Rare Mughal-E-Azam poster acquired by Film Archives body

National Film Archive of India (NFAI) has acquired one of the rarest posters – one as big as six separate sheets – of Dilip Kumar's milestone movie Mughal-E-Azam. This news might help bring a smile to the faces of his fans, who are praying for his recovery, as Kumar is currently undergoing treatment at Mumbai's Lilavati Hospital.

The poster is spread over six sheets with a dimension of 10 x 5 ft and is an offset print of a hand-painted poster. The self-explanatory poster depicts the entire movie in itself. It has a picture of the Sheesh Mahal set and the paintings of the war sequence.

The highlight of the painting are the portraits of Kumar as Salim and Kapoor as Akbar in an emotional scene just before they set out for war. Another highlight is the chained portrait of Anarkali, which was played by Madhubala.

The movie, which released in 1960 and became a milestone in the history of Indian films, is known for Kumar's and Prithviraj Kapoor's outstanding performances.

This is not the only poster the NFAI has acquired. In fact, in a major acquisition, the NFAI has acquired total 2,500 posters of Indian cinema. Out of total posters acquired, nearly 1,500 posters are of Hindi movies while the others are of Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu movies. Some of the posters are as old as 1942.

Apart from Mughal-E-Azam, the other highlight of the acquisition is a collection of Amitabh Bachchan movie posters. This includes Sanjog, which was released in 1971, as well as Zamaanat, which remained unreleased.

Along with these collections, the NFAI has also acquired posters of movies like Roti (1942), Shree Ganesh (1962) and Veer Abhimanyu (1965). Speaking about the collection, Prakash Magdum, director of NFAI, said, "This is one of the biggest acquisitions and is a significant one. We are appealing film lovers to provide us with films and film-related material that can be preserved."