Yash Tonk and Amrita Raichand in Shobha Somnath Ki

The show: One of the costliest ever sets for an Indian TV serial has come up on nine acres on the Bombay-Ahmedabad highway in Maharashtra. Here shooting is in progress for Shobha Somnath Ki, Zee TV’s period drama centred around the girl Shobha who stood tall in the face of a fiery invasion by Mahmud of Ghaznavi, who plundered the Somnath temple time and again. Shobha’s story is part of local lore in Gujarat. The show (Monday to Friday 8pm) premiered on Zee TV on June 20.

The set: Set designer Jayant Deshmukh has already spent more than Rs 7 crore in erecting a 110-ft Somnath temple, Tripursundari temple and the palace of Pravash Patan. “The village of Bharuch is still to come up,” says the man who has worked in 32 films including Maqbool, Aarakshan and Tere Naam, while showing t2 around. “We have been researching this project for close to three years now. There was only one image of the ancient Somnath temple before it was destroyed, which we accessed from the temple museum. We have used common sense to include elements like a chest for daan samagri in the sanctum sanctorum and gems on the temple walls as there must have been some treasure which Mahmud came to loot.”

The temple

The palace

Five hundred-plus artisans have been toiling for over a year and a half. “Unlike in films, for television every corner of the set has to be detailed so that shooting can take place anywhere.”

The costume: Says Nidhi Yasha, an NIFT Delhi graduate who is in charge of the costumes for Shobha Somnath Ki: “For Mahmud and his soldiers, there has to be Afghan influence. So we have designed exclusive jewellery for them. Circa 1025 AD, the culture there was tribal-like. They used chunky stones without finish as they wore at random whatever they looted.”

The sketching started in July 2010 after research. For the Indian women, Nidhi took some cinematic liberties. “Blouses were a Muslim influence indicative of the purdah culture and started only after Mahmud’s invasion. Our country was hot, so women wore translucent clothes on the upper body and covered their chest with jewellery. Our sculptures show women only in adhovastra. But of course, such dresses are a no-no for television viewing,” she smiles. So ghagras and cholis have been introduced as they are integral to later-day Gujarati culture. “The fabric and jewellery are so heavy that in this heat the women must be abusing me behind my back.”

She will also have to dress three armies, with costumes for 200 men from Ghaznavi, 100 men from Patan and 100 more from Bharuch being stitched. “We have already spent Rs 80 lakh on costumes. For the soldiers, we still have to cheat using computer graphics for cloning as the illusion has to be of 1,49,000, which was the size of Mahmud’s army.”

The bottomline: Sukesh Motwani, head, fiction programming, Zee TV, said: “We’ve gone the extra mile to ensure that we get the nuances right. Over a year of meticulous research on the set, costumes, jewellery, dialects and traditions has resulted in an authentic re-creation of the royal lifestyles of Bharuch and Patan from over 10 centuries ago. The show will be shot on a RED camera with post-modern production techniques.”