Subhash K Jha looks again at Shimit Amin’s pioneering sports film Chak De India, the Shah Rukh Khan film from 2007, in this fabulous installment of This Day That Year. We also hear from the director about the casting and making of Chak De India!
First things first. Chak De India is an outright winner. A triumph of the spirit. And of craftsmanship. While director Shimit (Ab Tak Chappan) Amin has crafted a film with immense staying power , and exception integrity and gusto, the thought-process behind the endearing endeavour harks back to a series of well-crafted Hollywood films about the team spirit, the low-spirited team and the burnt-out disgraced and exiled coach who motivates the team and galvanizes his own dormant spirit into a wide-alert status .
Dig in. It’s all there. And yet writer Jaideep Sahni takes the expected tale to heights great expectations with an endearing tone of expression. Shimit Amin turns the triumph-of-spirit formula inside-out. While narrating a fairly predictable story of a down-and-out all-girls’ hockey team’s journey into global triumph, the director brings into play a kind of abiding charisma that’s born out of a sincere passion for a neglected sport and that even more-neglected spirit of collective aspirations.
To call Chak De India the Lagaan of the hockey field would be rather facile and foolish, and akin to calling Attenborough’s Gandhi the Schindler’s List of the Gandhian era. A certain fleet of formulism runs across all films about seeming losers who triumph on the field against all cynicism. But beyond that elementary reading there ticks a substantial art of gold in this tale of molten motivations .
The question of the Indian Muslim’s identity in the face of an often-suspicious majority surfaces early in the clenched narration, as Kabir Khan (Shah Rukh) is accused of selling-out a crucial game of hockey to Pakistan.
Uh-oh, you tell yourself, not one of those harangue-helmed polemic- possessed pulpit-preening exercises in bleeding -hearts cinema!
Shimit and his writer Jaideep Sahni don’t let you down. Every grim layer of ‘message’ is toned down and polished up to highlight and accentuate the cinematic quality without losing out on sheer relevance of the moment and its after-shocks.
The ragged bunch of girls from all over the country gather under one umbrella to give the cynics a run for their money. You watch them with a distant curiosity which soon merges into a keen interest in their progress report.
The game never looks contrived. And the green-room chat is filled with punctuations of immense mirth . Happily, the film never lapses into a verbose rendering of the awakening conscience.
By the time the director and his grim protagonist get a grip over the girls’ athletic abilities and their blind spots we are completely hooked, watching not the socio-political issues but a film that pushes the envelope by taking the Formula Film on a jaunty journey across a craggy hockey field.
The dialogues are quite often the stuff bumper stickers are made of. “There’s room for only one goonda in this team, and that’s me,” the snarling coach tells the team bully Bindiya Naik (played with instinctive strength by Shilpa Shukla).
The drama gathers momentum in a rush of warm feelings from the interactive tensions between pairs from the team , for instance the vain Marathi player Preeti Sabarwal (Sagarika Ghatge) and the diminutive mirchi from Haryana Komal Chautala (Chitrashi Rawat)…or for that matter the flavourful frisson between the ostracized Kabir and the hockey federation which collectively sneers at his aspirations for the all-girls’ hockey team.
Of course you know it’s all going to come together in a magnificent whoosh of athletic splendour at the end. Still, you are completely hooked…enraptured and in total empathy with the girls as they head for Melbourne to bring back the gold medal for a a neglected game. By the time the girls get into bordered white saris you are smiling protectively at these children from the third world.
Idealistic and dreamy? You bet! Isn’t that what cinema was always meant to be? Chak De India takes us back to the joyous days of watching movies where the heroes began by being unfairly cut down to size and then progressed to being warriors of the dark-light fighting their way out of the negativity that surrounds their dreams.
Several sequences stand out for their glorious grip over the grammar of cinema. The sequence at Macdonald’s where the hockey team beats up a gang of eve-teasers is so deliciously fulfilling, you want to applaud the writer and director for manoeuvring the gender war into an urbane recreational zone without trivializing the larger issues involved.
In terms of the tight but unobtrusive technique applied to Shimit Amin’s redolent narration Chak De India qualifies as one of the finest sports-based dramas in living memory, on a par with the poignant sportsmanship of Chariots Of Fire, if only there was a theme music to match the other film.
The editing is never cruel to the sportive spirit. We get to watch the girls playing hockey for as long as required without being subjected to redundant visual hammering .
Finally though, the film is a triumph for Shah Rukh Khan. Stripped of the lover-boy image, unadorned by the romantic props that have given his superstarry image that supple longevity and power, Shah Rukh stares straight into his character Kabir’s conscience and isn’t afraid to mirror some uncomfortable home truths about how we treat our minorities, be it the Muslim Indian, the publicly active woman(watch the arrogant cricket player smirk at his hockey- playing fiancee’s dreams) or just the female gender trying to be on a par with the opposite sex.
The power-driven images of gender equation , cultural dominance and athletic discrimination come , not from a bravura need to make an issue-based film but from the far more basic need to tell a story that had to be told.
The girls on the team remain with you after their on-field victory because there’s a far larger victory navigating their karma to a final hurrah.
Beyond the tale of the triumph of the spirit, there lies the triumph of the spirit of cinema.
After a point it doesn’t matter whether the girls are playing hockey . It’s not the sport. It’s the spirit that shines through in every glistening frame of this tale that needed to be told before hockey became as obsolete as films about people who play to redeem their souls.
For Shimit Amin, the leap from the gritty cops film Ab Tak Chhappan to the world of female hockey players in Chak De India is astounding. “For me it’s just the script. I react to the script. It didn’t matter which genre. But yes, the thought of doing a hockey film was challenging because nobody had done it. It gave me a chance to explore an entirely untried genre.Jaideep Sahni’s script was something I wanted to put on screen. I’ve come from the US and this film gave me a chance to connect to one new part of Indian culture,” he added.
Though film was received well at the box office, audiences responded somewhat warily to the theatrical trailer of Chak De India where all the hockey playing girls were brought on screen one after another.
Explained Shimit, “The trailer was an experiment, just as much as the film. We clearly wanted to introduce the thirteen characters through the film. It was a broad canvas. Some people did like it. Others didn’t. It doesn’t have romance songs and the formula. My film is about characters who’ll hopefully involve the audience within five minutes of playing time.”
Casting for the roles of the female hockey players was a gruelling task.”It was very difficult to cast. We had to find girls who could play hockey and speak lines that were quite complicated. We had to go to different parts of the country and find women who could play sports. We looked for girls who were firstly athletic, and then see if they could hold the hockey stick.”
In the course of making the film Amin discovered how poorly hockey is treated in the country.
“When I’d go out on Sunday mornings searching for female athletes, every single green patch that I passed had boys playing cricket. No hockey anywhere – forget female hockey players. I couldn’t even see one female cricketer anywhere. I’d be so envious. If I had to make a cricket movie my life would be so much easier. But we loved the script so much we wanted to be true to it as much as possible.”
Finally, after months of search, semi-athletic females were chosen.
“We had to choose semi-actors and train them to play hockey and to act. For three months we would wake up at 4.30 a.m. and they’d play hockey for five hours and then undergo physiotherapy.
“It was nerve-wracking. We didn’t know if it’d work. But all the actors, hockey players and actors-players helped one another. They all became one community. The cast never felt it was acting. Finally, they looked convincing as a team.”
Amin, who hired expert from the US to train and choreograph the team, says that the idea behind the film was to revive the sport.
Talking about Shah Rukh’s suitability for the game, he said: “Shah Rukh had played hockey and his passion for the game remained. As for Shah Rukh, you’d be surprised to know how similar in attitude he is to Nana Patekar who starred in my first film.
“They both understand the cinematic medium completely. Their knowledge of the medium is astounding. Look at the varied work Shah Rukh has done… from Mani Kaul to Aziz Mirza to Aditya Chopra.”
Amin and Shah Rukh’s association go back a long way.
“During Asoka I worked in his company, doing promos. He knew what I am all about. As for his image, to date people consider Shah Rukh’s performance in Swades among his best. And that was different. We never thought of his image or anything else. I was just interested the whole community of hockey, just as the whole relationship between cops and crime interested me in Ab Tak Chhappan. I’m glad films on sports are being made in Mumbai. There’s just three-four genres to explore. I’ve done what I wanted to do in Chak De India. What am I doing next? I wish I knew. But it has to be the story that interests me. But yes, I’ve a contract for three films with Yash Raj Films.”
