Rang De Basanti (lit. Paint It Saffron) is a 2006 Bollywood film directed by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, starring Aamir Khan, Sharman Joshi, Kunal Kapoor, Siddharth, Atul Kulkarni, Soha Ali Khan and R. Madhavan. A Coming of Age drama set in the shadow of Indian revolutionaries against the British regime, the film is considered one of the most important Indian films of the 2000s.
Sue McKinley (Alice Patten), an English film student, wants to make a movie based on the diary of her grandfather, James, a colonel in the British Raj, who oversaw the capture and execution of several Indian revolutionaries, including Bhagat Singh, Ram Prasad Bismil, Ashfaqullah Khan, Shivram Rajguru, and Chandrasekhar Azad. When Sue comes to New Delhi, India to begin filming, she and her friend Sonia (Soha Ali Khan) are disappointed to find a lack of revolutionary spark among the actors at Delhi University.
Sue then meets Sonia's friends at the university - Daljit "DJ" Singh (Aamir Khan), Sukhi Ram (Joshi), Aslam Khan (Kapoor), and Karan Singhania (Siddharth), all slackers who spend most of their time drinking, flirting and having little drive or ambition, along with Sonia's boyfriend Flight Lt. Ajay Singh Rathod (Madhavan), an Indian Air Force pilot. She also meets local right-wing activist Laxman Pandey (Kulkarni), who has friction with the others because of his virulent Islamophobic hate towards Aslam. Sue decides to cast all of them (bar Ajay) for her film - DJ as Azad, Sukhi as Rajguru, Aslam as Ashfaqullah Khan, Karan as Bhagat Singh, Sonia as Durgawati Devi, and later, Panday as Bismil.
As the experience of making the film changes the boys, a personal tragedy galvanises them and inspires them to follow their new idols.
Rang De Basanti provide examples of the following tropes:
- Anger Montage: Sue, as she tears her room apart when Laxman and the rest of the gang have tremendous friction working together on the movie.
- Big Man on Campus: DJ. Kinda deconstructed - he tells Sue that he has already graduated from university five years ago, but stills hangs around campus because, well:DJ: People know me on campus. DJ has some respect here. People say DJ has that spark, he'll really do something. But out there, in the world, the greatest DJs have gotten crushed by a crowd of millions.
- Bilingual Backfire: Sue speaks and understands Hindi perfectly well, but DJ, assuming that the white girl only understand English, flirts with her rather aggressively in Punjabi-tinged Hindi while telling her that he's talking about something else entirely (the rest of the gang, who knows, are barely holding in their laughter). Sue doesn't react till she meets his mother (after letting DJ tell her that he is going to marry her), where she greets her in Hindi to DJ's shock and everyone else's amusement.DJ: [in Hindi] She's really hot, man. [in English] I mean, it's very cold, man.
DJ, later: [in Hindi, to his mother] Look, ma, what a beautiful thing I've got for you. This is your daughter-in-law, her name is Sue, I brought her to you from London.[in English, to Sue] I'm telling her from London first trip, yours.
Sue: [in Hindi, to DJ's mother] Your blessings, ma. - Bittersweet Ending: Much more bitter than sweet, but strong elements of both. In the end, all the boys are killed by the soldiers, but their radio broadcast galvanises the nation into protest, Ajay's mother awakens from her coma, and the boys seem to have gone to some version of heaven along with their heroes.
- Chekhov's Gun: One of the gang's friends, Rahul, is met at the party where Sue meets the gang, talking about his new job as a late night radio jockey on All India Radio. It is Rahul's show that the gang takes over to spread their message after killing the Defence Minister and Karan's father.
- Corrupt Politician: The Defence Minister Shastri, working with Karan's father, is revealed to have made a deal to import cheap and faulty MiG-21 parts in exchange for a personal favour, which is a likely cause for the malfunction that cost Ajay's life.
- Face Death with Dignity: Bhagat Singh. When James McKinley approaches him on the day of his hanging, he calmly asks the Colonel to wait as he reads Lenin (Truth in Television, sort of - the real Bhagat Singh was reading Clara Zetkin's Reminiscences of Lenin on the day of his execution). He, frankly, seems to be holding it together more than James is.McKinley: I'm sorry it had to end this way.
Bhagat Singh: This isn't the end, Mr. McKinley. This is the beginning. Many will come after us. - Heroic Sacrifice: An investigation by the gang reveals Ajay's death to have been this. After his plane malfunctioned, Ajay could have immediately ejected from it and saved his own life; however, this would have led to the plane crashing into a populated city, potentially leading to several deaths. Ajay, therefore, chose to maneuveur the plane away from the town, not leaving him with enough time to eject safely. This makes it even more galling when the Defence Ministry closes the case and attributes the incident to pilot error.
- Meaningful Echo: In response to Karan's sarcastic question about what Ajay is so proud of India for, Ajay replies, "No country is perfect. It has to be made perfect.". Karan says the same line when replying to the call-ins on the radio, replying to a caller saying that the Minister's death will change nothing.
- Noble Bigot: Laxman Panday. While the first impression of the guy seems to only display contempt for the boys, with a particular hatred for Aslam because the latter is a Muslim, Sue sees that underneath the exterior is a principled man who genuinely loves his country and wants to make it better. Working on the film does redeem him significantly, given that he, as Bismil, has several scenes with Aslam, as Ashfaqullah Khan, and the two bury the hatchet as they die at the radio station arm in arm.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: DJ. When his mother, nearly halfway into the film, tells Sue that she had prayed for Daljit's well-being at a shrine, Sue is genuinely confused when she asks who Daljit is.
- Police Brutality: When the gang joins a group of students to protest Ajay being scapegoated for the crash at the India Gate memorial, the police disperses the protestors very violently, with Ajay's mother being brutalised so badly she falls into a coma.
- Show Within a Show: Sue's movie about the Indian freedom fighters. The making of this movie also kind of turns out to be a sort of feature-film version of Crystal-Ball Scheduling - the story of the freedom fighters gains an eerie similarity with the story of the college students. While initially the film scenes we see are primarily part of the actual film, later the similarities of the stories makes characters from the present transpose into the film (most memorably, after the reveal of the defence minister's corruption and disdain for Ajay, along with the police attack on the protest at India Gate, the Amritsar massacre scene is shown again, but this time, General Dyer is replaced by the minister.
