How to ruin Sairat: the Dhadak edition

By Poulomi Das

After doing a surgical strike on Mani Ratnam’s OK Kanmani, Karan Johar is all set to ruin Nagraj Manjule’s Sairat by remaking it as Dhadak with Janhvi Kapoor and Ishaan Khattar.

This year, Karan Johar, the guardian angel of Bandra star kids and buyer of regional film rights has set his eyes on ruining… err remaking Nagraj Manjule’s Sairat. Clearly, the copy-paste disaster that was Ok Jaanu seems to have had zero effect on his life goal of appropriating every culture.

His latest edition of #MakeBollywoodMediocreAgain titled Dhadak features Sridevi’s elder daughter Janhvi Kapoor reprising the role of Archi, and Shahid Kapoor’s half-brother Ishaan Khattar essaying Parshya. The film, which he calls an adaptation of the Marathi Sairat, and not essentially a remake, is helmed by Badrinath Ki Dulhania maker Shashank Khaitan, produced by Dharma Productions, and releases on July 20.

A tragic romantic story of a middle-class family, made at a paltry budget of ?4 crore is definitely the kind of film that blends in seamlessly with Karan Johar’s sensibilities. It’s foolish of us to even be worried about the fate of the remake. Especially when a source close to the project has gone on record stating Johar’s intention of “relocating the plot to a more upmarket milieu, and make it more Romeo & Juliet, than play on caste”. The same source also revealed that Khaitan too wanted to do a “lighter take on the original”. If there was an award for gloriously missing the point, who better than Dharma Productions to be the recipient of it? In fact, they might as well call the remake “Ae Ishq Hai Mushkil” if it’s going to look like every other Dharma love story.

His latest edition of #MakeBollywoodMediocreAgain titled Dhadak will feature Sridevi’s elder daughter Janhvi Kapoor reprising the role of Archi, and Shahid Kapoor’s half-brother Ishaan Khattar essaying Parshya. Image credit: Zee Studios/ Dharma Productions

Now that the Dhadak trailer is out, we finally have some more answers. Janhvi and Ishaan play Madhur and Parthavi and the film is set in idyllic Udaipur. They flirt, play antakshari with each other, jumble up accents, and promote Udaipur tourism by running around and romancing in the city’s many architectural wonders. Janhvi shows her dedication to the craft by expressing with her eyebrows instead of her face and Ishaan carries forward his legacy in the unwatchable Beyond the Clouds by getting arrested again. At the trailer launch, Johar claimed that the film is a homage to Sairat. Going by the trailer, Dhadak might be a lot of things, but it is definitely not a homage to Sairat.

But, maybe we’re jumping to conclusions too early. What if Karan Johar proves all of us wrong, and actually dares to show “poverty” in this film for the first time? Who knows, maybe Janhvi’s Archi, and Ishaan’s Parshya’s in Sairat’s Hindi remake are so broke that they are forced to go through the entire film with just an Android phone, unable to upgrade to an iPhone X?

Maybe then Nagraj Manjule will be excited for the Karan Johar-ification of Sairat, instead of claiming that he has no expectations from it.

After all, it’s all about loving your Bollywood remakes.

The article was originally published in Arre.

Poulomi Das is an author at Arre.