Raajneeti turns 15: Prakash Jha says Katrina Kaif learnt her speech for 40 days, Anjum Rajabali had his doubts about Ranbir Kapoor

“We didn’t start out by wanting to adapt the Mahabharata. We just allowed it to enter our script. It’s a sprawling epic. But you’re not writing an epic, you’re writing a screenplay,” Rajabali points out. After serving as a script consultant on Jha’s last two films, he was approached by the director to co-write a film on electoral politics. “I wasn’t interested in that,” recalls Rajabali.

But he proposed to Jha that the filmmaker visits him every evening from 7:30 pm to 10 pm. They’d brainstorm over “two shots of vodka” for seven days, in the middle of which Rajabali recalled they began veering towards the Mahabharata. The idea of power conflict and cousins competing with other brought them closer to the broad strokes of the epic.

Prakash Jha with the cast of Raajneeti.

But Rajabali was dead sure he didn’t want Karna to be the hero, much to the surprise of Jha. “Karna has the usual characteristics of a hero: he’s the underdog who comes up fighting against injustice. But I told Prakash you must not look at only as destiny, but also in terms of the choices he made. He wholeheartedly went with Duryodhana, knowing fully well he’s an evil guy. That lends the story a dystopian end — who do we side with, because they’re all evil,” reasons Rajabali.

Enter: Arjuna. “Prakash said Arjuna is a boring character, who’s a good family member and a good warrior. But I brought his attention to Arjuna’s arc — he doesn’t want to enter the war, but Krishna gives him the perspective on why he should fight for a cause. Then their dark deeds begin to surface. So I asked Prakash, ‘What if Arjuna begins to revel in that?’ Because he’s suddenly a demon who has been unleashed,” says Rajabali.

The Arjuna of Raajneeti — Samar Pratap Singh — is the proverbial outsider. The youngest son who comes back from his school abroad for a few days, only to get caged in the politics of his family and that of the state. “His father is killed, brother is jailed, so he has to enter politics out of anger. Then the guy who’s researching Victorian poetry begins to do one dark deed after another. If you notice, even the topic of his research has to do with violence in the 18th century. So there’s a fascination with violence, which was already coming out via academics,” underlines Rajabali.

He recalls the time when he got a call from Jha who said they’ve found their Arjuna: Ranbir Kapoor. “Who, Rishi Kapoor’s son? That’s how I knew of him,” says Rajabali, reminding us that Ranbir’s debut film, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Saawariya (2007), hadn’t released then. “Have you seen it? Can he perform?” “I haven’t, but my instinct says he can.” “I trusted his instincts, but I had my doubts,” reveals Rajabali.

A few days after Jha began filming in Bhopal, Rajabali visited the set. Jha showed him the scene in which Ranbir is just sitting on a chair and looking at the television news of his father’s death and brother’s arrest. The camera goes from right to left on his face. “That boy was speaking volumes with his silence. There was no prep. He’s an intuitive actor, a complete natural. I was completely convinced. Ranbir had very few lines, but boy, did he leave an impact! He’s the best actor we’ve had in more than a decade now,” says Rajabali.

Ranbir Kapoor in Raajneeti.

If Ranbir was a revelation, Katrina Kaif wasn’t far behind. “We couldn’t pick Draupadi’s angle as it is because the fight between husbands for her and all that jazz doesn’t quite work today. But it stayed with me after reading the epic that Draupadi loved Arjuna, but he was too focused on ambition. So there was an unrequited love,” recalls Rajabali, who again was concerned if Kaif would be able to pull off the Hindi heartland dialogues with the right accent. “Once again, Prakash was convinced she’d deliver,” he adds.

“Katrina is a very hardworking actor. She worked with so much dedication. She learnt her lines for 30-40 days so she could deliver them confidently,” Jha recalls. Rajabali did find issues with her accent during the filming, but changed his mind during the dubbing sessions. “The amount of effort that the girl put in… she managed to deliver word to word in near-perfect diction,” says Rajabali.

It’s been 15 years, the party in power has changed, so it makes sense for us to pose the question to Rajabali: Was Katrina Kaif’s character inspired by Sonia Gandhi? He refuses, but sees the parallels. “There are various archetypal characters in life and in good literature and cinema. Rajiv Gandhi was the proverbial outsider. He didn’t want to join politics. But then he did, and he won. Then he gets killed. There’s a widow. Katrina looks half white. I wasn’t concerned, but I anticipated such allegations,” says Rajabali.

Katrina Kaif and Prakash Jha on the sets of Raajneeti.

He then reveals that as the Congress party got concerned closer to the film’s release, they inserted their representative in the Central Board of Film Certification. “This was an open secret. There was no contention with the film though, except one word. When two people at a chai shop are discussing election results, a laconic man, buried in the newspaper, says, ‘Le jaegi vidhwa sab samet kar.’ They objected to ‘vidhwa‘ because that might be confused with Sonia Gandhi. I didn’t agree with it, but Prakash said we’d have to remove it. So the word was changed to ‘bitiya,‘” says Rajabali.

Other changes in translating the Mahabharata to the world of Raajneeti included eliminating Nakul and Sahadeva because they’re quite similar, and choosing Arjun Rampal’s character Prithvi as Bhima over Yudhishthira. “Prakash recommended we take Bhima because there’s an innocence to him. He loves his family. He’s loud and uncouth, but there’s an endearing quality to him too. He’s gullible so can get tricked very soon, so you need to protect him,” says Rajabali.

Another change was to make their Krishna far more quieter than he’s in the epic. In fact, Nana Patekar is the only actor in the ensemble who doesn’t get a monologue. Even Naseeruddin Shah does, within a cameo. “He doesn’t pick up any weapons, but only operates on plotting. So that’s how I asked Nana Patekar to be in his body language,” says Jha. “He’s a thinking person, a strategist. He’d just process everything and come up with just one line that Samar catches up on. He’s the man to watch out for. He forces you to pay attention to him precisely because he doesn’t speak much. So you always wonder what he’s up to,” argues Rajabali.

He quotes the example of the scene in which Patekar’s character comes up with the perfect candidate to compete with Surya (Ajay Devgn’s character based on Karna). “It’s obvious he’s the natural choice to win in a Dalit constituency. Nana Patekar doesn’t say anything, but he just goes there and announces their candidate as Surya’s father. That’s a masterstroke,” points out Rajabali.

Jha recently admitted that he has the story for the sequel ready. “I have an idea with me. But we just haven’t gotten to it yet because other commitments keep coming up,” says the filmmaker, who’s been busy with his MXPlayer show Aashram, his next film Janadhish, and other projects as a producer.

“It can be quite rich because it can reflect today’s challenges for politicians. The Mahabharata is infinite so there is a lot of potential,” argues Rajabali. Jha points out that most characters from the first part, including those of Devgn, Manoj Bajpayee, and Arjun Rampal, are dead. So would the sequel continue where we left the other characters?

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“It may start from there or once we work on it, it may be something completely new,” says Jha, with a shrug. But where would Samar, Indu, and Mama be today? Or what would their Arjuna, Draupadi, and Krishna up to to now? “I can’t possibly answer that because I may give you the idea Prakash and I just end up doing. So I have to be a little discrete about it,” says Rajabali, in true Krishna fashion.