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COVER STORY: LAGAAN
Making Of Lagaan
An old bat found in England. An argument over a
moustache. A cricket pitch in the sand. Here are the nuts and bolts of
an epic.
By Sheela Raval in Kunaria
Standing in front
of a barren stretch of land at Kunaria village-or Champaner as they know
it-near Bhuj in Gujarat's Kutch district, Jamie Whitby and Katherine Katkit
can't believe their eyes. Only six months ago, they were living here.
But all that are now left of the surroundings they had known so intimately
are a banyan tree and a cracked village well. Where was the temple on
the hillock? They had been married there just weeks earlier. No, there
was no trace of that either. Barring the chirp of a koel here and the
hum of a bee there, there was nothing to suggest that this place once
throbbed with love and life. Like so many other villages in Kutch, Champaner
too had vanished. And like so many of them, it had also resurfaced to
tell a triumphant tale of human spirit.
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| EPIC SHOTS: Stills from the film that
views 1890s India from the remote, arid landscape of the fictional
village of Champaner set in Kunaria village in Gujarat's Kutch district |
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The story of Champaner is different though. A
fictitious village set in 1893 in Kunaria for the making of Lagaan, it
didn't disappear because of the earthquake on January 26. It vanished
off the face of the raw, arid earth because the film's producer, Aamir
Khan, and director and scriptwriter, Ashutosh Gowarikar, had kept a promise
to return the land on which the film was shot to the villagers to whom
it belonged.
On a visit to Kunaria this past week Aamir,
Gowarikar and a good section of their team-300 Indian artistes, 15 British
actors, among them Whitby and Katkit, and around 10,000 extras-could not
but feel nostalgic. Said Gowarikar: "I never thought the Champaner
of my dreams would have such an emotional impact."
The name itself was not entirely a product of
Gowarikar's imagination. It was obviously inspired by Champaran, the village
in Bihar where Mahatma Gandhi began his agitation in 1917 to protect the
rights of peasants in indigo plantations.
Four years ago when Gowarikar conceived the
story idea, Aamir rejected it outright. "The idea of a bunch of villagers
in 1893 playing cricket to evade lagaan (levy) was not palatable on first
hearing," recounts the actor. "That was my instant reaction
and not based on the understanding of the story in totality."
It didn't stop Gowarikar putting his idea on
paper. More confident the second time around, he again approached Aamir
and got the endorsement he was seeking. Aamir agreed to play the lead
role of Bhuvan and asked Gowarikar to chose his producer carefully. But
no one was willing to bet on a Rs 25 crore budget for a period film that
would almost certainly not attract big stars.
So Aamir made it his own gamble even setting
up a production company. "We knew the film would be expensive and
that it could be a risky proposition but we still wanted to make it,"
says Aamir. "After all, you only live once."
The result was one of India's most lavish movies
ever. Around 3,000 people worked round the clock in the six-month, one-schedule
shoot to set up Champaner on 100 acres of farmland. The Kunaria site was
zeroed in on after an extensive seven-state search by Gowarikar and art
director Nitin Desai. The natural landscape of Kutch fitted in perfectly
with the script. Besides Champaner's huts and the cricket ground, the
story centres on a hillock on which a temple stands and two palaces in
which the British administrators live.
Known for his fetish for perfection, Aamir made
special trips to the United Kingdom and scoured libraries, mu-seums, sports
and antique shops to get material that could lend that authentic Raj era
touch. Even the prototype for the cricket bats used in the film was brought
from England, found in an old curiosity shop. The trip to Blighty was
also resourceful in that it uncovered an old portrait of Queen Victoria-empress
of India in 1893-in a quaint little library near London. The lady's likeness
adorned one of the film's palaces.
Aside from his family and films, Aamir's one
abiding passion in life is cricket. The cricket pitch was laid after much
consultation with groundsmen. About the only compromise was the size of
the playing area, reduced to facilitate filming. Aamir had to agree to
a pitch nine-and-a-half yards shorter than the usual 22 yard one. The
desert sands were covered with river mud, specially brought in through
25 truckloads to get the pitch right.
Two repositories of cricketing wisdom were Aamir's
companions as he went about the task of putting together India's biggest
sports-theme film-Mihir Bose's The History of Indian Cricket and Sachin
Tendulkar. If the book was bedtime reading, the batting legend was the
film's de facto consultant. Never one to forget a favour, Aamir personally
invited Sachin and his wife Anjali to a private screening of Lagaan earlier
this month. Unfortunately, the former Indian captain couldn't make it.
For the film crew, the most daunting task was
Champaner itself. Says Desai, who has designed sets for other period films
like Devdas and 1942: A Love Story: "Creating a village on barren
land is a mammoth task, a different ball game from putting up sets in
a studio." Not just that, recreating the social fabric of 1893 entailed
a complete town planning exercise using parameters like caste, religion
and social status. The house of a Harijan, for instance, had to be a thatched
unit at the end of the village while that of the mukhia (headman) had
to be centrally situated with a high, pukka roof. Recalls Kanku Dhanji,
one of the 150 artisans who painted the houses: "Constructing Champaner
was like rebuilding our lives. At the end, the village looked more real
than our little Kunaria."
Simulating reality can be painful business.
Before shooting commenced, actors actually stayed in Champaner's houses
for a day to familiarise themselves with their new if temporary abodes.
Says Aditya Lakhia who played Kachra: "I hardly speak in the film
but my presence is such that I had to live like a Harijan through temperatures
varying from four to 40 degrees Celsius."
Gowarikar was equally tough on the British actors.
Says Paul Blackthorne, the British theatre and television performer who
plays Captain Russell, Lagaan's arch-villian: "As preliminary preparation,
I was asked to learn Hindi and horseriding. For three months I did nothing
but rehearse my lines in Hindi. They were so tough that at one point I
thought of giving up." It was not before four months that he got
the first word in the script-samjah (understand)-right. But he kept at
it, just as he did with studying the finer details of the behaviour of
the men who ruled India.
Aamir and Gowarikar themselves spent many nights
debating which dia-lect-khadi boli or Avadhi-would suit Bhuvan better.
Avadhi is spoken in central Uttar Pradesh and khadi boli further west
in the state. There was also the question of whether Bhuvan should don
a moustache. "How can a young boy from central India of 100 years
ago not have a moustache?" asks Aamir. "But I followed the director's
gut feeling. He just could not imagine Bhuvan with a moustache."
Costume designer Bhanu Athaiya-awarded an Oscar for Gandhi-did her homework
alright. Hundreds of hat designs were screened for British female lead
Rachel Shelley. Says Athaiya: "The approach for Lagaan was the same
as for Gandhi: careful research and meticulous execution."
No matter what the outside temperature, the
cast had to don bandis (jackets), dhotis, corsets or gowns if the shot
so required. They also had to shed their urban sensibilities. When Shelley
went into a tantrum because she did not have a pin for her hat, she was
firmly told that she could get one only the following day, when it arrived
from Mumbai. "There is none of the starriness that you get in Hollywood,"
Shelley complained at the time. Others saw it differently. "Even
treatment was given to all, no matter who they were," says Raj Zutshi,
who plays Ismail. "The working rules were made clear right from day
one."
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