EXCLUSIVE: Sulaiman Merchant reveals Chak De! India title track was rejected about 6 times before the final version

Sulaiman Merchant shares stories behind the making of some of his iconic songs including Chak De! India title track in an exclusive conversation with Bollywood Hungama.

By Bollywood Hungama News Network -

November 15, 2022 - 2:00 PM IST

Salim Merchant and Sulaiman Merchant are among India's finest musician duos. The duo composes music predominantly for Hindi films.

EXCLUSIVE: Sulaiman Merchant reveals Chak De! India title track was rejected about 6 times before the final version

Over the years, music composers Salim-Sulaiman have managed to be one of the most revered names in the realm of Hindi film music. From Chak De! India, Fashion to Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, Band Baaja Baaraat and much more, the Merchant brothers have come a long way creating smash hit music albums for numerous Bollywood films for over a decade now.

In an exclusive music room interview with Bollywood Hungama, the music duo shared interesting behind-the-scene stories of how they created musical masterpieces. Talking about the course of creating their chart-buster sports anthem Chak De! India, Sulaiman said, “You know at one point we were ready to give up the film because we weren’t able to crack the main song of the film. We had cracked all the other songs like Badal Pe Paon and all, but this one song we were not being able to crack.”

“Two songs actually,” Salim interrupted. “I’ll share the story of the other song.” Sulaiman then continued, “When you read the script, the script has some kind of nobility, there’s depth in it. You see Kabir Khan’s character is written very well; it shows the depth of his personality. We felt that the main song, which is Chak De! India, should have a little more depth, should have patriotism and all of that.”

He added, “So, every time we made the song, Aditya [Chopra] would come or Shimit [Amin] would come and say ‘Man this is not working, let’s try something else.’ So, we did about 6-7 versions and we did it with all our heart and soul and we knew this is going to be a big, important song.”

“After the 7th version, we were all sitting and we were like ‘Man I don’t know what to do,’” Sulaiman shared. “[We were] just not getting into the zone. So, Salim said ‘You know, if there’s one more rejection, I just don’t want to do this film.’ I said we’ll do it. Then we went to Jaideep [Sahni] and we said ‘Jaideep, why don’t you write something.’”

Further telling us about the song, Sulaiman said, “So, Jenny wrote Kuch Kariye, Kuch Kariye, Nas Nas Meri Khaule Haye Kuch Kariye... Haye To Chal Zid Phadiye, Doobe Tariye Ya Mariye and then Chak De Ho Chak De India. We were like ‘okay there is some motivation here and then we started working on that. And then Aditya of course said ‘Make it celebratory, make it about the win. It was about the win.”

Starring Shah Rukh Khan, Chak De! India was directed by Shimit Amin and produced by Yash Raj Films. The film threw the spotlight on hockey and became an instant craze. The film portrays Kabir Khan (Shah Rukh Khan), the coach of the Indian Women's National Hockey Team who dreams of making his all-girls team emerge victorious against all odds.