Bajrangi Bhaijaan
The film Bajrangi Bhaijaan Brother Bajrangi) is a comedy-drama film that was released in 2015 in India. It was co-written by Kabir Khan and directed by V, and it was based on an original story. Vijayendra Prasad, which Salman Khan, Kabir Khan, and Rockline Venkatesh produced.
The story of Pawan Kumar Chaturvedi, a devotee of the Hindu deity Hanuman, is told in the movie alongside debutante Harshaali Malhotra, Kareena Kapoor Khan, and Nawazuddin Siddiqui. Pawan embarks on a journey to bring mute Pakistani Muslim girl Shahida, who was separated from her mother in India, back to her hometown.
The film was made for a budget of 75 crore, or US$11.69 million, and the first scenes were shot in November 2014. Aseem Mishra shot the footage for the film, and Rameshwar S edited it. Bhagat. The film’s score was composed by Julius Packiam, and Pritam wrote the songs that were in the movie.
Upon its release, Bajrangi Bhaijaan received widespread critical acclaim. The film became a huge commercial success, grossing 918.18 crores worldwide, and is currently the fifth highest-grossing Hindi film. Its storyline, dialogues, music, cinematography, direction, and cast performances were all praised by critics.
Additionally, it was the year’s highest-grossing Indian film. At the 63rd National Film Awards, it took home the National Film Award for Best Popular Film Providing Wholesome Entertainment.
At the 61st Filmfare Awards, it was up for four awards, including Best Film, Best Director (Kabir Khan), Best Actor (Salman Khan), and Best Story (V. Prasad Vijayendra) It was also up for Best Foreign Film at the China Douban Film Awards in 2015. Salman Khan made the announcement in December 2021 that Prasad would be writing a sequel.
Plot
Shahida, a six-year-old mute girl, lives in Sultanpur, Azad Kashmir, Pakistan, amidst the picturesque hills. She falls off a hill while playing one afternoon by accident. The villagers form a search party if she does not return home by nightfall. They finally locate the young girl on a hillside branch after searching for hours.
She had been stuck there all day, but due to her disability, she was unable to call for help. Her neighbors and parents talk about what needs to be done to help her the next morning. In Delhi, India, an elderly man suggests that they take her to the shrine of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya.
The religious family is of the opinion that going to the sacred shrine will restore Shahida’s speech and bring happiness and peace to the family. As an ex-armyman, Shahida’s father is certain that he will not receive a visa to India. As a result, her mother Razia decides to leave the village for the first time.
The majority of the trip goes according to plan. After making their offerings at the shrine, the two board a train to their country of origin. The train makes a nighttime repair stop on the way back. Shahida sees a sheep stuck in a pit just outside the train when everyone is asleep. Before she goes outside to help the animal, she doesn’t give it much thought. She can, however, return to her mother before the train restarts.
The young girl tries to run toward it but is eventually left behind, so she boards a freight train in an attempt to follow in her mother’s footsteps. However, to her dismay, it turns around and comes to a stop in Kurukshetra, India. Razia stops the train when she discovers that her daughter has vanished.
The girl has been assigned the task of looking for her around the track where she got lost. However, they are unable to locate her because Shahida has already moved on to another location. When Razia meets her husband, he is extremely concerned about his daughter. Much to their dismay, they are unable to obtain an immediate visa to return to India. The only other option for the parents is to pray that their daughter is safe.
Shahida, on the other hand, is now alone and unable to communicate in a different nation. She sees a stranger eating at a street-side restaurant at a religious celebration. The kind stranger is Pawan Kumar Chaturvedi, who extends an invitation to eat with her. He attempts to speak to her for a few minutes before realizing she is mute and calling her Munni. After finishing the food, a hungry Munni follows Pawan around.
He asks her to stay in front of a temple, presuming that she was separated from her parents during the festival. Pawan is a fervent devotee of Lord Hanuman and a devout Hindu Brahmin. He believes that if Munni stays in front of his temple, Lord Hanuman will take her home.
He takes Munni to the police station when she continues to follow him. However, as she is unable to provide any information about her parents, the police can only wait for a missing person’s report to be filed. Munni requires a place to stay until her parents are located, so Pawan takes her in.
He tells Munni to call him Mama if they ever talk on the way to his Delhi home. He also begins to name various Indian cities and asks her to nod if she knows which city her parents live in. He receives assistance from every passenger on the bus, but none of them can name cities outside of India.
Pawan tells everyone how he got to Delhi for work as they talk. He remembers his time in high school in a flashback. He was a typical student who never managed to pass the final exam. Pawan, a true devotee of Lord Hanuman, refused to cheat or lie while his friends carried on with their lives. He finally got through on his eleventh attempt, and he went to Delhi to look for work.
He stayed with Pandey, a close friend of his father who adhered to Hinduism and forbade non-Hindus from entering his home. Rasika, Pandey’s daughter, fell in love with Pawan’s innocent persona and offered him a job at the school she taught. However, Pandey, the strict father he is, requested that Pawan construct his own house before he married his daughter. Since then, Pawan and Rasika have put in a lot of effort to get money.
They will undoubtedly tie the knot sometime in the coming year. His account leaves an impression on everyone on the bus. When he and Munni get to his house, Rasika meets them at the door. Pandey, on the other hand, is not as pleased as she is that Pawan is assisting a young girl who is in need.
He is concerned about the likelihood that Munni practices a different religion. Pawan rationalises that she is Hindu because of her fair skin color and persuades Pandey to let her stay for a month. Despite Pawan and Rasika’s treatment of Munni as if she were their own child, Munni weeps every day in memory of her parents.
Munni rarely finishes her meals because she is accustomed to eating meat at every meal and the entire family is vegetarian. She is discovered by Pawan and Rasika eating home-cooked chicken one day in the residence of a Muslim neighbor. Even though eating meat is against his religion, Pawan takes her to a restaurant that evening and lets her eat whatever she wants. The glistening bangles they sell on the street side are very popular with Munni.
She innocently picks up a pack of bangles one day while walking through a market before the vendor pulls her over. She is compelled to return it by Pawan, who then takes her to the temple to apologize to God for her theft. Munni sneaks into a nearby mosque while he teaches her to join her hands.
Despite his reservations, Pawan follows her inside. He was completely taken aback when he saw her reading the Quran in front of a shrine. He has the impression for a few minutes that she betrayed him because he would never have connected with a Muslim.
However, Rasika reveals to him that she is a human prior to becoming Muslim. She wants Pawan to be different because she despises the fact that her father discriminates against people based on their religion. When Pawan realizes, he tries to get Munni from the mosque, but she has already left.
She rushes over to him and gives him a firm hug as he anxiously searches for her. He overcomes his irrational fear of going against his religion at that point and accepts her wholeheartedly. There will be a cricket match that night between India and Pakistan.
Except for Munni, who cheers when Pakistan scores, the entire family watches the match on television and supports India. She dances and kisses the Pakistani flag on television when the Pakistani team wins the game. Pawan approaches her and inquires about her origins.
Munni finally says yes after a few weeks of shaking her head at every Indian city. Pandey is enraged. Being a Muslim was bad enough, but because the girl is from Pakistan, he can’t let her stay at their house any longer. The following day, Pawan promises to deliver her to the Pakistani embassy.
However, the employee at the embassy is unable to grant her a visa without her passport. Because they don’t even know Munni’s real name, they can’t give her a visa. In addition, a riot breaks out in front of the embassy, forcing the processing of visas to be halted for a month.
Pawan takes Pandey’s advice and takes her to a travel agent as the last resort. The agent asks for one lakh rupees and says that he will take the little girl to the other side of the border. To assist Munni, Pawan and Rasika give up the money they had saved for their house.
After a tearful farewell, Pawan reluctantly brings Munni to the travel agent’s office the following day. He sees a street vendor selling glistening bangles on his way home. He buys one for Munni because he remembers that she liked them. He discovers, however, that he has been duped upon returning to the travel agency.
The agent is about to sell the young girl into prostitution after taking her to a brothel. When Pawan, who is otherwise composed, sees the agent counting the Munni-made bills, he loses his cool. He brings Munni back home after throwing the man out the window. Pawan has decided to bring Munni home with him.
He packs his belongings and makes his way to the border, despite the fact that he has no connections to Pakistani villages or ideas about them. They meet a secret agent by the name of Ali a few miles away who uses a tunnel to transport people illegally to the other side. He agrees to take them for free after hearing Munni’s tale.
Ali flees when they reach Pakistan’s border, but Pawan, a devotee of Lord Hanuman, refuses to leave without first asking the guards for permission. Munni watches and cries as the officers beat him up when they find him. In order to calm the little girl down, Pawan tries to laugh even as he is beaten.
The head soldier asks him to do whatever he wants for the next ten minutes before they return for the next round after finding out the reason for his travel. Because they have not yet granted him permission, Pawan decides to wait for them. Despite the stupidity of the concept, he is eventually permitted to leave with the soldiers’ permission, despite being beaten once more. He and Munni are in a restaurant in the next scene.
Munni steals a police officer’s handcuffs, assuming they are a bracelet, after seeing them. Pawan is arrested after the cop learns about it and accuses him of being an Indian spy due to the lack of a passport. After that, a struggling journalist named Chand Nawab is introduced to us.
He rushes to the police station to question the alleged spy as soon as he learns about it. He informs the media company that Pawan provides a few vague responses and does not take him seriously. A police officer questions Pawan inside the police station, but he refuses to believe anything he says.
Munni suddenly recognizes a picture on a table calendar as her village. Until the policeman coerces Munni into speaking, Pawan is overjoyed. Pawan gets angry and attacks the man, causing him more problems. He escapes from the police and defeats the officers. When Nawab sees him running away, he follows him.
They board the bus where Pawan shows the conductor their destination and also tells him Munni’s story. Nawab and the other travelers decide to assist him after discovering that he is actually a good person. When the police arrive, they conceal him and Munni on the bus’s roof.
Nawab, Pawan, and Munni spend the night in a mosque. They are also helped by a religious scholar named Azad, who hides them from the police officers who are searching the entire city for the alleged spy. Munni thought the picture was of her village until one of Azad’s students notices that it says “Switzerland.” The group is back where they started.
After that, Azad manages to get Pawan and Nawab out of the city without the police noticing by dressing them in burqas. Pawan, who was oblivious to Islam a few weeks ago, feels strange in their traditional clothing. He apologizes to his god but is willing to do whatever it takes to help Munni.
Pawan and Nawab take Munni to a lot of different places over the next few days and ask people there if they know her. Nawab chronicles Munni and Pawan’s relationship as well as their journey. He tries to sell the documentary to news outlets, but they say they won’t air it because they think it’s boring.
They need to come up with a different strategy for getting the word out so that people on the internet can help. They go to a well-known mosque one day and find that police are looking for them. Nawab realizes that his friend who is a cameraman is being used by the police to find out where they are.
The trio immediately flees the holy site and provides false information to the cameraman to distract the police. After that, Munni recognizes her mother in one of the videos as the group looks over footage from their time at the mosque. When they see her board a particular bus, they immediately approach the bus driver.
He identifies all of the villages along his daily route upon inquiry. Sultanpur, which Munni claims to be her residence, is one of them. After finally reaching their destination, Nawab and Pawan share a hug. Nawab also posts the documentary video to YouTube, where the police can get a sense of where they are.
The bus comes to a stop on its way to Sultanpur for security checks. Pawan pretends to run away when he realizes there is no way out and approaches the police. Nawab takes Munni and takes her back to her village while the men are trying to catch him. We see Munni run to her mother in the following scene, who is overjoyed to see her. Pawan is assaulted by the police as she reunites with her family.
The documentary goes viral on YouTube, and larger news outlets begin covering the story. People eventually discover that Pawan is being held in prison for assisting a young girl and is not a spy. He has the full support of the people of Pakistan and India. However, Pakistani authorities refuse to release him.
In prison, they beat him for hours, starved him, drowned him until he died, and beat him. After that, Nawab responds with a second video, this time on a larger platform, in which he asks people to gather at the border to make sure Pawan gets home safely.
The strategy works, and large crowds of people from both sides arrive at the border. Rasika and her family are waiting for him to return among the crowd as well. The officials will eventually have to give in. As Pawan crosses the border, a raucous chant of his name is heard from the crowd.
After that, Munni is seen among the crowd, waving her hands, but she is unable to call him. She suddenly yells “Mama,” the name Pawan requested from her when they first met. She yells “Goodbye” as the crowd falls silent. In shock, Pawan turns around. They run to each other and hug at the end of the story.
Cast
Credit – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bajrangi_Bhaijaan#Cast
- Salman Khan as Pawan Kumar Chaturvedi a.k.a. Bajrangi Bhaijaan, a Hindu Brahmin hailing from Pratapgarh who has been living in Delhi since his father Diwakar’s death
- Najeem Khan as teenage Pawan
- Harshaali Malhotra as Shahida “Munni” Aziz, a mute Pakistani girl who gets lost in India and bumps into Pawan, who makes it his mission to take her back home
- Kareena Kapoor Khan as Rasika Pandey, Dayanand and Archana’s daughter and Pawan’s love interest and fiancé
- Nawazuddin Siddiqui as Chand Nawab, a Pakistani news reporter and Pawan’s later ally, based on a real-life Pakistani reporter with the same name
- Sharat Saxena as Dayanand Pandey, Archana’s husband and Rasika’s father, Diwakar’s childhood friend
- Alka Badola Kaushal as Archana Pandey, Dayanand’s wife and Rasika’s mother
- Meher Vij as Razia Aziz, Rauf’s wife and Shahida’s mother who ends up losing her in the train
- Kushaal Pawar as Kamil Yusuf, Chand Nawab‘s cameraman caught by police to get information about Pawan and Chand Nawab
- Mir Sarwar as Rauf Aziz, Razia’s husband and Shahida’s father.
- Kamlesh Gill as Farookh Zehrullah, passenger in the train with Razia & Shahida
- Om Puri as Maulana Azad, a religious scholar
- Adnan Sami as a singer in the song “Bhardo Jholi Meri” (special appearance)
- Rajesh Sharma as Hamid Khan, a Pakistani senior police officer
- Krunal Pandit as Vardhan, travel agent in Delhi
- Mursaleen Qureshi as Boosmaan “Boo” Ali, smuggler at India–Pakistan‘s border who helps Pawan and Munni to cross the border illegally
- Manoj Bakshi as Police Inspector Iqbal Qureshi
- Harssh A. Singh as Shamsher Ali, Pakistani news channel head and Chand Nawab’s boss
- Yudhvir Dahiya as Pankaj Verma, reporter of NDTV
- Atul Srivastava as Diwakar Prasad Chaturvedi, Pawan’s father and Dayanand’s childhood friend, who chided Pawan for his failures