Rajkummar Rao Steps Into Sourav Ganguly's Shoes: Why the Dada Biopic Is the Cricket Film India Has Been Waiting For

The morning mist still hangs over the Maidan when the city of Kolkata truly wakes up. But for millions of Bengalis, there is one image that cuts through every fog, every grey morning, every moment of self-doubt: Sourav Ganguly, shirt swirling above his head at Lord's, a defiance so pure it became mythology.

Now, decades later, that moment and the entire extraordinary life behind it is heading to the big screen, with Rajkummar Rao pulling on the whites at Eden Gardens to bring the Prince of Kolkata back to life.

Dada: The Sourav Ganguly Story has officially gone on floors, and Indian cinema just got a whole lot more interesting.

Filming began at Eden Gardens, arguably the most emotionally loaded cricket ground in the country. This was not a coincidental location choice. This is where Ganguly grew up as a cricketer, where Kolkata came out in its hundreds of thousands to breathe together as one crowd, where the air itself seems to carry the memory of every six he ever hit.

Starting the shoot here was a statement of intent from director Vikramaditya Motwane and the entire team. They are not making a sanitised, boardroom-approved tribute. They are going after the full, complicated, combustible truth of one of the greatest sporting lives India has produced.

Rajkummar Rao announced the start of production on Instagram with a photograph taken at the ground and a caption that read simply, "And it begins… The one and only DADA." Seven words. The internet did the rest.

The Man Who Changed Indian Cricket Forever

To understand why this film matters, you have to go back and honestly reckon with what Sourav Ganguly actually did. Not just the runs, though the runs were spectacular. Not just the captaincy record, though that was transformational. What Ganguly did was change the psychological architecture of Indian cricket.

Before Ganguly took over as captain in 2000, Indian cricket had a complicated relationship with aggression. The team toured well in patches but famously struggled abroad. There was a softness, a deference, that opponents learned to exploit.

Ganguly, almost from his first press conference as skipper, made clear that era was finished. He was confrontational, unapologetically emotional, and absolutely clear that Indian players would no longer stand aside on the world stage.

The results speak for themselves. He took over a team that was still recovering from the match-fixing scandal that had shaken the sport to its foundations.

He identified and backed a generation of players who would go on to define Indian cricket for the next two decades.

MS Dhoni, Yuvraj Singh, Harbhajan Singh, Zaheer Khan, and Virender Sehwag all flourished under his captaincy and his belief. He was not just picking players, he was building a culture.

The 2003 World Cup final.

The famous Lord's balcony incident after India won the NatWest series. The battles with Greg Chappell that played out in full public view. His exile from the team, his remarkable return, and then his dignified exit from the game.

The Ganguly story is not a straightforward hero's journey. It is messier and richer than that, and that is precisely why it belongs on screen.

Motwane and Rao: The Right Pairing

Vikramaditya Motwane is a filmmaker with a genuine gift for pressure and interiority. His debut, Udaan, was about a young man suffocating under a father's expectations before breaking free.

Trapped showed a man surviving impossible circumstances through sheer mental tenacity. Lootera was about longing and loss stretched across seasons. In each case, Motwane found the emotional core beneath the surface drama and built his film outward from there.

Ganguly's story, for all its public spectacle, is fundamentally an interior one. The question that runs through it is what it feels like to know, with total certainty, that you belong at the top of your sport, and then have the world repeatedly try to tell you otherwise. From being dropped on his Test debut tour, to the Chappell years, to fighting his way back into the squad in his late thirties, Ganguly's career is a sustained argument against self-doubt. Motwane is exactly the kind of director who can put that argument on film without it feeling like a motivational poster.

Rajkummar Rao brings his own credibility to the table. He has never been a star in the conventional Bollywood sense and has deliberately built a career around transformation and character work. Newton, Stree, Shahid, Bareilly Ki Barfi: each one required him to disappear into someone else entirely, and each time he managed it.

The physical preparation for Dada has already been widely reported, with Rao explaining in detail the weight gain and loss cycles he has undergone across multiple simultaneous biographical projects. This is not an actor phoning it in. This is someone who understands that playing a real person, especially one this beloved, demands a level of commitment that goes beyond performance and into something closer to devotion.

Cinematographer Siddharth Diwan, who shot Queen and Trapped among others, joins the team. His work tends to find beauty in constraint and emotion in close physical detail, which should serve a cricket film beautifully. Cricket, despite taking place across enormous grounds, is ultimately an intimate sport. So much of it happens in the six inches between a batsman's ears.

Why This Film Is Needed Right Now

Indian cinema has had a complicated history with the sports biopic. The genre can tip easily into hagiography, smoothing out the edges of a complicated life until it resembles a highlights reel rather than a human story. The best sports films in world cinema, from Raging Bull to Rush to Fire in Babylon, succeed because they refuse that comfort. They insist on the full picture: the ego, the failure, the reinvention, and the cost of greatness on the people around those who achieve it.

Ganguly's story contains all of those ingredients. The falling out with Greg Chappell, whatever the complete truth of it, was a genuine drama involving real professional and personal stakes. His relationship with Kolkata, with Bengal, with the question of what it means to carry an entire region's pride on your shoulders, is a story with genuine political and cultural texture. The BCCI presidency and his role in shaping Indian cricket administration adds another dimension entirely.

There is also the nostalgia factor, which should not be underestimated. An entire generation of Indian cricket fans grew up watching Ganguly. They remember exactly where they were during the NatWest final.

They remember the feeling of watching him take on Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath at their peak and not blink. For those fans, this film is not entertainment in the ordinary sense. It is a return to something that mattered enormously, rendered visible again.

Luv Ranjan producing under Luv Films, reuniting once more with Motwane, suggests a team that believes in the material enough to protect it. The rest of the cast remains unannounced, which only adds to the anticipation.

Rao was last seen in Maalik, has Toaster releasing on OTT on April 15 opposite Sanya Malhotra, and will also portray lawyer Ujjwal Nikam in a separate biopic. He is clearly in a period of exceptional creative ambition, taking on complex real-life figures back to back with full physical commitment each time.

But among everything on his slate, Dada feels like the one that could define a career chapter entirely on its own. Because Sourav Ganguly is not just a cricketer. He is an emotion. And the day the cameras rolled at Eden Gardens, Indian cinema took one more step toward finally giving him the story he deserves.

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