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Ratnakar Phadke (Art Director)
C. B. More (Associate Art Director)
 A challenging job always brings out the best in an artist. When Producer – Director Akbar Khan assigned us the art direction of his magnum opus 'Taj Mahal - an eternal love story', instinctively we knew that we will reach the pinnacle of our career. Although we had more than a hundred films to our credit, we were still aspiring to get the best of our capabilities explored. Fortunately, our destiny fulfilled our ambition through Producer – Director Akbar Khan and his film 'Taj Mahal'; therefore we put our heart and soul in our job. We went to libraries and referred several books on that period. After that the art director team along with Akbar Khan visited the Taj Mahal, Fatehpur Sikri, Red Fort and other Mughal monuments in India, absorbing the nuances and collecting samples.
 By dint of an exhaustive research and fertile imagination, the ambience of that period was amazingly recreated. There is tremendous creativity involved even in replication. We could have used yellow marble following the sample of Taj Mahal but we have used white keeping in mind that in the film, the monument is newly built. We have also used tricks using our knowledge of colours and materials. For example every royal chamber had exquisitely embroidered chiks. Instead of using the impractical option of embroidering all the chiks, we painted the designs in a way that gave the embroidered look when photographed. Several such ideas led to the making of these sets. We used thermacol, mixed it with fevicol and other ingredients and made it look like marble. The sets showing the abode in Agra Palace where Shah Jahan was detained, the bedrooms of Noor Jahan and Jahan Ara, Emperor Jahangir’s court, the heroine’s chamber and the Meena Bazar are, in particular, breath-takingly exquisite.
 We made miniatures of the interiors of Taj Mahal and the monuments in its construction stages. On camera, they will look life-size. We have also made a mini-Taj Mahal for a specific scene requirement. There is this sequence where Shah Jahan is imprisoned by Aurangzeb for seven years. In those times, Shah Jahan would keep looking at the architectural marvel from his chamber. Our job was to construct a mini Taj to help the actor and cameraman understand the perspective. The difficult part was calculating the distance between Agra fort and Taj Mahal as that would determine the size of Taj as seen by Shah Jahan. The size we constructed is exactly the size, as Shah Jahan would have seen.
We had the privilege of not only designing and erecting the sets but also of the selection and collection of the property and the artifacts for the decor, which tremendously contributed to the recreation of the backdrop of this memorable film.
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