“People know Yakut Mahal as a theatre. For our family, it feels more like a living memory of Hyderabad.
Long before multiplexes and online bookings, cinema here was an occasion. Families dressed up for evening shows, friends gathered outside ticket counters, and entire neighbourhoods celebrated the release of a big film. Yakut Mahal stood at the centre of that era.
The theatre’s story began in the late 1930s, when Nawab Jafar Nawaz Jung built it with remarkable vision. Inside its projection room are Peerless Magnarc high-intensity carbon-arc projectors, manufactured in Chicago by the J. E. Maculey Manufacturing Company in 1927. They arrived in Hyderabad decades ago and, even today, remain part of the theatre’s soul. These machines have survived black-and-white cinema, the arrival of talkies, the colour-film revolution, and generations of changing audiences. Every scratch on them carries a piece of cinematic history.
I often think the culture of Hyderabad did not only live in palaces or old streets. It also lived inside theatres like this one. Yakut Mahal witnessed audiences laugh, whistle, cry, and celebrate together for decades. People queued up for Dilip Kumar’s Devdas, Raj Kapoor classics, Dharmendra’s action dramas, NTR and ANR’s legendary films, and later the Amitabh Bachchan wave that transformed Indian cinema. During films like Sholay, Zanjeer and Deewaar, the crowd outside would spill far beyond the entrance gates.
In the early 2000s, my father, Mohd Abdul Salaam Sharfan Sahab, purchased Yakut Mahal. For him, it was never just property. He believed old theatres carried the emotional history of a city and deserved to survive. Even while renovating the space, he protected its original identity instead of modernising it beyond recognition.
Today, my brother and I continue to run the theatre. Truthfully, operating a single-screen cinema in today’s time is not easy. But for us, this is no longer just business. It is preservation.
Many historic theatres disappeared as multiplexes expanded across the city. Yet Yakut Mahal endured because people never completely let go of it.”
— M. A Lateef Sharfan
Proprietor, Yakut Mahal, Hyderabad