Rang De Basanti

About the film

Rang De Basanti (transl. Paint Me In The Color of Spring) is a 2006 Indian Hindi-language coming of age drama film written, directed, and co-produced by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra. The film stars an ensemble cast of Aamir Khan, Siddharth (in his Hindi debut), Sharman Joshi, Kunal Kapoor, Atul Kulkarni, Soha Ali Khan, and Alice Patten (in her Hindi debut), with R. Madhavan in a guest appearance. Waheeda Rehman, Anupam Kher, Kirron Kher, and Om Puri appear in supporting roles.

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 injustices of their present-day government.

Plot

In London, film student Sue McKinley finds the diary of her grandfather James, who served as a colonel in the British Army in the 1930s. James oversaw the capture and execution of the three freedom fighters – Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, and Rajguru – at the Lahore Jail and has written in his diary about his admiration for their revolutionary spirit, in spite of his being an officer of the British Empire.

Inspired by the revolutionaries' story, Sue decides to make a film on them. She travels to India, where she searches for actors with the help of her local associate Sonia, a student of international studies at the University of Delhi. Following 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 politically well-connected businessman Rajnath Singhania, are at once carefree and cynical about their futures. While they get along well with Sue, they remain uninterested in working on a film expressing patriotism towards India. Tensions arise when Sue casts the boys' rival, conservative party activist Laxman Pandey, as Ram Prasad Bismil. However, over the course of working on the film, Pandey grows closer to the others. Sue begins a relationship with DJ.

Production

Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra spent seven years researching and developing 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 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 th…

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 Basanti's 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.

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