Rajkumar “Raju” Hirani, born on 20 November 1962 in Nagpur, is an Indian filmmaker known for his Hindi films. His films have won four National Film Awards and 11 Filmfare Awards. He is known for light-hearted films that deal with significant social issues through humour and emotional intelligence, and he began his career as a film editor and a maker of advertisements.
He was born to a Sindhi Hindu family whose ancestors came from Mehrabpur, now in Sindh in Pakistan. His father, Suresh Hirani, ran a typing institute in Nagpur. Hirani studied at St. Francis De’Sales High School in Nagpur and graduated in commerce. His parents wanted him to be an engineer, but he was more interested in theatre and film, and in college he was involved with Hindi theatre, spending a lot of time at the city’s medical college where he had friends.
His father had his photographs taken and sent him to an acting school in Mumbai, but he could not fit in and returned to Nagpur after three days. His father then suggested the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune. The acting course had shut down, and the chances of admission to the direction course looked slim because of the number of applicants, so he chose the film editing course and won a scholarship. At a public event in 2025 he described himself as a “huge fan” of Satyajit Ray and recalled watching Ray’s films for weeks and months during film school.
He tried to work as an editor for many years, but bad experiences pushed him into television advertising, where he established himself as a director and producer of ad films, including a well-known Fevicol advertisement and the Kinetic Luna campaign created by Ogilvy & Mather. He then started working with Vidhu Vinod Chopra on promos and trailers for 1942: A Love Story (1994) and Kareeb (1998), and got his first chance as a film editor on Chopra’s Mission Kashmir (2000).
His first film as a director was the comedy-drama Munna Bhai M.B.B.S. (2003), produced by Chopra and starring Sanjay Dutt and Arshad Warsi. It earned strong reviews, won the National Film Award for Best Popular Film Providing Wholesome Entertainment and the Filmfare Award for Best Film (Critics), and brought Hirani the Filmfare Award for Best Screenplay and his first Best Director nomination. Its sequel, Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006), was his highest-grossing release up to then, with about Rs 1.2 billion worldwide, and also won the National Film Award for Best Popular Film.
3 Idiots (2009) was the highest-grossing Indian film of its time, and his religious satire PK (2014) again set that record. The biopic Sanju (2018), based on the life of Sanjay Dutt, was a commercial success. He is the founder of the production house Rajkumar Hirani Films, and his latest film, Dunki, starring Shah Rukh Khan, was released on 21 December 2023 to mixed reviews.
A third Munna Bhai film remains on hold as of early 2026, according to Wikipedia. Hirani has been continuing to refine the script, and Boman Irani said in January 2026 that it had not begun filming but that he hoped it would be made when the “story is right”.
Featured image: Rajkumar Hirani, director of 3 Idiots, at an event in 2010 (file photo). Photo by Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, licensed under Government Open Data License – India, via Wikimedia Commons.
