Kangana Ranaut was only 17 when she joined the cast, as a last-minute replacement for Chitrangada Singh, of Anurag Basu’s ‘Gangster: A Love Story’ (2006). She had run into Basu at acclaimed filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt’s office, where she’d landed in search of a break.
Kangana played an alcoholic trapped in a love triangle involving a notorious gangster (Shiney Ahuja, whose career later went out of the window after he was convicted on a rape charge) and a sympathetic friend (Emraan Hashmi).
The role got Kangana instant fame. Hailed as a “remarkable find”, and honoured with the Filmfare Award for Best Female Debut, she instantly began her dalliance with headlines.
For a rebel child who shocked her family — her mother was a school teacher and her father a businessman with roots in Bhambla village, Mandi district, Himachal Pradesh — by not taking the All-India Pre-Medical Test, it was indeed a dream start in Bollywood, whose fierce critic and conscience keeper she later became.
For the great-granddaughter of a Himachal Pradesh Congress MLA, and granddaughter of an IAS officer, it was also a bold career move that did not initially go down well with the family.
After opting out of higher education, Kangana moved to Delhi from Chandigarh, where she went to school, to join the Elite Modelling Agency and pick up a couple of assignments, before deciding to become an actor.
Her first step in that direction was to join Delhi’s celebrated theatre group Asmita, shepherded by Arvind Gaur, who became Kangana’s guru. She ended up acting in Girish Karnad’s play, ‘Taledanda’, and it was this exposure that convinced her to move on to Mumbai, where she joined Asha Chandra’s acting school.
After ‘Gangster’, Kangana went on to act in several acclaimed films, beginning with ‘Woh Lamhe…’, where she navigated the demanding role of playing a schizophrenic actress, a character inspired by Parveen Babi, and including ‘Life in a … Metro’, the critically hailed ‘Fashion’ and supernatural horror film ‘Raaz: The Mystery Continues’ — all these films had typecast her as a heroine cut out to play only hysterical characters, so she broke out of the mould by picking up Anand L. Rai’s 2011 romantic comedy ‘Tanu Weds Manu’, where she was cast opposite R. Madhavan.
Thereafter, Kangana’s career graph was like that of any other successful star, with its share of hits and misses, but the two productions that have stood out in her filmography are ‘Krrish 3’, the Rakesh Roshan-helmed blockbuster hit, where she played a shape-shifting mutant, despite her previous disappointment with the filmmaker in the Hrithik Roshan-starrer ‘Kites’ (she felt her role had been cut short), and the dramedy ‘Queen’, which prompted a critic to write that Kangana’s Rani was the “role of her lifetime”.
Her Bollywood journey, however, was not without its pitfalls. Initially, her poor command over English became the subject of the object of derision in the industry, especially among its elite. Then, she had a controversial affair with Aditya Pancholi that turned out to be an abusive relationship and left her emotionally scarred.
And then, even as he was recovering from a failed relationship with her ‘Raaz: The Mystery Continues’ co-star Adhyayan Suman, her ‘Kites’ and ‘Krrish’ 3 co-star Hrithik Roshan filed a lawsuit against Kangana, accusing her of cyberstalking and harassment. The case was closed because of lack of evidence.
After ‘Queen’, Kangana’s career also yo-yoed from box-office failures such as ‘Rangoon’ and Hansal Mehta’s Gujarati crime comedy, ‘Simran’, to her moderately successful Rani of Jhansi biopic, ‘Manikarnika’, which marred by the walkout of co-star Sonu Sood during production, and the sports drama, ‘Panga’, which was about a female kabaddi star. Both films won her critical acclaim and national awards, and established herself as a champion of female-first films. But thereafter, her films just stopped doing well at the box office.
Kangana, however, stayed in the headlines. In 2017, for her public falling out with influential filmmaker, Karan Johar, whom she accused of nepotism. Then in 2020, when she accused certain unnamed film personalities of having “systematically sabotaged” Sushant Singh Rajput’s career, driving him to commit suicide.
Both episodes cemented her image as an honest, outspoken outsider fighting the Bollywood establishment. It also made her the favourite of people ideologically aligned with the BJP, for they saw in the issues she raised echoes of their own campaigns against dynasts, nepotism and corruption.
Slowly but steadily, Kangana, a follower of Swami Vivekananda, emerged as the most visible, and articulate, spokesperson for the BJP within the film industry. And UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath was the first BJP leader to recognise Kangana’s potential and appointed her the brand ambassador of ODOP (One District One Product), one of his flagship development programmes.
Kangana’s outspoken opposition to privilege dictating people’s place in their professions and the snobbery of the English-speaking class, her impressive social media following, and her consistent support for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, make her most suited for a bigger presence in the BJP.
The party seems to have recognised this fact by rewarding her with the Mandi ticket.
