khuda aur mohabbat

 T

hirty nine weeks into an unimaginably successful run and twenty four hours after its final episode aired, Khuda Aur Mohabbat 3 had broken all viewership records. The drama serial’s first episode, which aired on February 12 this year, amassed 54 million views on YouTube and every subsequent episode turned out to be just as massive. KAM3’s popularity has been unwavering, with fans and viewers both finding themselves fixated to the intense love saga between Farhad and Mahi, played by Feroze Khan and Iqra Aziz.

Written by Hashim Nadeem, who also penned the first two successful seasons, and directed by Syed Wajahat Hussain, the story plays with themes of love and spirituality and is hugely set at the shrines and havelis of Multan and Bahawalpur. “Each season of Khuda Aur Mohabbat focuses on a different place of worship,” Hashim Nadeem said in an informal conversation with Instep. “The first two focused on the mosque, this one on shrines, which are very important to the people of this region.”

While love and spirituality are two subjects strong enough to hook an audience across the globe, there has to be much more to the drama’s unprecedented popularity. Far from flawless, and the story did get its fair share of critique (whether it was the disconnect some people felt with the intensity of love Farhad professed to have for Mahi and its relevance to spirituality or the fact that the drama dragged in the second half), it did nevertheless hit the ball out of the park for popularity. Khuda Aur Mohabbat’s TRPs broke all records and its viewership on YouTube has crossed 2 billion, an unimaginable feat for any drama serial.

The story is fairly simple and revolves around a boy, Farhad, who falls madly in love with a young girl, Mahi, who he sees at a wedding he is assigned odd jobs at. Farhad comes from a lower middle class family in Lahore whereas Mahi belongs to a powerful and privileged Pir gharana from Bahawalpur. When it comes to love stories, the social disparity angle is always a popular hook. The more challenging the love, the more people desire a fairy tale ending. Farhad and Mahi’s love, therefore, is doomed from the get-go, but there is another twist in the tale. While Farhad immediately falls in love, Mahi doesn’t; he mistakes Mahi’s kindness and friendship as love and sets off with mixed signals. When he follows her to Bahawalpur, she brushes him off and brutally rejects him, breaking his heart and shattering his soul.

What follows is Farhad’s journey through heartbreak and solace at the shrine, where he finds peace and wisdom under the guidance of the wise old Pir Saeen (played by Noor ul Hassan). A series of confusing incidents convince Farhad’s friends and family as well as Mahi that he’s dead. Mahi is wed to a highly suitable boy, only to be widowed on the night of her wedding, in an attack executed by her brother’s political opponents. During her period of mourning, she realizes where her heart truly is. With both her true love and her husband dead, she resigns to a life of misery.

There is, of course, more to the story than one can outline but what can be quantified is Khuda Aur Mohabbat’s mammoth success.

Abdullah Kadwani, producer of the drama and founder of 7th Sky Entertainment, expressed his views on the serial in an exclusive chat with Instep.

“Khuda Aur Mohabbat was filmed during the Corona epidemic, which for us was a very difficult task,” he said. “The serial was created in 2020 and aired in 2021. It was made like a serial film, but it was very difficult to create. 7th Sky Entertainment maintained its tradition of providing high quality content to viewers and that is why Khuda Aur Mohabbat has emerged as a new benchmark in the history of drama. The serial’s more than two billion views on digital media is a major achievement for Geo Television Network and the entertainment industry. We saw how every episode was watched by over 10 million people within the first 10 hours.