Indian cinema is known for some epic historical films like Nausherwan-E-Adil, Mughal-e-Azam to Baahubali. While some films manage to find success at the box office, some fail pretty badly. One such colossal flop was Dharmendra and Hema Malini’s Razia Sultan. The biggest flop in Bollywood history, this film took the entire film industry down, putting it in debt. Kamal Amrohi, after delivering genre-defining films like Mahal and Pakeezah, started working on a biopic of Delhi Sultanate’s only female ruler – Razia Sultan. The film went on floors in 1975. The film witnessed numerous cast changes before its release in 1983. Made on a budget of Rs 10 crore, the film was the most expensive Indian film at that time. Despite this, the film fell flat at the box office, earning only Rs 2 crore worldwide. The film emerged as one of the biggest loss-making ventures of the Bollywood industry. While many disliked the slow pace of the film, a few others found Urdu used in the film too difficult to understand. Simply put, Razia Sultan was a box office disaster.
Following the failure of the film, many financiers, distributors, and other investors were compelled to bear the huge losses caused due to it. The scale of the film led a significant portion of the film industry to suffer. An article was published claiming that the film’s box office failure affected the industry. Kamal Amrohi, at the same time, said that he would bear all the losses, not the producers. The filmmaker also said that the long production period of the film provided jobs for several technicians for years.
Despite the criticism, Kamal Amrohi always defended Razia Sultan saying that every classic including Mughal E Azam, Pakeezah, and Sholay were termed flops and the critics did not approve of Razia Sultan due to the lack of usual masala. After the film, Amrohi took an extended break and started working on Aakhri Mughal. It was a biopic of Bahadur Shah Zafar. However, after he died in 1993, the script of the film went missing.
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