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This memorable scene is from the classic 1949 film Mahal, which was the debut of Madhubala, one of the legendary actresses of Bollywood .

Madhubala and playback singer Lata Mangeshkar have started her career from the film Mahal (1949). Ashok Kumar was in the lead role of a lawyer Hari Shankar, who was suffering from a nervous breakdown. Hari decides to retire to the abandoned ancestral old Moghul palace known as the Shabnam Mahal.

All the things were OK before seeing a portrait of an ancestor on the wall. It looks same as he was and in his stressed situation of mind, he begins to think carefully about the concept of belief that a dead person’s spirit returns to life in another body.

The housekeeper of the house tells him the tragedy of two lovers. After it housekeeper leaves, but Hari continues to see the painting in the candle light. Then he hears an light and delicate voice “Oh My beloved, He will come”.

He follows the voice, and sees a ghost who was a beauty walking down the stairs through a rooftop swing and a boat in the lake.

Special about it:

Firstly, it was very thrilling to see 17 years old beautiful Madhubala with much maturity first time on screen. Another thing is that Lataji was singing with perfect pitch in a scale like the angels. Then Ashok Kumar looks so real as he is really acting at all. And all of this was due to debuted director Kamal Amrohi.

Whole movie has a poetic structure, and full of the logical, the psychological, the emotional and the metaphysical effects. The scene was full of gloomy corridors, ghostly images and shadows, fog and mist, demons and the Evil Eye.

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