By Ayesha Khan 
Mumbai, May 1: When Riteish Deshmukh first said he wanted to make a film on Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, a lot of people smiled politely and moved on. That was 2015. The man best known for cracking jokes in Housefull sequels was going to make an epic historical drama about Maharashtra’s greatest king. Sure he was.
Well. Here we are.
Raja Shivaji opened across India this morning, and if the packed theatres and housefull boards at multiplexes across Maharashtra are anything to go by, those polite smiles look pretty foolish now. People showed up. They showed up in big numbers, and many of them showed up wearing saffron, carrying marigolds, some with tears already in their eyes before the lights even went down.
That does not happen for a normal Friday release.
Eleven Years. Think About That.
Most people cannot stick to a gym routine for eleven weeks. Riteish Deshmukh spent eleven years building this film. Not eleven years of waiting around. Eleven years of reading history books, fighting for budgets, rewriting scripts, finding the right cast, and eventually deciding that if this film was going to be done properly, he would have to direct it himself.
He read books most people have never heard of. Vedh Mahamanawacha. Shree Raja Shivchatrapati. Old texts, dense historical accounts, the kind of material you do not browse through casually. He reportedly trained in traditional Maratha weaponry and horse riding just to feel physically connected to the character he was portraying.
At some point this stopped being a film project and became something closer to a personal obsession. You can either find that inspiring or slightly worrying. Probably both.
The film was shot across actual forts in Maharashtra, through the Western Ghats, in Satara, Wai, Mahabaleshwar, and several locations in Mumbai. Santosh Sivan, who shot Mani Ratnam’s Iruvar and Asoka among other classics, handled the camera. The budget is believed to be the highest ever for a Marathi language production. Ajay-Atul, the composer duo behind some of the most beloved songs in recent Marathi and Hindi cinema, did the music.
None of this is small. None of this was cheap. And none of it was accidental.
Who Is In This Film, Exactly?
Here is the cast list, because it needs to be read in full to be believed.
Riteish Deshmukh as Shivaji Maharaj. Sanjay Dutt as Afzal Khan. Abhishek Bachchan. Vidya Balan. Boman Irani. Fardeen Khan. Bhagyashree. Mahesh Manjrekar. Sachin Khedekar. Jitendra Joshi. Amole Gupte. Genelia Deshmukh. And, as a special appearance, Salman Khan.
That is not a Marathi film cast. That is a cast that most big-budget Hindi productions would be proud of.
Salman Khan plays Jeeva Mahala, a warrior who in actual history shielded Shivaji Maharaj during an attack that followed the famous Afzal Khan encounter. The role was apparently not originally planned for him. According to reports, Khan himself expressed interest after hearing about the project, shot his portions over two days in November last year, and delivered what insiders are describing as some genuinely intense scenes.
Two days of Salman Khan in a historical battle sequence. That alone is worth showing up for.
Sanjay Dutt as Afzal Khan, though, might be the real talking point. The confrontation between Shivaji Maharaj and Afzal Khan is one of those history moments that every Maharashtrian child grows up hearing about. Two powerful men. A meeting that was supposed to be peaceful. A betrayal. And then one of the most dramatic reversals in medieval Indian warfare. Dutt, physically imposing and genuinely frightening when he wants to be, seems well cast. The trailers suggest the confrontation sequence has been handled with real weight.
The Court Drama Nobody Needed, But Got Anyway
The day before Raja Shivaji was set to open, somebody decided to take the makers to court.
An NGO called Sree Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Foundation filed a petition in the Bombay High Court arguing that the film’s title was disrespectful. Their problem was that the title says Raja Shivaji rather than Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. By leaving out the word Chhatrapati, they argued, the filmmakers were somehow diminishing the king’s dignity. They wanted the title changed and the release stopped.
The Bombay High Court bench, led by Chief Justice Shree Chandrashekhar and Justice Gautam Ankhad, heard the petition on Thursday and was, to put it gently, unimpressed.
The producers’ side explained something fairly straightforward. The film is about Shivaji Maharaj’s life before his coronation in 1674. He was not yet Chhatrapati during the period the film depicts. The title reflects that. There is a disclaimer in the film saying exactly this, cleared by the Central Board of Film Certification. The bench looked at all of this, then looked at the fact that the petition had arrived two days before the release of a film announced publicly in 2024, and said, essentially, no.
The court called the PIL motivated. It noted the petitioner had relied heavily on Wikipedia for its arguments, which is not usually a great sign in a High Court. It said there was nothing remotely derogatory about the title Raja Shivaji and dismissed the petition entirely.
Film released. Crisis over.
Though it does say something about the temperature around anything involving Shivaji Maharaj in Maharashtra. This is a subject where people feel deeply and sometimes act impulsively. Deshmukh knew this going in. The fact that he had already built the disclaimer into the film, that the CBFC certificate was in order, that the legal argument was ready and clear, suggests he anticipated this kind of challenge and prepared for it.
The Money Side of Things
Trade analysts have been tracking the advance bookings closely, and the picture is interesting.
The Marathi version had already crossed Rs 3 crore gross in pre-sales before opening day, including blocked seats. For a Marathi film, that is a seriously strong number. The Maharashtra audience has clearly decided it wants to see this.
The Hindi version is a different matter. Advance bookings from outside Maharashtra have been relatively quiet, with early estimates suggesting the Hindi language opening will be somewhere around Rs 2 crore net. For a film with this cast and this promotional push, that is not what the makers would have been hoping for.
It raises an honest question. Does a film this specific to Maharashtrian identity, this rooted in a particular region’s history and pride, have the same pull for a family in Lucknow or Coimbatore that it does for someone in Pune or Kolhapur? The cast would suggest it should cross over. The music has already crossed over, with both the Chhatrapati anthem and Jai Shivrai doing well on national streaming platforms.
But historical epics about regional heroes have a complicated record in pan-India markets. The next three days will answer the question more clearly than any advance booking number can.
What This Day Actually Means
May 1 is Maharashtra Day. The anniversary of the state’s formation in 1960. In Maharashtra, this is not just a holiday. There are tributes at Raigad fort, at Shivneri, at the Gateway of India. Statues garlanded since early morning. Speeches. A collective act of remembrance that happens every year with genuine feeling.
Into that day comes a film about Shivaji Maharaj, the single figure around whom Maharashtrian identity orbits most completely. The timing is not coincidental and it is not just marketing. It is Riteish Deshmukh, a man from this culture, making a statement about what he believes his cinema should look like.
He spent years being asked when his next comedy was coming. He spent those same years quietly building something else entirely. There is a word in Marathi, used often in stories about Shivaji Maharaj himself, about people who commit to something without knowing whether it will succeed, simply because it needs to be done.
Today, the house full boards are up. The music is playing inside packed auditoriums. And somewhere in all of that, eleven years of stubbornness are finally having their moment.
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- Ayesha Khan
- Ayesha Khan
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Arun Upadhayay