25 years of Jaideep Sahni: From Chak De! India to Khosla ka Ghosla, how the screenwriting genius consistently chronicled a country’s struggle to understand itself

Jaideep Sahni has written acclaimed films such as Company, Khosla Ka Ghosla, Chak De! India, Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year, among others.
(Photo: Express Archives)

Outlaws who became the system: Company

What sets Sahni apart is not simply what he wrote, but what he revealed. His screenplays are replete with the contradictions that define India. The tensions that fracture it and the forces that bind it. In his stories, the personal is never separate from the political, and the spectacle is inseparable from the subtext. It is as if he composes social maps, chronicles emotional cartographies, and draws blueprints of a nation in flux. It is as if he writes about a country trying to make sense of itself. Most of his films draw their charge from the socio-economic undercurrents that shape the lives of their characters. So in Company, the story unfolds in the shadows of a post–License Raj India: a landscape where opportunity was gated, and those without access were left to their own devices. Out of that inequality, as if inevitably, rose a revolution with guns. The gangsters, once outlaws, soon became the system. And when we meet these gangsters, Malik (Devgn) and Chandu (Oberoi), we see not just criminals, but agents of a new order. They are going global now, riding the wave of liberalisation.

Liberalisation and its impact: Bunty Aur Babli, Khosla ka Ghosla

Liberalisation eventually became a recurring theme that Sahni kept returning to across his filmography. So say, in Bunty Aur Babli and Khosla Ka Ghosla, he tapped into both the middle-class ambition that gives us wings and the middle-class morality that gently pulls us back to the ground. Morality, in Sahni’s world, is not didactic but lived. It is a persistent thread that guides his characters, but also sometimes derails them. Though both films present themselves as caper comedies, they are punctuated with moments of profound moral clarity. In each, it is the elder, the weathered voice of experience, who pauses the momentum to offer the younger one a truth. Bachchan in Bunty Aur Babli, and Kher in Khosla Ka Ghosla. Push a little further into his filmography, and you’ll find the same thread in Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year, where Chopra’s character becomes the moral anchor to Kapoor’s drift. Seen now, these scenes do more than simply move the plot forward. They are sort of masterclasses, as sort of reference points for contemporary screenwriters still learning how to tell stories with both edge and conscience.

Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year is one of the best manifestations of Jaideep Sahni working within the YRF mold, while still managing to turn its conventions on their head.

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Stories of small-town rebels

It is this strange sincerity that lends Sahni’s stories their weight and panache. At their heart, all his films are wrestling with the status quo. They are filled with characters at the disadvantaged end of power, outsiders and underdogs in every sense, who stand up against an establishment that offers them nothing but rejection, ridicule, or humiliation. Of course, the seminal sports drama Chak De! India is the most iconic expression of this motif. And the same thread runs through Khosla Ka Ghosla, Aaja Nachle, and Rocket Singh. But it’s also evident even in a seemingly lighter film like Shuddh Desi Romance, where we find Raghu (Rajput) and Gayatri (Parineeti Chopra) rebelling against the institution of marriage, with disbelief, and disinterest. And Sahni’s choice to set the film in Jaipur, or to let much of Aaja Nachle unfold in a small town called Shamli, is itself a subtle departure from mainstream cinematic norms. In doing so, he not only brings us characters who are more vibrant, more earthy, and often more humorous than their metropolitan counterparts, but also far more defiant. These are small-town rebels, torn between tradition and transformation. They are constantly contradicting themselves, caught in a cultural tug-of-war: modern enough to want freedom, rooted enough to still feel its guilt. It is within this contradiction that Sahni finds his most fertile ground.

Perhaps that’s why his characters so often struggle with, a kind of existential or even identity crisis that runs beneath their actions like an undertow. Perhaps that’s why this is best captured in the way so many of his protagonists seem uncomfortable with their own names. And so, of course, Cherry (Parvin Dabas) wants to rid himself of Chiraunji Lal Khosla, the name given to him by his grandmother. And Raghu doesn’t quite like it when his Tauji (Kapoor) insists on calling him Raghu Ram, as if the full name somehow fixes him to a version of himself he doesn’t accept. This discomfort isn’t isolated. It surfaces again and again, in characters like Rakesh (Bachchan) and Vimmi (Mukerji), who don the identities of Bunty and Babli as if to escape the weight of their small-town ordinariness. Harpreet Singh Bedi (Kapoor) becomes Rocket Singh, not simply a pseudonym, but a new framework for ambition. Chandrakant (Oberoi) prefers Chandu in Company, a name that makes him sharper, more agile. On the surface, these may appear as minor, even trivial narrative choices, sort of simple character quirks. But beneath them lies a deeper preoccupation, Sahni’s, persistent interest in mapping the restlessness of a generation caught between inheritance and reinvention. As his characters are not merely changing names; they are attempting to unbind themselves from systems, traditions, and identities that no longer fit.

Jaideep Sahni collaborated with director Maneesh Sharma, along with actors Parineeti Chopra and Vaani Kapoor, for the film Shuddh Desi Romance.
(Photo: Express Archives)

Subverting the template: Rocket Singh Salesman of the Year

What is even more exemplary is that Sahni, despite working largely within Yash Raj Films and under the production gaze of Aditya Chopra, has consistently managed to subvert the YRF template from within. It takes a particular kind of conviction to write a film like Bunty Aur Babli, where the characters don’t dream of going abroad or becoming NRIs to climb the traditional ladders of success (unlike the protagonists of many Yash Raj films of the ’90s) but instead choose to stay, to scheme, to seek reinvention within the boundaries of the country itself. It takes a similar kind of audacity to write Rocket Singh, where Kapoor plays a turbaned Punjabi salesman, not as comic relief or caricature, but as a nuanced, dignified, rebellious character. It’s a portrayal that sharply contrasts with the kind of loud, over-the-top Punjabis YRF itself has often fed its audiences. And again, it takes real nerve to Shuddh Desi Romance which dares to question the very ideals that have long underpinned the YRF romantic universe: commitment, and compromise. Instead, he gives us characters who are sceptical of these values, who walk away from rituals and roles, who seek love without the burden of an institution.

Shah Rukh Khan, like we never imagined him: Chak De! India

And to top it all, there is Chak De! India, a film that casts the country’s greatest superstar, Khan, not in the image we know him for, but in the role of a man devoid of glamour, of romance, of charm. In its place, Sahni gives us sheer presence, restraint, and ache. To imagine Khan in such a part, and to have him deliver one of his finest performances, speaks to the daring imagination Sahni possesses: the ability to see not just what a star he is, but what he could become if handed a different mirror. One could go on and on, tracing the brilliance with which he constructs those small, magical moments that stay in our collective memory. One could go on writing about how he gives nuance and arc to characters often dismissed as peripheral, and how those very characters, over time, have come to define themselves in the cultural imagination, remembered not as types but as people. One could go on simply writing about his dialogue writing, his comic timing. His sensibility as a lyricist alone deserves its own essay, for he brings to language what few writers can: grace without excess, power without volume. And yet, there’s a certain sadness in the silence. It has been over a decade since Sahni last wrote a film. A decade in which both cinema and the country itself have entered their most turbulent phase. Fractured, uncertain, polarised. This is a time when we need voices like his the most. We need Sahni, steadfast in conviction, unseduced by noise. We need him to return with stories of those tier-two cities that run the engine of the nation. We need him to once again give voice to those who question without fear, who dream without apology, and who live without waiting for permission.