Chak De! India, the 2007 Film About a Women's Hockey Team, Won the National Film Award for Best Popular Film Providing Wholesome Entertainment and Ranked Third on Box Office India's 2007 Gross List

Chak De! India won the National Film Award for best popular film providing wholesome entertainment at the 55th National Film Awards, which cover films of 2007. The Press Information Bureau (PIB), the government’s press office, records that the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting announced the winners on 7 September 2009, naming the Hindi film Chak De India for that award and Kanchivaram best feature film. Sai Paranjpye headed the feature film jury, which judged 92 entries. President Pratibha Devisingh Patil was due to present the awards at Vigyan Bhawan in New Delhi on 21 October 2009.

Shimit Amin directed the film and Aditya Chopra produced it for Yash Raj Films. It opened on 10 August 2007. Jaideep Sahni wrote the story, screenplay, dialogues and lyrics, and Salim-Sulaiman composed the music, according to the studio’s film page. Shah Rukh Khan plays Kabir Khan, a former national hockey captain who becomes coach of the Indian women’s team. Khan’s whole career is covered in tuput’s article on Shah Rukh Khan. This one is about the film.

A newspaper report on a Commonwealth Games final

Sahni told The Quint in 2017 that the idea began with a newspaper report on the Indian women’s hockey team’s win at the 2002 Commonwealth Games, together with the team’s Asia Cup result. The report made him want to know more, he said, and the time he then spent with the team, its coaches and its staff made him want to write a film about them. A book came to mind first, then a documentary, before he settled on fiction.

ESPN’s 2018 account of the Manchester Games describes the match as the underdog story that inspired the film. India, ranked 17th, beat the fifth-ranked hosts England by a golden goal (the first goal in extra time, which ends the match) in the final, and ESPN names Mamta Kharab as the scorer. Film Companion notes that the team in the film is fictitious.

Chopra heard the idea while Bunty Aur Babli was going into production, Sahni says. The pitch covered the team’s practice conditions and how it kept winning without being widely known, and Chopra agreed to make the film. He then suggested Amin, the director of Ab Tak Chhappan. Match strategy came from hockey people and the team’s coach, whom Sahni names as Kaushik.

A coach with a past

Raja Sen of Rediff described Kabir Khan in his review of 10 August 2007 as a disgraced player who pulls a team of misfits together to win the World Championship. The Quint’s interviewer puts the backstory more specifically, as a captain wrongly accused of letting Pakistan win a crucial game. Amin told The Quint he was sceptical at first that this thread could work without being exploitative or tasteless.

The Star of Mysore ran an interview with Mir Ranjan Negi on 2 August 2021 under a subheading calling him the real Kabir Khan of Indian hockey. Negi said he played for India from 1978 to 1982 and was blamed after India lost the 1982 Asian Games final to Pakistan, with some alleging he took money from Pakistan. The film, in his words, is nothing compared with what he went through. On the character itself he said nothing in that interview, so the comparison stays the newspaper’s.

Players from Jharkhand to Manipur

Film Companion says the film introduces young women from various parts of the country, including Jharkhand, Mizoram and Manipur, and reads that as evidence of the film’s interest in representation. The same piece calls some of the players walking clichés, naming the hot-tempered Punjabi Balbir, played by Tanya Abrol, and the Haryanvi tomboy Komal, played by Chitrashi Rawat.

It is rare to get so many characters from different ethnicities, religions and regions into one story, Sahni told The Quint, and he used the chance to deal with gender, racism and religion. Yash Raj Films’ credits list Shilpa Shukla as Bindia Naik, Sagarika Ghatge as Preeti Sabarwal, Vidya Malavade as Vidya Sharma, Seema Azmi as Rani Dispotta, Nisha Nair as Soimoi Kerketa, Masochon V. Zimik as Molly Zimik and Kimi Laldawla as Mary Ralte, among others.

Turned away at early screenings

The film did not impress its first audiences. Feedback from friends-and-family screenings was uniformly discouraging, Sahni told The Quint. Multiplexes sent back a promotional video of the players, he said, with a warning that nobody would come to the film. Khan’s response, as Sahni tells it, was that he was happy with it and that the team should be proud of what it had made.

Amin said the second half was called too fast and the first half too slow, and that with the 10 August release date fixed there was no time to rework it. Sahni added that a year later the same viewers could not get enough of the same players.

Reviews and the 2007 box-office list

Sen wrote that the film struggles at times to balance melodrama with the sports genre, and called it “a fine, true-blooded sports movie” that deserves applause.

Box Office India’s page for the film lists a net of Rs 66.54 crore (a crore is 10 million) in India, an India gross of Rs 85.86 crore, a worldwide gross of about Rs 101.82 crore, a first week of Rs 21.53 crore and a budget of Rs 22 crore. Its 2007 table of India grossers ranks Chak De India third, behind Om Shanti Om at Rs 109.78 crore and Welcome at Rs 98.76 crore, and marks it Super Hit. Trade outlets give different totals, so these are one outlet’s figures and not settled ones.

The National Award and the other prizes

Yash Raj Films reports that the 55th National Film Awards ceremony was held in New Delhi on Wednesday, 21 October 2009, with Yash Chopra and Amin collecting the award from the President.

Filmfare gave Khan its best actor award for the role and its critics’ award for best film, credited to Amin, according to Indicine’s list of winners, and the studio’s page agrees. The studio’s awards page also lists, for the film, best film, director, actor and story at the International Indian Film Academy awards, best film at the Zee Cine and Screen Awards, and the Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitivity from the United Nations Population Fund.

What people in hockey say the film did

The claims here are attributed because none of the sources measures how many girls took up the sport or how funding changed. Kisholoy Roy wrote in Advertising Express in January 2008 that, beyond its box-office success, the film triggered tremendous interest in hockey, and that “Chak De! Effect” had become common jargon. Roy added that many believed the effect was temporary. Adam Wallish, a Hockey Australia board member quoted in the piece, said the film would give Indian hockey a much-needed boost.

The Quint wrote in 2017 that the film gave India a sports anthem and changed how women athletes and hockey are seen. In the same interview Sahni said women athletes of all ages, from hockey and other sports, told him the film had got them right. He said the title song became the sports anthem the producer had asked for, played now for every sport. Negi told the Star of Mysore that he has met many youngsters inspired to play hockey by the film.

The real team since

In Tokyo, on 2 August 2021, India’s women beat three-time champions Australia 1-0 to reach their first Olympic semi-final, with Rani Rampal as captain and Sjoerd Marijne as coach, The Tribune reported. Khan wrote to Marijne on social media that day, signing off as “Ex-coach Kabir Khan”, and asked the team to bring some gold back. Marijne had signed his own post “The Real Coach”. India lost the bronze-medal match 4-3 to Great Britain on 6 August 2021 and finished fourth, Outlook reports.

On 2 October 2026, India beat China 1-0 in the Asian Games women’s hockey final in Japan. Hockey India’s report credits Lalremsiami with the goal, a reverse-stick strike in the tenth minute, and goalkeeper Savita with saving a China penalty stroke. The report calls it India’s second Asian Games women’s hockey gold and its first since 1982, and the team was led by Salima Tete. The men’s team’s two Olympic bronze medals are covered in tuput’s article on India’s hockey bronzes. Another women’s team, India’s cricketers, won the 2025 World Cup, the subject of tuput’s article on women’s cricket.

That gold carried a direct place at the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics, and FIH reports that India is the third women’s team, after the United States and the Netherlands, to confirm its place there.