Long before Shah Rukh Khan's 2023 blockbuster Pathaan, the late filmmaker Yash Chopra had planned a film with a strikingly similar title — "Pathan" — more than four decades earlier, only to shelve it.

The detail was revealed by director-producer Umesh Mehra on DD Urdu's chat show "Guftgoo," hosted by Kiran Juneja. According to Mehra, the project was conceived in the early 1980s amid Indo-Russian co-production talks, with a large planned cast, but was abandoned when conflict between Afghanistan and Russia made it unviable.

Mehra said he still holds the original script, and that the title rights now sit with Yash Raj Films — the studio Yash Chopra founded. A companion project from that era, a Gulzar-associated "Mirza Ghalib" film, was dropped around the same time.

Nearly forty years on, it was YRF that finally brought a Pathaan to the screen with Shah Rukh Khan in the lead — a full-circle moment for a name the studio had once set aside.