and of late, talking on camera). With a good understanding of cinema and its trends, and a keen eye for detail, he continues to spark conversations around showbiz for readers around the world.Read More

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