Why a sequel to Zubeidaa can never be made: because truth, memory, and myth blur irreversibly when royalty, cinema, and unresolved grief intertwine in the shadows of Rajasthan’s grandeur. Khalid Mohamed writes…

Zubeidaa sequel, royal family mystery, unsolved murder case, Indian cinema scripts, ghost stories Rajasthan, and OTT series rejection—these keywords trace the emotional and investigative journey behind Rutba, an unmade film haunted by controversy, legacy, and silence. Set against the backdrop of Jodhpur's regal past and the tragic death of Hukam Singh, this narrative explores the intersection of history, grief, and storytelling in Indian film. Despite interest from filmmakers, OTT platforms, and industry insiders, the project faltered under the weight of political hesitations, spiritual lore, and a changing entertainment landscape.

This is the story of Rutba, a semi-fictionalised sequel to the script of Zubeidaa, which continues to glare at me from the computer files. It was almost made, then scrapped, then re-started and re-scrapped. Perhaps for its controversial content or because of valid reasons which are beyond my comprehension—some of which can only be guesstimates.

Rao Raja Hukam Singh aka Tutu Banna – son of Maharaja Hanwant Singh of Jodhpur and Zubeida Begum – was killed at the age of 31 in 1981. The fatal incident has remained shrouded in mystery for 43 years. Constant pleas in articles on websites and posts on social media to reopen the case have been futile. An individual’s pleas are not enough.

Hukam Singh was my younger half-brother by two years and stepbrother to Gaj Singh, the current (erstwhile) Maharaja of Jodhpur. A sizeable section of the grand Umaid Bhavan palace in the Rajasthan city was converted decades ago into a multi-star hotel. In the new millennium, the venue has hosted widely publicised destination weddings of celebrities, domestic and international.

Revisiting Zubeidaa – And Its Afterlife
In 2000, Shyam Benegal had helmed Zubeidaa – the extra ‘a’ was added by the film’s producer Farouq Rattonsey for numerological reasons – scripted by me as a tribute to her memory, narrating an excerpt from the life of my biological mother.

There I thought, I had at least laid to rest the grief churning within me. It hadn’t. I still can’t endure the rumours and canards which abound even in these supposedly rational times. Claims popping up from a variety of sources, including hotel guests, state that Zubeida’s ‘ghost’ haunts a sealed suite of the Umaid Bhavan. Others have located her ‘ghost’ to Mehrangarh Fort where she had stayed for a while—although Wikipedia ascribes that to hearsay: either the custom of ‘sati’ would be practised there, or it was a curse of an old man buried there and assorted paranormal incidents. Some more hallucinate—what else can I say?—that Zubeida paces up and down in a girls’ school during the late hours of the night, apparitions which appear to be influenced by similar visuals and songs, Aayega Aaanewala (Mahal, 1949) and Kahin Deep Kahin Dil (Bees Saal Baad).

As for Hukam Singh’s killing—described by several accounts as beheading with a sword—when he got abusive with a group of local people he was drinking with, has had to be tolerated with stoicism. As also the investigations commenting that he died in his sleep on a charpoy. As a brother, I have had to grin and bear it. Being incorrigibly ‘filmi’, flashbacks keep recurring to Sunny Deol screaming on empty streets in Rajkumar Santoshi’s Ghayal (1990), “Mere bhai ko maar daala (‘Someone has killed my brother.’)”

No One Killed Jessica – A Spark of Hope
Rajkumar Gupta’s film No One Killed Jessica (2011), a dramatically licensed recreation of the killing in 1999 of Jessica Lall, has been an impetus to find out why, why, why. It’s common knowledge that eventually Jessica’s sister Sabrina secured justice with the support of a TV journalist enacted powerfully by Vidya Balan and Rani Mukherjee respectively.

A public protest had led to a reappraisal of the case—in which Jessica, who was serving as a celebrity bartender at an elite party on April 30, 1999, on the outskirts of Delhi, was shot to death by Manu Sharma. Reportedly, Jessica had refused to serve drinks to Manu Sharma and two of his friends after the bar was closed for the night.
Sabrina Lall, at the age of 53, passed away in 2011 after a prolonged illness. She had done right by Jessica before her end.

Immeasurably inspired by the film, my quest and trips to Delhi and Rajasthan were resumed to find a journalist who could use his or her connections to reopen the Hukam Singh murder case. Or did No One Kill Hukam? Joke. The journalists were essentially newbies since I didn’t wish to intrude on my friend Rajdeep Sardesai or the ever-upright Ravish Kumar. As for Tutu Banna’s friends and acquaintances right from their days at the Mayo College, Ajmer, they had backed off without so much as half an excuse.

A woman, earnest as she may be, wrote to me on Facebook that she was Zubeida reborn, a reincarnation. Through a police officer, she attempted to meet me. I didn’t, couldn’t. That would have been futile in re-probing the fatal brutality of Tutu Banna. A friend, a student in Jodhpur, on Facebook, insatiably curious to know more about Zubeida and Hukam Singh—keeps texting me updates which are inadvertently painful. Efforts are on, according to the empathiser, to remove Zubeida’s name from the ‘royalty records and archives’.

Writing Rutba – A Script in Search of a Home
Meanwhile, I had been writing and rewriting a script titled Rutba, meaning Status or Prestige. Hukam Singh had been warring for his rightful status in the former Jodhpur royal family. As I could gauge from his few visits to Mumbai, he could be alternately hot-tempered and composed.

The first draft of Rutba was handed over to Shyam Benegal. Unfortunately, as he admitted, he was suffering from flashes of amnesia. Besides, his plate was already full with an adaptation of the Spanish opera Carmen, which didn’t fructify for lack of financiers. Unstymied, Benegal sir went on to helm Welcome to Sajjanpur, the TV series Samvidhan on the Constitution of India, Well Done Abba, and his swan song Mujib: The Making of a Nation, before he passed away this year at the age of 90.

Either Benegal sir had been too polite to reject the Zubeidaa sequel or it could be languishing in the heap of files on his office desk. I did ask for his opinion about the script but he had responded blankly. It would have been patently rude to badger him beyond one attempt.
Filmmakers I knew, be it Karan Johar, Nikhil Advani, Farhan Akhtar or Ram Gopal Varma, I steered clear of, afraid that a rejection slip would spoil our personal equation.

Suddenly I read in the trade papers that Akshay Kumar was about to start on a project called Rutba. I retorted on Twitter and Facebook that the title had been already announced and registered. To his infinite credit, the next day Akshay Kumar stated on media outlets that he wasn’t making any film with the title. Thank you.

Out of the warmest blue, then, producer-director Vikram Bhatt, whom I had met once in Mauritius, besides carrying a weekly column by him in Hindustan Times as the editor of its Entertainment supplement HT Café. When I resigned from the newspaper for various reasons—essentially the overburdensome task of bringing out 32 pages of Café daily—Vikram gave up his column too, the concluding one being excessively flattering about me. Frankly, I was chuffed; at least someone out there in the strictly quid pro quo grid of our mainstream cinema was listening.

A Ray of Hope with Vikram Bhatt
At a meeting in Vikram Bhatt’s Andheri-Oshiwara office, he heard out the synopsis of the Rutba script and was more than keen to produce it within a tight financial budget which would recover its costs and hopefully bring in a residue of profits. At that time, he was involved in quite a few projects of the thriller-horror genre, including one by himself and others by a variety of directors. Actor-turned-director Deepak Tijori is one name I can recall.

Assigned an assistant director, Leena Tandon, I began cleaning up the script, completing the dialogue in Hindi, and working on the rough scheme of the shot-takings. Moreover, Leena and I flew to Rajasthan to recce for locations. Posters by the seasoned art director R. Varman had also been designed for a final okay.

Despite his excessive workload, Vikram Bhatt rewrote the dialogue since he felt mine were too “SoBo” and lacked punchlines. Auditions were conducted with newcomers at his office, one of them with Esha Gupta. I can’t vouch for this, but one of the staffers of Vikram Bhatt also mentioned Ranveer Singh as one of the auditioned.

Dissatisfied with the auditions by male actors, Vikram suggested the names of Rajniesh Duggal and Vir Das, who were already committed to his company by contract. Not an ideal sleight of casting, but I was determined to film Hukam Singh’s story in any which way.
To spare you the details, nearly three years whizzed by in wasteful pre-production. Two days before the shoot was to commence, I had no costume designer, set decorator, or a cinematographer I could invest my trust in. I was befuddled. Vikram, professionally, told me that we would have to wait a while before his under-production films were released. My jaw dropped, I quit. This was without any acrimony; Vikram Bhatt had been extremely courteous all along and his office staffers were consistently friendly.

Plus, during those years I had edited a start-up website, Asli Baat, founded by him. I had been paid more than fairly. The parting with Bhatt took just a sentence or two, and he would occasionally keep in touch with text messages about his personal poems and a novel.

OTT Temptations and Missed Chances
It’s more than likely that he had had second thoughts on Rutba, which he was entitled to. After all, he wasn’t making a vanity project for me. As his uncle Mahesh Bhatt told me on an airflight, “He’s a good chap. He must have realised that your film wouldn’t be commercial enough.”

What me worry? That I did. OTT was in full bloom then. Top executive officers of the premium streaming channels were contacting me for a project discussion over lunch. That began with two executives of Star at the Gallops restaurant. They were excited, or so it seemed, but the script would have to be extended into a 10-part episode at least. Any payment for that? No, not right now. They asked for the script in its current shape, adding that a MOI would prevent me from discussing the Rutba script with any financier or channel. Sorry, no can do.

Within a fortnight, a meeting with a representative of MXPlayer materialised at a coffee shop of the Phoenix Mall. The representative was charm personified, a beautiful woman who stressed, “I’m a feminist and have liked your scripts.” She declined Rutba politely and asked if I could rewrite Mammo into a series with more characters and incidents. The school-going protagonist of Mammo, I could change to a senior college student. The topic of Mammo is so relevant and timeless, she smiled. I came up with that age-old excuse, “I’ll get back to you.” I didn’t, neither did she.

A Final Attempt – And a Farewell
Next and the last: Guneet Monga, Oscar-winning producer of the documentary The Elephant Whisperers (2022), called for a discussion at the Mustard restaurant in Atria Mall. She came right to the point: impressed by the series Feud about the arch-rivalry between yesteryear’s Hollywood actresses, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, could we do something along those lines in a desi format? We would pitch it to Ekta Kapoor with me as ‘creative consultant’. At meetings, I would just have to go aye aye, nay nay. According to her, I’d been in Bollywood circles for donkey’s years; I must know of a similar face-off between two heroines. No, I didn’t have the foggiest about an extremist feud between female or male stars here, none that I was aware of.

Our conversation went around in giddy circles. Idea? How about an avatar of a top actress like Hema Malini whose ugly duckling-like sister grooms herself covertly into a sophisticated Zeenat Aman and takes over her crown and boyfriend? Oh boy. My Rutba was fading into the deepest sunset.

No more series, no more film producers, I had failed miserably. At most, I could fictionalise Hukam Singh’s killing into a novel, which I did, slogging on it for two years. The genders of protagonists and the location of the dramaturgy were altered beyond recognition. The manuscript, titled The Imperfect Prince, was accepted by a prestigious publishing group in Delhi some two years ago.

That’s it. And if I’ve vented here today, it’s with an iota of optimism for other aspiring filmmakers and scriptwriters: the film and series production rate has been rising nationwide. Bollywood has been sidetracked to a degree by the whopping success of the stories conceptualised, directed and enacted by a whole new league of talents from South India.

Unlike me, if you’re aspiring to join the ranks of ‘creators’, don’t give up hope. Your day will come. Vis-à-vis the sequel of Zubeidaa, though, some stories are such that they will remain untold.