Mehboob Studio

Where it sits. Mehboob Studio occupies about 20,000 square yards — some 4.2 acres — on Hill Road in Bandra West, a short walk from Mount Mary's Church and roughly fifteen minutes from Bandra station. Five shooting stages and a recording studio sit behind a plain wall on a street otherwise given over to shops and traffic. It is the last of the classic Bombay studios still working inside the city proper rather than out in the northern suburbs, and its survival on some of the most valuable land in Mumbai is the single most surprising thing about it.

The story behind it. Mehboob Khan began directing in 1935 and founded Mehboob Productions in 1942, by which point he had made Anmol Ghadi (1946) and Andaz (1949) and needed a studio nearer the centre than Filmistan and Bombay Talkies, which were then far out at Goregaon and Malad. He bought the Bandra plot in 1951 from a local Bohra trader, Jaffer Bhai — part of it held a school run by a Parsi woman, the rest was vegetable farmland in what was still a quiet, marshy suburb before the reclamations. Construction finished in 1954, while Khan was shooting Amar with Dilip Kumar. Three years later he made Mother India here, the film that carried Indian cinema furthest abroad in its era: it won Best Film and Best Director at the Filmfare Awards and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Khan never matched it. His last production, Son of India, failed in 1962, and he died in 1964 at fifty-six, leaving his family in debt. The studio's fortunes recovered in the 1970s when the rights to Mother India reverted to the family and a recording studio was added.

Who worked here. Within a decade of opening, the studio was a first choice for directors and stars, in large part because so many of them lived in Bandra and could walk to work. Guru Dutt shot Kaagaz Ke Phool on these stages — the film about a director's decline whose celebrated shafts of light through a studio roof were made in exactly this kind of space. Dev Anand brought his Navketan productions here starting with Hum Dono and continuing through Guide, and kept an office in the complex for twenty years. Chetan Anand worked here; Manmohan Desai used the studio extensively through his run of 1970s hits. The stages have remained in demand into the present: the final schedule of Imtiaz Ali's Tamasha was shot at Mehboob Studio in August 2015, wrapping on 6 August. A fire gutted stages 1 and 2 in December 2000 and they were rebuilt.

Its second life. Since the 2000s the studio has doubled as one of Mumbai's better cultural venues, because a sound stage is essentially a large column-free hall with a grid overhead. Stage 3 hosted Anish Kapoor's first exhibition in India, from November 2010 to January 2011, the other half of which was shown at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. The Mahindra Blues Festival was staged here on 5–6 February 2011 and 11–12 February 2012 and has returned repeatedly since, and the complex regularly hosts fashion shows, award ceremonies and advertising shoots. In September 2007, for Mehboob Khan's birth centenary, India Post released a commemorative stamp at a function held at the studio.

What a visitor can realistically do. This is a working production facility, not a museum: there is no ticket office, no tour and no public access to the stages on an ordinary day. What draws people is the gate, the name in its old lettering, and the sense of standing outside the building where Mother India was made. The practical way in is an event — the Blues Festival in February is the most dependable, and exhibitions, concerts and public award shows are announced through the venue's own channels. The surrounding stretch of Bandra rewards the trip regardless: Mount Mary's Basilica up the hill, the Bandra Fort and Bandstand promenade with its view of the sea link, Chapel Road's murals and the Portuguese-era village lanes of Ranwar with their tiled roofs and outdoor staircases.

Getting there and timing. Bandra station on the Western line and the Bandra metro stop are both close; autorickshaws run to Hill Road from either. November to February is the right season, both for the weather and because the events calendar clusters there. Check what is on before travelling — outside an event, the visit is a five-minute stop on a longer Bandra walk rather than a destination in itself.