Jahanara Bhargava

Jahanara Bhargava was practically raised on stage and sets—where theatre lights doubled as nightlights and ad film scripts as bedtime stories. By fifteen, she was already in the thick of it, assisting her father, the iconic adman and storyteller Bugs Bhargava Krishna, on ad shoots.After graduating from design school, she sharpened her pen as a copywriter at Ogilvy Mumbai, before taking a bold leap into cinema as an assistant director to Amole Gupte on feature films. Jahanara’s love for storytelling only deepened, leading her to co-found Ten Years Younger Productions with long-time collaborator Seema Mohapatra.

Together, they’ve crafted compelling and genre-bending narratives—Barot House, Posham Pa, Nail Polish for Zee5, and Dil Dosti Dilemma for Amazon Prime Video. Their slate also includes the independently funded Pune Highway, which they co-produced, and now, they’re in post-production on their boldest venture yet: the experimental film Pigeon. But the script doesn’t end there. A voracious reader and literary enthusiast, Jahanara is turning the page to a new chapter—launching a publishing house with Seema. She recently edited Murder in the Time of Jazz, a crime novel penned by none other than Bugs himself.

Whether it’s the stage, screen, or spine of a book—Jahanara doesn’t just tell stories. She lives them.