June 2001. Second semester of college, a hostel room, a degree most of you wouldn’t have heard of — that’s a story for another day. The weekly outing was mandatory movie watching at the single-screen theatre. In summers especially, that meant three hours away from the heat outside. Two films were releasing that week — Aamir Khan’s Lagaan and Sunny Deol’s Gadar: Ek Prem Katha.

Information moved differently then. Living in a hostel meant the little that existed, music channels, newspaper reviews, word spreading through a neighbourhood, largely bypassed you. What you knew about a film before watching it came from accumulated star image. That was the entire brief.

The equation was simple. Aamir Khan had Rangeela, Raja Hindustani, Sarfarosh, Ghulam behind him. You waited for his films. Sunny Deol, by 2001, had been in that phase where Bollywood had quietly moved on without making an announcement about it. Not forgotten. Just no longer waited for.

So Lagaan was the plan. Gadar was what we ended up watching first.

What happened inside that theatre is difficult to explain to anyone who wasn’t there. This was a different register entirely. Whistling, clapping, chanting Hindustan Zindabad, Bharat Mata Ki Jai— not performed patriotism but a physical release, the entire hall’s adrenaline moving in one direction at the same time. When Tara Singh uproots that handpump in the middle of Pakistan’s army, an act of gorgeous, impossible excess, the hall did not cheer, it detonated.

ALSO READ: When Aamir Khan’s Lagaan cast played a real cricket match and the British won easily

You couldn’t find a flaw in the film in that atmosphere. You didn’t question Sunny Deol dismantling an army single-handedly. You just became part of it and went back to the hostel all charged up, carrying the film like something that needed to be shared immediately.

👁 Gadar

What Gadar had done was something Anil Sharma understood intuitively about a certain kind of Indian single-screen audience. The film was set during Partition, the story of a Sikh truck driver who crosses into Pakistan to bring his wife back. It should not, on paper, have produced the kind of collective hysteria it did. Sunny Deol, considered a fading star before this, became something elemental in that film. Not a hero, but a force.

The next day, classmates who had watched Lagaan came back with their own version of the same story. The surprise was that the film had an actual cricket match running through its second half. We knew it was a period drama, nothing more. The idea that there was a full cricket match in there, that the second half was essentially a game, played out ball by ball, genuinely surprised us. By the time they finished describing it, every six, the entire hall cheering; every wicket, pin-drop silence; everyone clapping, everyone invested, we had already decided to watch the film.

Both films were running to full houses. Tickets for both were selling in black. We bought them in black and watched Lagaan the following week.

It delivered everything that had been described.

The cricket match in that theatre felt like being inside an actual stadium. Every run, every appeal, every close call had the whole hall responding in real time. The collective experience of watching Lagaan was joyful in a way that is hard to explain — it was warm, it was euphoric, it was the kind of thing you wanted to repeat. And like Gadar, it made you want to go back.

👁 Lagaan

That was the thing about both films. They were not similar in any other way — not in tone, not in story, not in what they asked of you. Gadar was pure adrenaline, a film that ran on collective electricity. Lagaan was something you felt more slowly, that built and built until the cricket match and then gave you the release you had been waiting for. Completely different experiences. Both of them unforgettable.

That summer, for the first time, box office numbers became something people outside the trade actually talked about. There were no hundred-crore clubs then, no opening-day discourse. A film was either a hit or a flop. But these two generated a different kind of conversation — which one was doing better, which hall was running to capacity, whose film would last longer. Gadar ultimately earned Rs 133 crore worldwide against a budget of Rs 18.5 crore, surpassed Hum Aapke Hain Koun as the highest-grossing Hindi film of its time, and ran in theatres for 25 weeks. Lagaan earned over Rs 65 crore worldwide, and won eight National Film Awards.

Neither film ate the other’s business. The conventional logic was that two big releases on the same day meant one would kill the other. These two ran parallel, created their own separate audiences, and then overlapped those audiences. People went back for second viewings of both.

Lagaan did something beyond the box office that took a little longer to register. It opened up the space behind the camera to a general audience that had never particularly cared about it. Interviews and features around the film were detailed in a way that landed with ordinary viewers — the fictional village of Champaner built from scratch by local craftsmen, the 10,000 villagers assembled for a single day’s shoot of the climactic cricket scene, director Ashutosh Gowariker suffering a slipped disc mid-production and directing for a month lying on a bed placed next to the monitor. For the crowd shoot, Aamir Khan, dressed in his nineteenth-century village attire, took a microphone between takes and sang “Aati Kya Khandala.” The footage of the crowd losing their minds became the actual reaction shots in the final cut.

👁 Lagaan

The documentary Aamir commissioned on the making, Chale Chalo: The Lunacy of Film Making, won the National Award for Best Documentary. Then came the Oscar campaign. Lagaan was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film — only the third Indian film ever, after Mother India and Salaam Bombay! Aamir and Gowariker toured New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, screening the film for Academy members, receiving standing ovations. They lost to the Bosnian film No Man’s Land. It didn’t diminish what had happened.

25 years on, both films are cultural touchstones. Gadar got a sequel in 2023 — Gadar 2 — which became one of the biggest Hindi hits of that year, proof that Tara Singh had lodged somewhere permanent in collective memory. Lagaan gets studied, revisited, cited whenever Indian cinema’s international ambitions come up.

👁 Gadar

The clash between Lagaan and Gadar has become part of Bollywood folklore. But in June 2001, in a tier-2 city single-screen theatre, none of that was the point. Two films arrived on the same day and both made the hall feel like it was breathing together. That summer did something unusual — it didn’t split the audience. Most people who went for one came back for the other. Two films, same season, and somehow nobody felt they had to choose.

One turned a theatre into a rally. The other turned it into a stadium.

And for a few weeks in the summer of 2001, the theatre felt like the only place in India anyone wanted to be.