THR India's 25 in 25: 'Sairat' Was A Gut-Punch That No One Saw Coming

The mark of a game-changing film is that everyone wants to remake it again, and again. In 2016, when a small Marathi film — starring actors no one had seen before and directed by a filmmaker whose work was yet to breakout — released, it disrupted the entire Indian entertainment landscape. Nagraj Manjule’s Sairat was a storm no one saw coming, which is why film industries swiftly commissioned remakes across five languages (Hindi, Kannada, Punjabi, Odia and Bengali). Yet none managed to retain the bite of the original, which was a scathing commentary on caste.

Led by debutants Rinku Rajguru and Akash Thosar, Sairat daringly flipped the formula of love story — and lovers — in Indian films. Much before it became a template, Manjule anchored the story on a fiercely independent, assertive female protagonist Archi, who, undeterred by societal norms, acted on her desires by pursuing romance with a lower-caste boy, Parshya.

A still from 'Sairat'

The film not only boldly challenged traditional gender norms, but also was novel in the way it was structured. This was a doomed love story, charged with rage and bleeding with anti-caste politics, but Manjule hid it all. The politics and the dangerous repercussions of caste were wrapped in the glossy wrapping paper of striking visuals (shot by Sudhakar Reddy Yakkanti) and an unforgettable chartbuster Ajay Atul soundtrack, which played everywhere in the country even before pan-India became a buzzword. The trick worked.

With masterful storytelling, which ran the movie like a mainstream love story, the film drew the audience in, enticing them to sing and dance along, only to deliver a crushing blow, much like Manjule's earlier work, Fandry (2013). Unlike countless love stories before, which placed class as the antagonist that lovers overcome to live happily ever after, Sairat confronted caste head-on, boldly upending the trope and refusing to hold back from landing the widely discussed gut punch in its climax, leaving the audiences shattered and shaken.

A still from 'Sairat'

The pop culture footprint of Sairat mirrored its merits. The film began its journey from the Berlin International Film Festival in 2016 and emerged as the highest-grossing Marathi film of the time with over ₹110 crores and followed it up with a National Film Award – Special Mention for Rajguru. What has now become a common sight, of people dancing in cinema halls for an engineered Instagram engagement was, a decade ago, perhaps a first when audiences across India and even globally danced to the frenzied, pulsating beats of the chartbuster ”Zingat”.

This was repeat audiences, aware of the heartbreak in store by the end of the film, letting it all go, throwing their hands up in the air and dancing like one community, caste, class irrespective. It was truly wild, just what Sairat means in English.

Nagraj Manjule on Making Sairat 

Almost a decade before Saiyaara turned two actors into overnight sensations, it was Sairat which made newcomers Rinku Rajguru and Akash Thosar household names. While Rajguru auditioned for her part, Thosar was spotted at a railway station by Manjule’s brother, Bharat, who sent his pictures to the filmmaker.

“I had told both my actors while working with them that the film will be a blockbuster, but they shouldn’t change overnight,” Manjule told Film Companion in an interview after the film. “You can enjoy yourself, be free and roam wherever you want because it will be difficult to do so once the film release.”

And that’s precisely what happened. The filmmaker recalled how Rajguru had learned how to ride a [Royal Enfield] Bullet on her father’s bike. When the film became a blockbuster, people started coming to her house, clicking selfies with the bike she rode.

“Around 20,000 people had already visited all the locations to catch a glimpse of them. In fact, it was difficult for Rinku to go back to her village as fans would come and click a picture of the locked house. There is a shot in the film where both climb a dead tree. I heard that there was a person who started charging ₹50 for a selfie and had earned around ₹10,000 by doing that! Earlier they would ask me why I was shooting here; later all of them became tourists’ spots.”

Manjule had shared, among his most cherished reactions to the film, was how many parents got their children married, officially, after they had run away from their homes. After a screening in Jalgaon, Maharashtra, a lot of inter-caste couples were called and celebrated. “It is truly strange, none of us had anticipated this. We will have to write a long book to document it all."