25 years of Lagaan: 25 ways Aamir Khan turned a film no one wanted to make, into one no one will ever forget

A quarter of a century ago, the industry passed on a four-hour period musical about villagers playing cricket against the Raj. This weekend, from 12 to 14 June, that same film returns to Indian cinemas for a special three-day run, marking 25 years since it first released on 15 June 2001. The gap between those two facts is the whole story of Lagaan, a film almost nobody wanted to fund and that nobody has since been able to forget. When Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India returns to cinema screens this weekend, it will be doing something a 224-minute period musical about cricket and colonial taxation has no business doing in the streaming age. It will fill halls. A generation that was not born when the film first released in June 2001 will sit through nearly four hours of a story it already knows by heart, and will still hold its breath at the final over. That, more than any award, is the measure of what Ashutosh Gowariker made.



Here are 25 things that made Lagaan unforgettable.

Production and scale

1. The film that built a studio: Lagaan was the maiden production of Aamir Khan Productions. The banner did not pre-exist the film. It came into being because no established producer was willing to bankroll so unconventional an idea, and Aamir Khan finally decided to put his own money where his belief was. Something Aamir Khan's vast body of work displays. The one-movie-per-year idea, being shy of going for bulk when that was the norm. And the guts to trust his instinct, when everyone was a skeptic.

2. A first-timer at the helm of production: Aamir 's then wife, Reena Dutta, served as executive producer of the film, taking charge of one of the most logistically daunting shoots in Hindi cinema with no prior film experience whatsoever. She ran a self-contained unit in the middle of nowhere and brought it home.

3. A first cut that ran seven and a half hours: By Aamir's own recollection, the earliest assembly of the film stretched to roughly seven and a half hours, with close to four of those hours covering everything that happened before the cricket match even began. Gowariker remembers it as closer to five. Either way, it was eventually disciplined down to the theatrical runtime of three hours and forty-four minutes. Even in the pre-social media era, when people had the patience of watching long movies, this was a huge risk. To today's generation, talking about runtime of films, like the recent Dhurandhar, Lagaan was the pathbreaker that set the rule that if an idea, story, script and editing was good, people will sit for almost 4 hours in a cinema hall. Period.

4. A village raised from the dust: The entire village of Champaner was built from scratch on the barren flats of Kutch in Gujarat. There was no existing location to dress. The mud walls, the lanes and the temple were all constructed, lived in for the length of the schedule, and left behind. Now on to Champaner... it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, renowned for being an exceptionally preserved pre-Mughal Islamic city and a major Hindu pilgrimage center. Located about 50 km from Vadodara (Baroda), it lies at the foothills of the Pavagadh volcanic hill.

5. Air-conditioning in a drought: For all that the film depicts a parched, famine-struck 19th-century village, the quarters built for the cast and crew in that desert were said to come fitted with modern comforts, air-conditioning and toilets among them. The contrast between the suffering on screen and the practical needs of a long shoot off it, became part of the film's lore.

The script and casting

6. Bhuvan, before Aamir: The role that defined Aamir Khan was, by several accounts, offered around first. Shah Rukh Khan was reportedly approached and declined, after which Hrithik Roshan and Abhishek Bachchan were also in the frame before the part came to Aamir. He too hesitated, famously calling it "a strange idea," before committing not only his part as the lead but as the producer.

7. An Englishman learning Hindi by ear: Paul Blackthorne, who played the cold, contemptuous Captain Andrew Russell, did not speak Hindi. He learned every one of his Hindi lines phonetically, syllable by syllable, which makes the menace he carries on screen all the more remarkable.

8. The largest British contingent in an Indian film: Along with Kulbhushan Kharbanda as Raja Puran Singh, Lagaan assembled what was then the biggest ensemble of British actors ever cast in a Hindi film. The region's erstwhile royals are also said to have helped the production with vintage cars and location support.

9. A heroine's first film: Gracy Singh made her feature debut as Gauri, holding her own in an ensemble dominated by veterans. The casting churn ran deep across the unit, the role of Bhura that Raghubir Yadav eventually played, for instance, had first been offered to the late Ravi Baswani.

10. The voice that framed it all: Amitabh Bachchan lent his unmistakable baritone to the opening and closing narration, setting the legend in motion and gently laying it to rest at the end. It is the voice you hear before you see a single villager on screen.

Music and sound

11. Recorded live, against the odds: Lagaan was among the first major Hindi films in decades to be shot in sync sound, capturing dialogue on location rather than dubbing it later in a studio. For a film of this scale, shot outdoors with a vast cast, it was an enormous technical gamble that paid off in texture and realism.

12. The tyranny of silence: Sync sound meant the desert had to be genuinely silent for every take. A single hand pump or a tractor working a couple of kilometres away could ruin an entire shot, so the unit had to hunt down and shut off every stray source of noise across a wide radius before the cameras could roll.

13. A score that carried the story:

‘Ghanan Ghanan’ turns the longing for rain into communal euphoria, ‘Mitwa’ swells with resolve, and ‘Radha Kaise Na Jale’ sets the love triangle to a folk pulse.

14. The anthem of the making: ‘Chale Chalo,’ the rousing call to keep marching, became more than a song in the film. It turned into the unofficial rallying cry of the production itself, and later gave its name to the feature-length documentary that chronicled the shoot.

15. A prayer for everyone: The film's devotional heart is ‘O Paalanhaare,’ a bhajan written so that it belongs to no single faith, addressing a protector that a believer of any religion can claim as their own. It anchors the film's quietly principled spine, the idea of defeating the coloniser by his own rules and without raising a weapon, which gives Lagaan its undefeated moral core.

Behind the scenes

16. A cricketing boot camp: The actors playing the villagers were put through months of cricket coaching before filming so that they could play convincingly, and with period-appropriate bats and equipment rather than the modern gear they might have known. The clumsiness of men learning the game had to be earned, then unlearned.

17. A shoot that ran on sheer will: The making demanded a kind of endurance that has passed into legend. Gowariker, struck by a debilitating back ailment, is said to have directed portions of the film lying down, while the ailing veteran, AK Hangal, kept turning up to shoot so the production would not stall.

18. Ten thousand villagers in the stands: The grand cricket sequences called for crowds on a scale rarely attempted, and the production drew on roughly ten thousand local people from in and around Bhuj as extras to fill the match with genuine, roaring life.

19. Real heat, real drought: None of the desolation was faked. Daytime temperatures on the outdoor shoots regularly climbed past 45 degrees Celsius, and because the region was suffering an actual prolonged drought, the scenes that needed rain had to be created with water tankers, the irony of which was lost on no one.

20. The earthquake that came after: The land that gave the film its parched beauty turned tragic soon after. Bhuj was devastated by the catastrophic earthquake of 26 January 2001, only months after the unit had wrapped its work there, a sombre footnote to a place that had hosted such a joyful effort.

Global impact and legacy

21. Only the third to reach the Oscars: Lagaan earned a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2002 Academy Awards, becoming only the third Indian film ever shortlisted in the category, after Mother India in 1957 and Salaam Bombay! in 1988. The statuette went to the Bosnian war drama No Man's Land, but the nomination alone carried the film to the world.

22. A box office it had no business winning: Made on a budget of around Rs 25 crore, Lagaan collected roughly 65 crore worldwide and stood among the highest earners of 2001, all while sharing its release date with the blockbuster Gadar: Ek Prem Katha. Two very different visions of the freedom struggle opened together, and both found their audiences.

23. A clean sweep of the awards: The film dominated the year's award circuit, winning eight National Film Awards, the most of any film that season, and matching that with eight Filmfare Awards including Best Film, Best Director and Best Actor. The trophy cabinet groaned louder than the villagers ever did.

24. A soundtrack for the ages: Rahman's work on Lagaan is routinely ranked among the finest in the history of Indian cinema, blending folk textures, Western orchestration and classical Indian vocals into something that has refused to date. A quarter of a century on, the songs are still alive on playlists, long after many of the year's bigger hits have faded from memory.

25. The big screen, again: To mark the milestone, Lagaan is set to play on the United Kingdom's largest IMAX screen at the BFI IMAX in London on 12 July 2026, as part of the London Indian Film Festival, with Aamir Khan appearing in a rare in-conversation session a few days later to revisit how it was all made. The film that the industry once would not fund is now an honoured guest on the world's grandest screens.

The afterlife of this blockbuster tells us the most about the legend of this film. Lagaan set a template—the underdog rising through sport against impossible odds—that Hindi cinema has been reworking ever since, in films like Chak De! India and Dangal. It made a director the industry had written off into a name to reckon with, and it turned an actor into a producer who would go on to shape the films that followed. Twenty-five years later, audiences who were not even born when Lagaan was released, will sit through three hours and forty-four minutes and still hold their breath at the final ball. That is why this movie is coming back, and that is why people will go to the cinema hall. It is a fitting tribute, because Lagaan was always a film built for the big screen and the collective gasp of a packed auditorium rather than the solitary glow of a phone. To understand why it endures, it always helps to remember just how unlikely its existence was in the first place.