Mumbai: Before the cameras rolled on the sets of “Lagaan”, the film’s cast would start each day with the Gayatri Mantra, said superstar Aamir Khan on Friday, adding that the daily ritual fostered a collective discipline and meditative focus in the team.
The period sports drama film, which completes 25 years in June this year, was helmed by Ashutosh Gowariker. The movie was screened at the first day of the 2026 Red Lorry Film Festival.
“Akhilendra Mishra (who played Arjan) would play Gayatri Mantra when we would travel in the bus. There were some people who wanted to listen to English songs but I insisted we listen to Gayatri Mantra. For six months we would listen to it every day before reaching the shoot location.
“And that helped us in a meditative state of mind. When you go to work, it’s important to understand to know the state of mind we are in. In the bus, it would be dark, as we would travel before the sun would rise, and we would listen to Gayatri Mantra,” Khan said.
“Lagaan” revolved around a villager who assembles a ragtag team to defeat the Britishers in a game of cricket to avoid paying triple the tax. The film received widespread critical acclaim as well as commercial success, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Khan said he is eternally grateful to the audience for giving love and respect to “Lagaan”.
“Everyone works hard work but very few films get this kind of love and respect,” the 60-year-old actor said, adding, when he watched the last ten minutes of the film, he got quite emotional.
Asked if he would do anything differently were “Lagaan” to be remade, Khan promptly said he would opt for an unshaven look and speak in pure Awadhi.
“Ashu and I had a long discussion on Awadhi dialect. I liked the language that Yusuf sahab (Dilip Kumar) used in ‘Ganga Jamuna’. We had used a diluted version. I wanted pure Awadhi and Ashu said no for it. So, if we can do it again, then it has to be with pure Awadhi and moustache and beard look,” he said.
Speaking about the film’s Oscar campaign, the actor said the team held several screenings of the movie in the US.
“In terms of hustle, all we could do is do screenings. So, our hustle was, we felt, whether people will turn up or not. A couple of screenings were not for the academy but for friends and other people to come and watch the film. So, we would call parking staff, or whoever we could spot, we would urge them to attend the screening. Our idea was whoever will watch the film, they will like it, our job was to get people to screening.”
Khan said he had rejected “Lagaan” quite a few times before giving his nod, only after his father Tahir Hussain’s advised him to not let go off a “good” script.
He said when Gowariker first narrated him the one line idea of “Lagaan” about ‘no rains, Lagaan, and cricket’, he shrugged it off saying he should make something that would make “sense”.
However, over a period of one-and-half to two years the actor said the story of “Lagaan” made a deep impact on him so much so that he would often ask Gowariker to narrate him the script every six months.
“I told Ashu to narrate me the story once again, this would be fourth or fifth time. I had called Reena (Dutta), Jhamu Sughand, the presenter of the film, and my parents. I’ve never asked my parents for advice on scripts but I told them I want to narrate a film.
“When my parents heard the script, I asked them how did they find it and they said, ‘It’s good and I must do it’. I told my dad its unusual and expensive film, there were so many things that are going against it. And my father said only one thing, ‘Aamir, you rarely get a good story and when you get it, you must not reject it’,” the actor recalled.
The biggest challenge, Khan said, was getting a producer for “Lagaan”.
“That challenge was really big, it lasted one-and-half to two years. It went to everyone in the industry and one of the producers even said that, ‘Put some action sequences in the film, or let Bhuvan stabs cricket stump into captain Russell’,” he said.
Eventually, Khan made his debut as a producer with “Lagaan” and released it under own banner Aamir Khan Productions.
“I was not a producer until then and I had decided not to produce films because I had seen my father go through hell. I was like if there’s one thing that I’ll never do in my is to produce films. But I ended up doing so,” he said.
“Lagaan” also featured Gracy Singh, Rachel Shelley, Suhasini Mulay, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Rajendra Gupta and Raghubir Yadav, among others.
