Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman is a 1992 Indian Hindiromance comedy film directed by Aziz Mirza starring Shahrukh Khan, Juhi Chawla, Nana Patekar and Amrita Singh. Khan plays Raj Mathur, a young Diploma Holder in Civil Engineering from Darjeeling who comes to Bombay hoping to become a successful engineer. The film emerged as a commercial success. The rights to this film are owned by Khan's Red Chillies Entertainment. Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman was released in Japan in 1997. While Indian Parallel Cinema, including Satyajit Ray's Bengali films such as The Apu Trilogy, was known in Japan, Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman introduced the commercial masala film style, which was well received by Japanese audiences, with the film becoming a commercial success in the country. This sparked a short-lived boom in Indian films released in Japan, for the next two years, paving the way for the Japanese success of Rajinikanth's Muthu in 1998.
Plot
Raj Mathur is a young Diploma holder in civil engineering from Darjeeling who comes to Bombay with only one ambition — to become a big engineer. In Bombay, he arrives in a lower-middle-class locality in search of a distant relative, only to discover he has left years before. He spends the night at a temple, where he meets a philosophical streetside performer Jai, who becomes a close friend and gives him a place to stay. With no connections and no experience, he finds it hard to get a job in the city until a beautiful girl Renu, finds him a job as a trainee with the construction company where she works as a secretary to Chabbria. They eventually fall in love with each other. As he becomes successful he gets the attention of Chhabria's daughter Sapna. They spend more and more time together and he soon gets caught up in the rich and glamorous lifestyle. Sapna has fallen in love with Raju, but when she finds out that he loves Renu, she is heartbroken. In the meantime, Raju's enemies are conspiring against him and they collapse a bridge which was under Raju's supervision. He gets the blame and soon realizes that the glamorous world of the rich is not what he wants. In the end, Raju decides to leave. Most people were asking Jai when Raju would come back. Jai told them when he turns his head around and looks at Renu, he will have no choice but to come back. Just a second earlier, Jai says "Palat" then Raju turns and looks at Renu. He and Renu finally get reunited again. The movie plot is loosely based on the Raj KapoorclassicShree 420.
Sippy initially wanted to cast a better known actor than Shahrukh Khan who was still a newcomer at the time. But the co-producer Vaswani eventually convinced him. However, Sippy decided to cap the budget of the film at only Rs 6 million. Vaswani talked Juhi Chawla into playing the female lead. Chawla was an established actress at the time. Vaswani convinced her to take the role by promising that Shahrukh Khan was the "next Aamir Khan". Chawla had heard of Shahrukh Khan but had never met or seen him. She was taken aback by his skinny frame and untidy hair when they first met on the sets. That night she called Vaswani and yelled, "Eeek is this the next Aamir?!". Shahrukh Khan got married during the making of the film. Still struggling financially, he borrowed suits from the film's costume department for the wedding. Aziz Mirza and Vivek Vaswani attended the ceremony.
