With Zubeidaa, Benegal made his first venture into the ballyhoo of Bollywood, casting Karisma Kapoor in a musical lavishly wrapped around the story of a Muslim woman in early-fifties Bombay whose desperate aspiration to be an actress leads to tragedy. This Mumbai melodrama is bracketed by the real-life quest of screenwriter Khalid Mohammed to discover the truth about his mother, Zubeidaa, whose fleeting screen presence exists only in a fragment of the elusive film Banjaran. After a broken marriage and a short-lived success as a film star, Zubeidaa falls in love with a Hindu prince (Manoj Bajpai) from Rajasthan, only to discover that the regal life has its terribly restrictive decorum. A. R. Rahman's music (bolstered by Javed Akhtar's lyrics) airily punctuates the drama, charting Zubeidaa's vertiginous whirl of conflicted emotions. All this well-polished passion is backlit by an extraordinary historical moment as India's princely states are being dismantled and the exercise of royal sovereignty brought down to the ground.