as a "pioneer in every sense". They praised its cinematography and music, adding that Rama Rao "proved his calibre as a method actor". In their 2015 book, Transcultural Negotiations of Gender: Studies in (Be)longing, Saugata Bhaduri and Indrani Mukherjee opined that Mayabazar "both breaks and perpetuates the stereotypes for masculine and feminine bhavas by making a single female actor Savitri perform both the set of emotions". Colourisation Mayabazar was the first colourised Telugu film, with its audio remastered from monaural to a DTS 5.1-channel system. In late November 2007 a Hyderabad company, Goldstone Technologies, acquired world negative rights to 14 Telugu films produced by Vijaya Vauhini Studios, including that of Mayabazar, to digitally remaster them in colour. C. Jagan Mohan of Goldstone Technologies' experience at All India Radio gave him the idea of converting the film's audio to DTS. The audio was restored, sound effects remastered, distortion eliminated, and the volume of the vocals increased, and musicians re-recorded the film's background music on seven tracks instead of one. A team of 165 people worked for eight months; Mohan used 180,000 shades of colour to create a tone similar to human skin, and employed 16.7-million-shade colour technology. Apart from colouring clothing and jewellery, Mohan said that the song "Vivaha Bhojanambu" and the wedding scene in the climax were the most challenging sequences, and that the food should look more realistic after colourisation. In the wedding scene, Mohan explained: "Each and every rose petal strewn on the pathway had to be coloured. Further, each frame in the climax has many actors. In technical parlance, we refer to a set of colours used for skin tone, clothes, jewelry and so on as different masks. If five or six masks were used on one character, the presence of many actors in a frame called for that much more work." Three songs ("Bhali Bhali Deva", "Vinnavamma Yashodha" and "Choopulu Kalisina Subha Vela") and many poems were cut from the remastered colour version to maintain print quality. Re-release With an estimated digitalisation budget of 7.5 crore (valued at about US$1.7 million in 2010), Mayabazar was released in colour on 30 January 2010 in 45 Andhra Pradesh theatres. The colourised version was distributed by R. B. Choudary under his production banner, Super Good Films. Nageswara Rao, Gummadi Venkateswara Rao, Mikkilineni Radhakrishna Murthy and Sita were the only cast members still alive for the release of the digitally