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Irrfan Khan‘s film Paan Singh Tomar, about the soldier-turned-athlete-turned-rebel won the late artiste a National Award for his stellar, ground-breaking performance in the Tigmanshu Dhulia directorial. The movie was also honoured with the Best Feature Film Award at the 60th edition of the ceremony. But Paan Singh was not an instantaneous success. It had no marketing strategies as such to promote the movie, and was only declared an average hit at the box office.
Made on a small budget, Paan Singh Tomar went through quite a journey to reach its audience. In a 2017 interview with Film Companion, while promoting Hindi Medium, Khan also spoke of his journey as an actor at length. In it, he discussed how sometimes he does little preparation and waits for the movie to direct, or nudge him a certain way. Speaking in the same breath about the sports movie, Irrfan said, “While shooting Paan Singh Tomar, I was getting hurt so many times you wouldn’t believe it. And without any rhyme or reason. I am just walking and I miss a step, and suddenly my back goes. I mean my back is not fragile. I have done so many things, and I am not weak from my back, or a tennis ball hits my eye while playing a simple game of cricket on set. I tore my ligament during the shoot… so many incidents happened. So that film was testing me in a different way completely.”
Irrfan further went on to elaborate how while shooting the film, they were given a muharat window by an astrologer, and the crew was supposed to shoot the first scene within that given time for everything to go down auspiciously thereafter. But the cameraman couldn’t make the set in time even after landing at the airport since his car got a flat tyre.
“That was the film which exactly behaved as what happened to Paan Singh Tomar in his life. He was a national champion, but his name was not there at all when we started researching about him. Nobody knew him. Same thing happened with the movie, it was made and everybody who had seen it was loving it before it got released, but it was not getting released. We got so frustrated that when after 8-9 months after the shoot, people used to ask me about the film, I used to say, ‘I forgot Paan Singh, don’t talk to me about it.’ And then the film finally came out with no publicity and that one poster at Lokhandwala where he is seen running with the money bag. Suddenly the film stood on its own merit,” Irrfan concluded with a smile.
Helmed by Tigmanshu Dhulia, Paan Singh Tomar marked the second collaboration of the director with the acclaimed actor. They had begun their Bollywood career with the 2003 movie Haasil.
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