Mohenjo Daro is a 2016 Indian Hindi-language period action-adventure filmMohenjo Daro: Box Office Mojo written and directed by Ashutosh Gowariker. It was produced by Siddharth Roy Kapur for UTV Motion Pictures and The Walt Disney Company India and Sunita Gowariker for Ashutosh Gowariker Productions (AGPPL), and stars Hrithik Roshan and Pooja Hegde. Set in the ancient Indus Valley civilisation city of Mohenjo-daro, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is loosely based on Ali Baba's Sindhi novel "Mohan Jo Daro". This film marked Pooja Hegde's debut in Hindi cinema.
Set in 2016 BCE at the height of the Indus Valley civilisation, the story follows a farmer Sarman (Hrithik Roshan), who travels to the city of Mohenjo-daro and falls in love with a high-status woman (Pooja Hegde), and who must then challenge the city's elite, and fight against overwhelming odds to save their civilisation.
Gowariker took over three years to research and develop the script, working closely with archaeologists to ensure authenticity in the representation of his fictional story. The film was shot in Bhuj and Mumbai, with brief schedules in Bhedaghat (Jabalpur) and Thane. The score and soundtrack are composed by A. R. Rahman with lyrics penned by Javed Akhtar. The film was released worldwide on 12 August 2016. The film received mixed reviews and grossed worldwide, underperforming at the box office.
Mohenjo Daro marks the last film production of UTV Motion Pictures, as two Disney releases, Dangal and Jagga Jasoos, became producer Kapur's final projects under the Disney·UTV brand before his contract with the company lapsed on 1 January 2017; the non-Hindi versions of both films were nonetheless presented by the banner, while Jagga Jasoos faced delays before its release in mid-July 2017.
Plot Sarman (Hrithik Roshan), a young man from the village of Amri, lost his parents at a young age. Sarman kills a crocodile that has been terrorizing his village's fishermen and is hailed as a hero. He asks his uncle, Durjan (Nitish Bharadwaj), to allow him to go to Mohenjo Daro to trade their family's goods, but his uncle refuses. Sarman attempts to sneak away to the city at night with his friend Hojo (Umang Vyas) but is caught by Durjan, who relents and allows both friends to go. He gives Sarman a seal that contains an inscription of a unicorn that Sarman often sees in his dreams, suggesting he uses it only once in a life-or-death situation.
Arriving in Mohenjo Daro, Sarman learns that the city is ruled by the tyrannical Senate Chief Maham (Kabir Bedi) and his wicked son Moonja (Arunoday Singh). He also learns that the unicorn he sees in his dreams is the symbol of the city, and feels the city is oddly familiar to him. While Sarman is trading, Maham proposes to impose an additional tax on the farmers so that the city may grow, but Sarman leads the farmers to oppose the taxes so that their families don't starve to death. Sarman gains access to the upper city by showing his uncle's amulet and meets Chaani (Pooja Hegde), the daughter of the head priest (Manish Choudhary) of Mohenjo Daro. Sarman is enchanted by Chaani's beauty and charm and falls in love with her. Upon meeting, the head priest seems to recognise Sarman. Chaani reveals to Sarman that she has been forcibly betrothed to Moonja. Maham discovers that Sarman and Chaani love each other and that Sarman is the leader of the tax revolt, so he challenges Sarman to fight Bakar and Zokar, his two champions. Sarman proposes that if he wins, Chaani will be released from her engagement, and Maham accepts the terms.
On the night before Sarman's clash with Bakar and Zokar, the head priest reveals to him how Maham was expelled from Harappa for illegal trade with the Sumerians. Maham entered Mohenjo Daro as a trader and quickly rose to become the trade chief. Maham had discovered that the mighty Sindhu River held vast gold deposits, so he decided to place a dam on the river and divert its course to mine the gold. The wise Senate Chief Srujan (Sharad Kelkar), who is revealed to be Sarman's father, opposed this, but Maham won the vote to build the dam. He had Srujan framed and arrested for hoarding gold. Chaani's father and Durjan – Sarman's uncle – were coerced by Maham to betray Srujan, and the former was killed later by Moonja – Maham's son. Maham then took Srujan's place as the new Senate Chief.
In the arena outside the city, Sarman faces the ferocious Tajik mountain cannibals Bakar and Zokhar. After a vicious battle, he kills one of the cannibals but spares the other, and the people of Mohenjo Daro rally even more behind him. Enraged, Maham urges Moonja to finish off Chaani and the priest. Moonja kills the priest, but Sarman saves Chaani and kills Moonja. Sarman exposes Maham's plan to use the gold from the Sindhu to enrich himself and to smuggle in weapons from the Sumerians. All the chiefs now stand against Maham. The people elect Sarman as the new chief, but Sarman suggests Mohenjo Daro needs a people's government, not a chief. With the arrival of a heavy thunderstorm, Sarman realises that the dam will burst and the Sindhu river will flood the city. He rallies the people to form a floating bridge by tying boats together.
They evacuate Mohenjo Daro and cross to the other side of the river. The dam collapses, and Maham, chained in the city square, drowns as the city is destroyed. The survivors migrate to another river, where Sarman sees the unicorn of his dreams and names the river Ganga.
Cast
Hrithik Roshan as Sarman, Chaani's love interest Pooja Hegde as Chaani, the Priest's daughter and Sarman's love interest Kabir Bedi as Maham, the Senate chief Arunoday Singh as Moonja, Maham's son Suhasini Mulay as Laashi, Maham's wife Nitish Bharadwaj as Durjan, Sarman's uncle Kishori Shahane as Bima, Sarman's aunt Manish Choudhary as The Priest, Chaani's father Narendra Jha as Jakhiro, the mad man and a former member of Srujan's council Shaji Chaudhary as Kulka Tufail Khan Rigoo as Ishme Dagan, the Sumerian Diganta Hazarika as Lothar, The Guard Naina Trivedi as Junu, Chaani's friend Shyraa Roy as Mohini Umang Vyas as Hojo, Sarman's friend Casey Frank as Bakar Mike Homik as Zokar
Cameo appearances Sharad Kelkar as Srujan, Sarman's late father Jividha Sharma as Rami, Sarman's late mother
Production
Development Director Ashutosh Gowariker was first inspired to make a film set in the ancient Indus Valley civilization when he was in Bhuj, Gujarat, scouting locations for his then-upcoming Lagaan (2001), and stumbled across the massive excavations in progress at the ruins of Dholavira: "I thought, My God! This is incredible! What happened to this civilisation, who were the people, how did they live?"
Several other film projects later, Gowariker announced the film Mohenjo Daro officially in February 2014 with A. R. Rahman composing the film score.
On taking up the project, in an interview, Gowariker stated that there was meagre and superficial information available about the people in that civilisation, particularly about their lifestyle, food, and feelings. The lack of information about the period troubled Gowariker, and he decided that whenever he would get a story to tell, it will be depicted circa 2500 BC at Mohenjo-daro which, despite being the largest city yet discovered from that ancient civilisation, is today known only by the name—which translates as "Mound of the Dead" in English—ascribed by the Sindhi locals to the site when its ruins were discovered in 1922. "Mohenjo Daro" is not only the official name associated with that ancient city by the United Nations (as a World Heritage Site since 1980), but also the only name associated with it by archaeologists and historians around the world, as well as the general public. Thus, regardless of the literal translation of the words, "Mohenjo Daro" was the chosen title for an audience to identify with the actual reference point despite the fact that the city would likely not been so named in ancient times.
On the film's plot, he was quoted as saying, "While the plot will follow Mohenjo-daro and the culture and the vibe of the ancient civilisation, it will largely centre on a love story." It took Gowariker three years to piece together a plot of the entire civilisation through various cities and weave a love story into it.
There were challenges in adapting for cinema a story based on a renowned ancient civilisation which had a written language not yet deciphered. Because modern science can not yet read anything the Indus Valley peoples wrote about themselves, any aspect about their civilisation has to be conjectured from what relics survive, by archaeologists working at their various ruins. As The Indian Express pointed out, "whatever we do know about Mohenjo-daro is perhaps as much an imagination of the historian as that of a filmmaker who depicts it in visual terms."
During Ashutosh Gowariker's research, he met "as many as seven archaeologists" who are closely involved in excavating sites and studying the Indus Valley civilisation. After much reading of published archaeological reports on his own, he brought in the American archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer of the University of Wisconsin–Madison,as officially credited in the film considered one of the world's leading experts on the subject, who had worked at the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro over 35 years. He brought together Kenoyer to a round-table discussion with five other expert archaeologists who have also been working on this topic for many years—P. Ajit Prasad, V. N. Prabakhar, K. Krishnan, Vasant Shinde, and R. S. Bisht, "who are all from the Archaeological Survey of India, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and other institutions, all with expertise in different aspects of the same civilisation." Gowariker had also personally revisited the archaeological dig at Dholavira in Gujarat.
Kenoyer later visited Bhuj to inspect and approve the sets and props built by the filmmakers.
The symbol ultimately selected for the film Mohenjo Daro recalls one of the earliest discovered artifacts from the initial archaeological excavations at the ruins of the ancient city itself: 'Another [seal] shows six animal heads—"unicorn", bison, antelope, tiger, the remaining two broken—radiating from a ring, and recalling a whorl on another seal from the same site with a single "unicorn" and five featureless lobes',The Indus Civilization, Sir Mortimer Wheeler (Cambridge University Press, 1953) p. 79, quoting E. Mackay, Early Indus Civilizations, 2nd ed. (London, 1948) the "unicorn" being one of the 'most frequently represented' animalsThe Indus Civilization, Sir Mortimer Wheeler (Cambridge University Press, 1953) pp. 76–77 portrayed among the 'over 1,200 of them [seals] [which] have been found at Mohenjo-daro alone'.The Indus Civilization, Sir Mortimer Wheeler (Cambridge University Press, 1953) p. 76 The filmmaker has chosen to identify the "unicorn" with his central character.