Remembering Nitin Chandrakant Desai and the Worlds He Imagined for Devdas, Lagaan and More

To think of the films which ushered in the era of dizzying, scaled-up beauty in Hindi cinema — Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999), Lagaan (2001), Devdas (2002), Jodhaa Akbar (2008) — is to pay homage to the work of production designer Nitin Chandrakant Desai. 

Born in Dapoli in 1965, Desai grew up in Mulund, a quiet suburb on the outer reaches of Mumbai. His stamp, his labour, is forever writ on the history of image making in India. This is unsurprising, given his focus of study when he was a student at the J.J. School Of Art was photography. He had a sense of both how things look and how they ought to look under the snappy, archival gaze of a camera. 

In the Eighties, when he entered Film City, moved by the motion he could animate his photography with, he decided to switch to films and worked as an assistant to production designer Nitish Roy for Tamas (1987). There is a gorgeous greed in this transition — to have your imprint on 24 frames, every second — one that Desai had described as “sudden and magical”. 

Transforming Film City into Dalhousie for 1942: A Love Story

He also worked on Shyam Benegal’s Bharat Ek Khoj (1988) and Chandraprakash Dwivedi’s Chanakya (1991-2), through which he curried the confidence to take up projects independently. While his first feature film was Adhikari Brothers’ relatively unknown Bhookamp (1993), it was Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s 1942: A Love Story (1994) that pushed Desai into the mainstream. For the film he had to recreate parts of the hill station Dalhousie in the mushpit Film City in Mumbai, making a period-appropriate town square from scratch. While many industry-insiders considered it a huge risk to give a newcomer like Desai the reins of a Rs. 80 lakh-set, he proved them wrong, winning the Filmfare Award for Best Art Direction. This would begin his journey of bringing India to Mumbai’s Film City — Goa in Josh (2000), Kashmir in Mission Kashmir (2000), among many others. 

If Chopra lubricated his path to Bollywood, the director-producer’s then-assistant, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, would be the one who would usher Desai into the spotlight. Bhansali was conceiving his debut film Khamoshi: The Musical (1996) and insisted that Desai do the production design for it. Desai was moved by his conviction: “Woh experiment bohut karte the. Nana Patekar ki khasiyat thi unki dialogues. Sanjay ne use goongha bana diya (He used to experiment a lot. Nana Patekar’s strength was his dialogue delivery and Sanjay made him dumb in this film).”

The World of Khamoshi

Together, Desai and Bhansali were charting the visual possibilities of excess in Hindi cinema. Though Khamoshi was about a poor family, they lived in a mansion by the sea. Everything from the crosshatched chicken coop to the aged walls to the lighthouse was sketched into being by Desai. When I spoke to Desai two years ago, he chuckled about this lighthouse, remembering a group of foreigners who had seen it from a distance and, thinking it was real, insisted on climbing it. Small victories for the inconspicuous labour behind the camera.  

Bhansali and Desai’s visions both aligned and supported each other. When Khamoshi did not fly commercially, they, along with the editor and Bhansali’s sister Bela Segal, went from theatre to theatre to cut the film on the spot because some audiences complained it was too long, too slow. 

It was with Bhansali’s second film Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999) that Desai’s maximalist flair became apparent, through elements like the marigold acrylic floor in ‘Dholi Taro’, in the middle of all that water; or the deep blue backdrop of ‘Nimbooda’, with a striking contrast of hot red and lime yellow. The vertiginous beauty and texture of the sets were so palpably real that a French production company called Desai after the film’s release to find out where the film had been shot. Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam announced not just Bhansali’s and Desai’s glittering intentions, but the glittering realisation of these intentions.

When accepting his award for Best Director at the Filmfare Award, Bhansali thanked Desai for “[teaching] me how to think big”. They were osmotically spiraling towards grander and grander projects.

Devdas and the Grandeur of Scale

This maximalist flair that Desai brought to Bhansali’s craft blossomed to fruition on their next film together — Devdas. Desai, remembering how things had to be scaled up for the film, had laughed at the sheer absurdity of the enterprise. Devdas was a love triangle between the modest Paro (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan), her landowning neighbour Devdas (Shah Rukh Khan) and the courtesan Chandramukhi (Madhuri Dixit).

Paro’s home in the film was made of 1.2 lakh pieces of stained glass and cost Rs 3 crore. Since Devdas was higher on the caste and class ladder, his haveli had to be four times bigger, and so they brought in scaffolding with over 128 columns — the first time such an endeavour was undertaken in Hindi cinema.

These were two of six sets — the most expensive being Chandramukhi’s kotha and the temple city blooming around it, made at the cost of Rs. 12 crore. It was so large, it had its own horizon and you could walk two kilometres through it. Doomed and glamorous stories of the making of the film buzzed like tabloid gossip, and members of the film fraternity would regularly show up just to see the set. When Dixit saw the space, she gasped and told Desai, “Kitna khoobsoorat hai. Lagta hai ab chaar guna rehearsal karni padegi mujhe to justify this space (How beautiful! I’ll have to rehearse four times as much to justify this space).”

The then-Maharashtra Governor P.C. Alexander even requested the director of Film City to retain Chandramukhi’s kotha as a permanent tourist spot. Additional space had to be acquired at Film City just to park the generators used while shooting Devdas. There is even a comical anecdote flung out there — marriages in Mumbai suffered because most of the generators were put to use in Film City for the night shoots. 

This grandness had its own abrasive hurdles. When it was time to shoot the climax of Devdas, the producer of the film was in jail and spending needed to be curtailed. The scene has Khan barely holding onto his last breath as Aishwarya Rai Bachchan runs towards him for a good four minutes, floating through the unending corridors of her mansion. Since the budget only permitted one corridor, first they painted it off-white. Then, overnight, they got it painted blue with Ajanta-Ellora motifs to make it look grander. And then the following night, it was painted red. Such was Desai’s nimble acumen. To be grand and to look grand are two different things — and Desai had mastered the illusion of the latter. 

The Master of Illusions

In 2005, he founded ND Studios, a film and television production studio in Karjat, where imposing films were shot, like Mangal Pandey: The Rising (2005), Traffic Signal (2007) and Prem Ratan Dhan Payo (2015) — for which he had to make a palace of mirrors which took him six-and-a-half months, using nearly 10 million glass pieces, installed by craftsmen from Udaipur. Even stretches of Jodhaa Akbar (2008) were shot here after permissions to shoot the historical film in Agra were denied. Desai’s dream was to make a Universal Studios in Mumbai. A meticulously recreated Amer Fort, with inch-by-inch replicas of the Agra Fort, the Diwan-e-Aam, Diwan-e-Khas, Jodha Mahal, and a fully landscaped Mughal Gardens were concocted on this barren land. 

Parallel to this, he pushed himself into international projects, working as an art director for the 1994 live-action adaptation of The Jungle Book. He worked on Mira Nair’s Kama Sutra (1998), Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke (1999), and even the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire (2008), for which he recreated — to the minutest possible detail — the set of the television show Kaun Banega Crorepati. 

Back home, over the length of his illustrious career, he garnered four National Awards — for Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar (1999), Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (2000), Lagaan (2002), and Devdas (2003). His career, an ever-spiralling desire for grandness, came to a halt on August 2, 2023, when his body was found in the same studio he had built ground-up — a death by suicide. 

In the midst of all this celebration and mourning, I am reminded of something Desai told me towards the end of our conversation. It is true that his work involves the repeated creation and destruction of things. He seems to have made peace with this — that what remains of his artistry will never be tangible, just a mere image on celluloid. And yet, he remembered, movingly, that moment when Bhansali and Rai Bachchan insisted on walking through the set of Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, postponing its dismantling by one more day. Watching them soak up his creation, spending the whole day there, he tried to conjure that feeling of imminent collapse for me: “Ek voh tha na, ki yeh ab tootne vala hai (There was that sense that all this will fall apart).”