Rang De Basanti

''Rang De Basanti'' () is a 2006 Indian drama film written, produced and directed by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, and co-written by Rensil D'Silva. The film features an ensemble cast consisting of Aamir Khan, Siddharth, R. Madhavan, Atul Kulkarni, Soha Ali Khan, Sharman Joshi, Kunal Kapoor and British actress Alice Patten. It follows a British film student traveling to India to document the story of five freedom fighters of the Indian revolutionary movement. She befriends and casts five young men in the film, which inspires them to fight against the corruption of their own government.

Shot primarily in New Delhi, The film was released globally on 20 January 2006. Upon release, the film broke all opening box office records in India, becoming the country's highest-grossing film in its opening weekend and holding the highest opening-day collections for a Hindi film. It received critical acclaim, winning the National Film Award for Best Popular Film, and being nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2007 BAFTA Awards.

''Rang De Basanti'' was chosen as India's official entry for the Golden Globe Awards and the Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film category, though it did not ultimately yield a nomination for either award. A. R. Rahman's soundtrack, which earned positive reviews, had two of its tracks considered for an Academy Award nomination.

Plot

In London, film student Sue McKinley finds the diary of her grandfather James, who served as a Colonel for the British Raj in the 1930s. James oversaw the capture and execution of five Indian freedom fighters - Chandrasekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh, Shivaram Rajguru, Ashfaqulla Khan, and Ram Prasad Bismil - and has written in his diary about his admiration for their revolutionary spirit in spite of working for the British Empire.

Inspired by the revolutionaries' story, Sue decides to make a film on them and travels to India, where she searches for actors with the help of her friend Sonia, an international studies student at the University of Delhi. Amid a string of unsuccessful auditions, Sue meets Sonia's friends: Daljit "DJ" Singh, Karan Singhania, Sukhi Ram and Aslam Khan. She immediately decides to cast them in her film, with DJ as Chandra Shekhar Azad, Karan Singhania as Bhagat Singh, Aslam Khan as Ashfaqulla Khan, and Sukhi Ram as Shivaram Rajguru.

DJ, Aslam, Sukhi and the spendthrift Karan, who is the son of political businessman Rajnath Singhania, are carefree and cynical about their futures, and while they easily get along with Sue, they remain uninterested in working on a film expressing patriotism towards India. Tensions arise when Sue casts the boys' rival, the right-wing party activist Laxman Pandey as Bismil. However, over the course of working on the film, Pandey grows closer to the others. Sue begins a relationship with DJ.

The group becomes devastated when their friend Ajay Singh Rathod, a flight lieutenant in the Indian Air Force and Sonia's fiancé, is killed when his MiG-21 jet malfunctions and crashes. The government attributes the accident to pilot error and closes the case, but Sonia and her friends refuse to accept the official explanation, remembering Ajay as a skilled pilot who died while steering the plane away from crashing into a populous city. They learn that the corrupt Defense Minister, Shastri, signed a contract importing cheap parts for MiG-21 aircraft in exchange for a personal favor. Karan, however, is severely jolted when he realizes that Rajnath was involved in orchestrating the deal.

Galvanized against the corruption of the government by their efforts working on the film, the group organizes a peaceful protest at the India Gate war memorial, but the police arrive and violently break up the demonstration with Ajay's mother going into a coma. Laxman realizes that his senior party official, Raghuvir Mishra, was in league with the government officials ordered the police to stop the protest and becomes disillusioned with his own party. Inspired by the revolutionaries, the group decides to take action themselves and they assassinate Shastri to avenge Ajay's death, while Karan confronts and murders Rajnath.

The media reports that Shastri was killed by terrorists and celebrates him as a martyr. The group decides to publicly clarify their intent behind the assassination, and take over the All India Radio station after evacuating its employees and alerting Karan's friend Rahul, who works there and is live at the moment. Karan goes on air and calls out the defense ministry's corruption to the public. The police arrive at the station under instructions to kill them. Sukhi is shot dead, while Aslam and Laxman are killed by a grenade and DJ is severely injured. DJ reunites with Karan in the recording room as the latter finishes his public statement, and the two of them get killed together.

News of the boys' death enrages the public, spurring a wave of demonstrations against the Indian government. Ajay's mother awakes from her coma. The film ends with Sue describing the personal impact of meeting the boys and working on the film, while the deceased boys are seen in an afterlife-like state meeting a young Bhagat Singh in his family garden.

Cast

* Aamir Khan as Daljit "DJ" Singh / Chandra Shekhar Azad (dual role)
* Siddharth as Karan Singhania / Bhagat Singh (dual role)
* R. Madhavan as Flight Lt. Ajay Singh Rathod
* Sharman Joshi as Sukhi Ram / Shivaram Rajguru (dual role)
* Atul Kulkarni as Lakshman Pandey / Ram Prasad Bismil (dual role)
* Kunal Kapoor as Aslam Khan / Ashfaqullah Khan (dual role)
* Soha Ali Khan as Sonia Chaudhary / Durgawati Devi (dual role)
* Alice Patten as Sue McKinley
* Mohan Agashe as Defence Minister V. K. Shastri
* Waheeda Rehman as Mrs. Aishwarya Rathod, Ajay's mother
* Chandan Roy Sanyal as Batukeshwar Dutt
* Badrul Islam as Ravi Das / Sukhdev Thapar
* Kirron Kher as Mitro Kaur, DJ's mother
* Om Puri as Amanullah Khan, Aslam's father
* Anupam Kher as Rajnath Singhania, Karan's father
* Steven Mackintosh as James McKinley, Sue's grandfather
* Lekh Tandon as DJ's grandfather
* K. K. Raina as Raghuvir Mishra
* Cyrus Sahukar as Rahul Das (Radio Jockey)
* Tushar Pandey as an Auditioner (special appearance)
* Abhishek Banerjee as an Auditioner (special appearance)

Production

Development

Rakeysh Mehra took seven years to research and develop the story, including three to write the script. While some raised doubts about his morale following the failure of his last film, '' Aks'', at the box office, he retorted by saying that it would not affect him at all. He added that not only did his storytelling technique improve, but past mistakes had helped him improve his filmmaking abilities.

Rakeysh said the following in a scriptwriter's conference conducted by the Film Writers Association in the year 2008, "I was making a documentary called ''Mamooli Ram'', on Amul, the milk revolution with Kamalesh Pandey. We were sitting in a small hotel room in Nanded, drinking. We started singing songs, and we both realized we liked similar songs. And so Rang De Basanti was born. He was angry with the system, I was helpless with the system. We wanted to do so much. But we really can't do anything and it was born out of anger. He wrote a story called ''Ahuti'', meaning sacrifice. ''Ahuti'' was about the armed revolution in India, between the years 1919 and 1931. It started with Ashfaqullah Khan, Ramprasad Bismil, Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, went on to Chandrashekhar Azad and so on. We had this amazing screenplay called ''Ahuti'', which we had also termed as ''The Young Guns of India'', which started with a train robbery, Azad on a horse and so on. I said, "let's do ''The Young Guns of India''". We were going to go on the floor, and suddenly there were a couple of film on Bhagat Singh made. But they came and went. Not because they were good or bad films, not because they were written badly or not written so badly. I'm not being judgmental about them. And this is very important: because they did not reflect the sentiment of today's time. Nobody in the audience could identify with something which was past. It wasn't that there wasn't an idea of patriotism in us, but it was sleeping somewhere. And you had to kind of relate to it in today's world. So a couple of bottles of vodka again, and three days later, with a couple of vodkas down, Kamlesh Ji comes up with 'You know what, I think I've cracked it'."

Development of ''Rang De Basanti'' originated with several ideas Mehra came up with early on but later dropped or greatly evolved into new directions. One of these involved a group of youngsters who worked in an automobile repair shop, while another was about the life of Bhagat Singh, Indian freedom revolutionary. During this time, he personally conducted a survey with a group of youths in New Delhi and Mumbai about the Indian revolutionaries he was planning on depicting, which indicated that many of youngsters did not recognise the names of some of the most prominent revolutionaries. This led Mehra to believe that the sense of "patriotism had blurred" in the young generation. Because of this, he dropped his original plans in favour of a new idea in which a British documentary filmmaker on a visit to India realizes that the local "kids are more Western than her". This new story, which eventually formed the basis for ''Rang De Basantis script, was influenced by Mehra's upbringing, youth and experiences over the years, including his desire to join the Indian Air Force while in school, as well as his recollections of listening to Independence Day speeches and watching patriotic films such as ''Mother India''. Although Mehra denies that the film is autobiographical, he confessed that the character sketches were loosely inspired by himself and his friends.

Mehra approached Angad Paul after having been impressed with his production work on British films ''Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels'' and '' Snatch''. Paul, who was keen to work in India, liked Mehra's story and agreed to produce the film, bringing with him David Reid and Adam Bohling as executive producers. Despite having no prior knowledge of Hindi cinema, Reid and Bohling's belief in the script was strong enough that they each were willing to work at half their normal rate. While it was originally suggested that language versions of the film would be made concurrently, in English (as ''Paint it Yellow'') and Hindi, the plans for an English version were dropped during development. Mehra believed that English-language version felt alien and that "one can tell a film in just one language". After the English version was dropped, the writer Kamlesh Pandey was brought on board to pen the first draft of ''Rang De Basanti'' in Hindi, marking the start of his screenwriting career. Thereafter Mehra and co-writer Rensil D'Silva took over the script, working on it for about two years. Prasoon Joshi, the film's lyricist, worked on the dialogue, marking his foray into screenwriting.

''Rang De Basanti'' suffered a significant setback when one of the initial producers ultimately failed to contribute any funds towards it; the shortfall left production looking uncertain just two months away from the beginning of principal photography. However, after Aamir Khan agreed to act in the film, Mehra approached Ronnie Screwvala of UTV Motion Pictures with the script. Screwvala, who supported Mehra from the beginning of the production, had faith in the film, reasoning that in historical films, "the treatment and execution is very different from regular masala fare", and that such films "find favour with the audience owing to their elaborate sets and period costumes". The budget was reported as Rs. 250 million (approximately US$5.5 million), and, despite going a little over the initially planned budget, Mehra did not have any serious disagreements with UTV.

The film's script originally had a different climax, originally showing the protagonists on the run. The climax was rewritten, as the idea of them running away wasn't liked mutually, as they should have the last stand resembling that of Bhagat Singh. Years earlier, Khan had written his own story with the climax in a radio station, which he adapted for the climax of ''Rang De Basanti''.

Casting

Aamir Khan agreed to act in ''Rang De Basanti'' immediately after reading Mehra's script. Mehra described his character as a simple man with a strong sense of integrity and dignity. Khan, who would turn 40 during the shoot, lost about with a strict diet and exercise regime to more convincingly depict a man in his late twenties. Atul Kulkarni and Kunal Kapoor were publicly attached to the film by the time it was officially announced; Kapoor had been the assistant director to Mehra during the filming of ''Aks'' and was already familiar with the material Mehra had been developing. Mehra gave Kulkarni biographies of Ram Prasad Bismil as preparation, including Bismil's autobiography. Early rumours indicated that actors Arjun Rampal and Arjan Bajwa would be amongst the male leads, but these roles ultimately were filled by Siddharth and Sharman Joshi. Mehra and Khan also offered Siddharth's role to Hrithik Roshan, but he declined in favour of ''Krrish.''

''Rang De Basanti'' marked Siddharth's Bollywood debut, following on the success of his Telugu film ''Nuvvostanante Nenoddantana''. Having previously worked as an assistant director, Siddharth praised Mehra as being "by far the most ambitious technical filmmaker in Indian cinema". R. Madhavan, despite being a well-known Tamil cinema actor, took the smaller role of a fighter aircraft pilot because he was convinced of the film's potential and wanted to be a part of it. Om Puri appears in a two-scene cameo as Aslam's staunch Muslim father.

Soha Ali Khan and Alice Patten immediately became Mehra's clear favourites for each of their roles during casting, which led to Patten flying to Mumbai for a screen test with the entire cast. She was informed that she had won the documentary filmmaker role after she returned home to the United Kingdom. Soha, portraying the pilot's fiancée, was filming Rituparna Ghosh's ''Antarmahal'' and David Dhawan's comedy ''Shaadi No. 1'' concurrently with her work in ''Rang De Basanti''. In particular, the demands of her emotional scenes in ''Antarmahal'' often left her exhausted, thus requiring "a lot of personal overhauling" to ensure that her performance in ''Rang De Basanti'' was unaffected. During filming, reports indicated that co-stars Siddharth and Soha had become romantically involved with each other. Alongside the two lead actresses, Lakh Tandon played the role of Aamir's Grand Father and Kirron Kher played the mother of Khan's character.

Filming

The film, which was shot in New Delhi, Mumbai, Rajasthan and Punjab, was officially launched at a hotel on 1 February 2005. When shooting began, Mehra made an announcement to his crew saying that they would enjoy their holiday only in July.

Instead of filming at the actual locations from the script, other locations were selected for picturisation. One such scene is where Soha Ali Khan is filmed at the India Habitat Center that masquerades as the University of Delhi. On similar lines, New Delhi's Modern School at Barakhamba Road served as the location for all the scenes pertinent to All India Radio station, which is shown to be stormed by the youngsters in the film. The Delhi Tourism department was happy to encourage filming in the city if it helped promote tourism, though any filming near India Gate was prohibited due to the ensuing bureaucratic paperwork. Similar issues with bureaucracy were faced by Mehra while filming at the Jaipur Fort. To use a historical location for filming, they had to seek permissions of seven officials ranging from the local police to the Archaeological Survey of India office. Nahargarh Fort, which oversees the city of Jaipur, was another such historical location where one of the songs was filmed. Besides these locations, the filming was also done at Amritsar's Harmandir Sahib Gurudwara. For Aamir Khan, a Muslim, it was for the first time that he was playing a North Indian Punjabi character and it took him some time to get the right dialect and diction. While speaking about his experience of visiting the Gurudwara for the first time, he said:

It's one of the most peaceful places I've been to. As you enter the place there's a certain serenity that surrounds you. I really enjoyed being there. The first shot we took was of our feet entering the water just as you pass the doorway of the temple. The water was cold but it was great!

Once the locations were finalised, the team of Lovleen Bains and Arjun Bhasin was chosen for designing the look of ''Rang De Basanti''. Bhasin had previously worked on '' Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love'' (1996) and ''Dil Chahta Hai'' (2001), the latter of which featured Aamir Khan, and he was referred to Mehra by Khan due to their previous association. Since the film's plot focused on men in their late twenties, Bhasin designed their look accordingly. Although he was responsible for Khan's rebellious look, Sharman Joshi's (who played ''Sukhi'') lovable persona or Madhavan's dignified appearance, Bhasin credited Bains for her major contributions to the film. Khan's hair was styled by Avan Contractor, who came up with soft curls falling over Khan's forehead. This new look, which took Contractor one hour to come up with, surprised the audience at the film's launch.

In post-production, the visual effects were handled by Tata Elxsi's Visual Computing Labs. The military aircraft they created was so realistic that the Indian Air Force called to check the producer's permission of using an actual MiG-21.

Censorship

On ''Rang De Basantis release, the Film Certification Board of India sought the views of Indian Defence Ministry due to scenes that depicted the use of MiG-21 fighter aircraft. But after viewing the movie the ministry found no problems and allowed UTV to release the film. There were also some issues with Animal Welfare Board of India due to the banned Indian horse race.

Music

The soundtrack of ''Rang De Basanti'', which was released by Sony BMG, featured music composed by A. R. Rahman and lyrics penned by Prasoon Joshi and Blaaze, an India-based rapper. From the film's announcement in April 2005, Rahman was slated to compose the music. In a press conference with pop singer Nelly Furtado, he said that she was to originally have featured on the soundtrack, although this was ultimately prevented from happening due to a change in producers and other factors. Aamir Khan, with his knowledge of Hindi and Urdu