Doosra: 3,000 hours of footage, and it was never a Ganguly biopic

A film named Doosra, one of Indian cricket’s loudest celebrations, and a legal back-and-forth that has already reached the Delhi High Court. Director Abhinay Deo has stepped in with a simple clarification: his movie is not Sourav Ganguly’s biopic.

Not Dada’s story, Tara’s fight

Speaking to India Today, Deo said Doosra borrows the emotional charge of Ganguly’s famous shirt-waving celebration at Lord’s after India’s 2002 NatWest Series final, but the film itself belongs to Tara, played by Plabita Borthakur. She is a young woman from small-town Rajasthan navigating individuality, sexuality and relationships.

“We believed that it would be an incomplete story if you only talk about what that moment was. It’s very important to talk about the effect that moment [had] on a normal person,” Deo said.

The idea began with a cricketer who felt left out

The brief came from Chicago-based producers Rohan Sachde and Mahesh Sachde. Rohan played cricket in Australia in the late 1990s and faced racism and prejudice. Watching India’s 2002 win on television became a turning point for him, Deo explained. The director and writer Agnello Oswin Dias then built a fictional narrative around Tara, keeping the focus on the moment’s effect rather than the cricketer’s life.

Seven years, a pandemic, and 3,000 hours of footage

Doosra’s journey to theatres was long:

• Shot in Rajasthan in 2018 and 2019.
• Edited between 2019 and 2020, with an initial plan to release by late 2020.
• Pushed back by COVID-19 and the legal clearing of archival footage.
• Required sifting through around 3,000 hours of footage.

Deo called the clearance process “a nightmare,” with editing coordinated across India, New York and Chicago. The rights detail matters beyond production logistics. Ganguly and production house Luv Films have approached the Delhi High Court alleging personality rights violations and seeking to halt the release.

Personality rights protect how a well-known person’s name, image or likeness can be used commercially. Here, the dispute turns on whether the footage and the fiction stay on the right side of that line. Deo said the makers reached out to Ganguly earlier and informed him about the project. “He was very happy,” the director recalled.

What fans should keep in mind

A separate Ganguly biopic, Dada starring Rajkummar Rao, is in the works. Deo dismissed suggestions that Doosra’s release timing had anything to do with that project: one film is about Sourav’s life, the other is about Tara’s.

So think of Doosra as a sports-adjacent coming-of-age drama, not a highlights reel. Walk in for Tara’s arc, and leave the biography to Dada.

Source: India Today