Patriotism was already Manoj Kumar’s calling card, but he turned it into a full-blown masala blockbuster with the 1981 film Kranti. He went all in and even mortgaged his house to make it on the scale he wanted.
He played the perennial patriotic Bharat, of course, but the cast also included other top stars—
Dilip Kumar, Shashi Kapoor, Shatrughan Sinha, Hema Malini, Parveen Babi—and the film had one of the most lavish production budgets of the time.
Before Kranti, Kumar had already given Hindi cinema some of its most enduring patriotic songs and films — “Mera Rang De Basanti Chola” from Shaheed, “Mere Desh Ki Dharti” from Upkar, and “Hai Preet Jahan Ki Reet Sada” from Purab Aur Paschim. He had cemented his identity as “Mr Bharat”. But Kranti was no rinse and repeat.
It went to an entirely new era, imagining a popular uprising against British rule in the 19th century. With elaborate sets, ships and costumes, Kumar recreated a world spanning 1825 to 1875. Grandeur was the key word. In a Rediff interview, he said more than 10,000 people worked on the film, that its fort sets took four months to build, and that the production included a “strenuous schedule” aboard a ship.
In a sense, Kranti set the template for a kind of patriotic film that was entirely unabashed about being an entertainer too. As Kumar would later say: “Our audience wants paisa vasool stuff… what I call thaali culture. If we make a movie featuring a good mix of ingredients, then that movie will succeed even if it’s based on patriotism.”
Kranti was proof of that. It was the highest-grossing Hindi film of 1981, beating out films such as the Amitabh Bachchan-starrer Lawaaris. Kranti T-shirts were sold in shops and it reportedly became the second highest-grossing Hindi film ever at the time, behind only Sholay.
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The magic mix in the Kranti ‘thali’
Manoj Kumar himself attributed the success of Kranti to four ingredients: “grand scale, music, story and performances.”
On the music front, there was plenty to hum along to, with Laxmikant-Pyarelal’s score spanning the rousing to the romantic. Kranti Kranti was a full-throated revolutionary anthem, while Mahendra Kapoor sang the patriotic Ab Ke Baras. Lata Mangeshkar and Nitin Mukesh gave the film its great romantic number, Zindagi Ki Na Toote Ladi. The more lighthearted Chana Jor Garam brought together Lata Mangeshkar, Kishore Kumar, Mohammed Rafi and Nitin Mukesh. It was, fittingly enough, a musical thali of its own.
The story itself was an epic. It starts with Sanga (Dilip Kumar), a farmer who turns rebel after a ruler called Raja Laxman Singh is betrayed and killed by members of his court working with the British. Escaping a death sentence, Sanga leads a resistance against the East India Company and its puppet ruler Shamsheer Singh (Pradeep Kumar), while farmers are enslaved and put to work in mines.
The film makes the change in regime almost comically explicit. During Raja Laxman Singh’s reign, the court enjoyed Indian classical music, but the new king prefers Western opera, sitting with a wine glass in his hand.
The rebellion is also a family saga. Sanga’s son Bharat (Manoj Kumar) grows up to lead his own band of revolutionaries, while his younger son Shakti (Shashi Kapoor), separated from his family and raised as a prince, initially finds himself on the other side.
Hema Malini plays Meenakshi, the daughter of the British-backed king who crosses over to the rebels, while Parveen Babi’s Sureli is part of Bharat’s revolutionary band.
The film was widely seen as a fitting comeback for Dilip Kumar, who was returning after a four-year hiatus. But for Manoj Kumar, it was something of a last hurrah — he never made a hit on that scale again.
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Who wrote the film?
Even today, there is a loose end around Kranti: who exactly wrote it? The film credits Salim-Javed with the story and screenplay and Manoj Kumar with the dialogues, but Kumar later disputed that division of labour.
In an interview in his later years, Kumar suggested that he had done much of the writing himself, and that Salim-Javed had acknowledged as much.
“Salim-Javed sahab had it published in Film Information six to eight weeks before the film’s release that we have nothing to do with Kranti. Whatever has been done has been done by Manoj Kumar sahab,” he said. “I called them up jokingly and said, ‘If I have done it, then at least return the payment that I have made.’”
In the same interview, Kumar said he wrote scenes and narrated them to Salim and Javed.
But the question didn’t quite die there. At the 2024 trailer launch of Angry Young Men, a docuseries on Salim-Javed, Salim Khan’s son Salman brought up Kumar’s version of events, taking half-jocular umbrage at his claim to have written Kranti.
Javed Akhtar responded with a dry, cryptic comment: “I think it is very, very honest of him to make this confession.”
Manoj Kumar died in 2025, and so the dispute remains unresolved.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)