General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Rajneeti

Raajneeti (राजनीति; "Politics") is a 2010 Indian Hindi-language political drama directed, produced, and co-written by Prakash Jha, with a screenplay by Jha and Anjum Rajabali. It depicts a power struggle inside a political family in a north Indian state, drawing on the Mahabharata and, in the view of many critics, on The Godfather. The ensemble cast includes Ajay Devgn, Ranbir Kapoor, Nana Patekar, Katrina Kaif, Arjun Rampal, Manoj Bajpayee, and Naseeruddin Shah.¹^•² Released on 4 June 2010, it earned Rs 620 million (Rs 62 crore) worldwide in its first weekend and became one of the major commercial successes of the year.³

Key fact	Detail
Release	4 June 2010, Hindi language, drama and social genres¹
Director and writers	Prakash Jha (director, producer, co-writer); screenplay with Anjum Rajabali¹
Lead cast	Ajay Devgn as Sooraj Kumar, Ranbir Kapoor as Samar Pratap, Katrina Kaif as Indu, Nana Patekar as Brij Gopal, Arjun Rampal as Prithviraj Pratap, Manoj Bajpayee as Veerendra Pratap²
Literary parallels	Loosely based on the Mahabharata, with Samar widely compared to Michael Corleone from The Godfather⁴
Opening business	Rs 620 million (Rs 62 crore) gross worldwide on 2,200 screens in the first weekend; in India, the second-highest first weekend in Indian cinema at the time³
India net total	936.6 million (93.66 crore) over its theatrical run⁵
Reception	IMDb 7.1/10 from about 20,000 votes; Rotten Tomatoes 22% among critics (9 reviews) and 65% among audiences²^•⁶

Spoilers

Plot and characters

The film chronicles the wealthy Pratap clan and a fight for control of its political party between warring sets of cousins: Veerendra Pratap (Manoj Bajpayee) and the low-caste secret heir Sooraj Kumar (Ajay Devgn) against Prithviraj (Arjun Rampal) and the intellectual Samar (Ranbir Kapoor), an American-educated family outsider.⁴ When the family patriarch Bhanu Pratap (Jahangir Khan) suffers a stroke on the eve of elections, his brother Chandra Prakash (Chetan Pandit) takes charge of the party, and Bhanu Pratap's son Veerendra refuses to accept the new leadership.⁷ The veteran politician Brij Gopal (Nana Patekar) guides the younger generation through the intrigue, in a role critics read as a Krishna figure.⁸

Early in the film, Brij Gopal tells Sooraj that there are no right or wrong actions in politics: the only purpose of any political action is to fulfill an objective, at any cost. The writer Uttaran Das Gupta argues that this ideology informs every character, and that the pursuit of state power justifies corruption, manipulation of allies and relatives, and even murder, turning politics into a criminal enterprise.⁷ The film's arc tracks Samar's moral descent from family outsider to ruthless power player, a trajectory the Los Angeles Times compared to Michael Corleone's.⁴

Development and the Mahabharata

The first draft was written in 2004, growing from Prakash Jha's long accumulation of observations about power and manipulation rather than from a single incident.⁹ Screenwriter Anjum Rajabali, a script consultant on Jha's earlier films Gangaajal (2003) and Apaharan (2004), initially declined the offer to write a film on electoral politics, then proposed a week of evening brainstorming sessions from 7:30 to 10 pm. Midway through that week the two began veering toward the Mahabharata, drawn by its theme of power conflict and cousins competing with cousins.¹⁰

Both creators insist the film was never planned as an adaptation. Rajabali has said that "some elements from the epic came up and got sucked into the story," and that the political element came from re-examining Arjuna's character, who became the protagonist played by Ranbir Kapoor. He described Samar's arc as a pre-Bhagavad Gita to post-Bhagavad Gita graph, and chose a deliberately dark view in which the protagonist who enters politics and gets his hands dirty ends up worse than the others.¹¹ Commentators have mapped the characters onto the epic directly: Bhanu Pratap as Dhritarashtra, Chandra Prakash as Pandu, Bharti as Kunti, and Brij Gopal as Krishna.⁷ Sooraj Kumar parallels Karna, abandoned by a mother who later marries into the ruling family.¹²

The film was also read against real Indian politics. A short New York Times review at release noted inspiration from the Godfather trilogy, overtones of the Mahabharata, and similarities to the history of the Nehru-Gandhi family, and the Indian Express noted that Ranbir Kapoor's character behaves, in parts, like Sanjay Gandhi.⁷^•¹³ The word rajneeti itself combines raj (rule, sovereignty) and neeti (moral philosophy, ethics), a composite the anthropologist Mukulika Banerjee reads as pointing to the rule of law, which she argues the film strips away.¹⁴

Reception

Critical response was divided. The Times of India gave the film 4 out of 5, welcoming the return of plot-driven drama, while Anupama Chopra called it "as exhausting as it is compelling" and Shubhra Gupta of the Indian Express wrote that it "could have been the film of the year" but comes together only intermittently.⁸^•¹⁵ Western critics were cooler: Rachel Saltz of the New York Times rated it 2.5 out of 5, finding it too diffuse to score political points, and the Los Angeles Times called it a convoluted, tonally awkward "Godfather" rehash.⁶^•⁴ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds 22% among nine critics but 65% among audiences.⁶ IMDb records 14 wins and 42 nominations, with a 7.1/10 rating from about 20,000 votes.²

Box office

Raajneeti opened strongly. It grossed Rs 620 million (Rs 62 crore) worldwide on 2,200 screens in its first weekend, and trade analysts were surprised by its overseas performance for a film without song-and-dance romance: $315,048 in the UK, $916,446 in the USA, and $500,000 in the Gulf within the first week.³ In India it opened at 105 million (10.50 crore) on day one, reached 560 million (56.00 crore) in week one, and finished with a net total of 936.6 million (93.66 crore).⁵ The Numbers records a worldwide gross of $27,702,802, of which $1,514,557 came from North American theaters.¹⁶

Legacy

Fifteen years on, the film is remembered both as a commercial high point for Prakash Jha and as a study in amoral politics. Das Gupta's retrospective argues that, unlike the Mahabharata, the film removes the framework of dharma (Hindu concept of moral duty and cosmic order) and replaces it with calculation and political survival, so that power becomes both means and end.⁷ A sequel is in development that would bring Ranbir Kapoor and Katrina Kaif back together and, like the first film, be based on the Mahabharata.¹⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Indian films (individual works) › Hindi films of the 2010s › Hindi films of 2010

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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