Kinship, road trips, realism: A tale that broke the mould
Until Dil Chahta Hai, and Lagaan for that matter, both released in 2001, much of the preceding decade’s mainstream Hindi cinema was a show-and-tell perpetrating age-old stereotypes. Post-liberalisation, amid an increasingly wealthy middle class, the blockbuster had become bigger and blingier almost to the point of parody.
The year of Dil Chahta Hai was also the year of Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, a film so bloated it remains hard to believe it came to pass. Shah Rukh Khan is ferried home to his family’s over-the-top mansion, in a helicopter that lands on a lawn roughly the size of Gurugram, to reunite with a Swarovskiencrusted family comprising Amitabh and Jaya Bachchan, Kajol, Hrithik Roshan and Kareena Kapoor. Some of these stars then proceed to perform a coordinated dance in a hall the size of Ghaziabad, as staircases sweep away to left and right.
This was a lot, but it was in keeping with the blockbusters of those years, the “NRI films” that Karan Johar kickstarted and that Indians everywhere queued up to watch.
And then here were these three men, Aamir Khan, Saif Ali Khan and Akshaye Khanna, gently navigating the heartbreaks of transition into adulthood, including the confounding loss of friendships that had survived all else, the grief of impossible love and the confusion of not knowing one’s place in the world.
Their bond felt real, tangible. As they lounged, drove around, played volleyball, they created a template for urban Indian bromance that didn’t yet exist. Google Chapora Fort and reams of photos pop up of young men trying to recreate the magic of a lazy afternoon when the three lounged on the ramparts there. The sensitive Sid (Khanna) wondering where they were headed and whether they’d get there together. The mischievous Sameer (Saif) putting a gentle hand on his shoulder. This wasn’t the boisterous friendship of the Hindi blockbuster through the ages. It was something else. And it resonated.
The film, Farhan Akhtar’s directorial debut, was released in theatres on August 10 and made Rs 6.4 crore at the box office. It was the seventh-highest-grossing Hindi film of 2001. Both were considerable feats for a movie that insiders had written off as a huge risk. “We were constantly told how much of a gamble this film was. All our distributors decided that they didn’t want distribute it within 48 hours of the screening,” remembers Ritesh Sidhwani, co-founder along with Akhtar of Excel Entertainment, which produced the film. “Every music label, except T-Series in the end, refused to buy the music for the same reason.”
A fresh timeline
Much of the change reflected there was just beginning to make itself felt in urban India. To a post-liberalisation generation growing up in relative comfort, and confidence, the film was aspirational; looking back, the film, with its road trips and weekends in Goa, its casual approaches to money, relationships and sex, seems almost prophetic.
“Dil Chahta Hai was a breath of fresh air. The modern, urban Indian film was redefined by this film. It was clearly within the framework of mainstream films. It had big stars, songs and romance. But it was also real and had depth. More than anything else, it was ‘cool’,” says filmmaker Raj Nidimoru, one half of the duo Raj & DK (The Family Man, Go Goa Gone, Shor in the City).
If it felt real, perhaps that’s because in many ways it was. Akhtar, who wrote the story, drew on his own life and those of his friends. Then 27, he too had been part of a group where someone played a stupid prank on a girl at a bar, realised he was in love while at the opera, and tried to win a woman’s love far too close to her wedding.
That sense of authenticity, mirrored also in the costumes, sets, dialogue and plot of Lagaan, would alter storytelling in the mainstream. In his autobiography An Unsuitable Boy, Karan Johar writes that he didn’t think his film, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, was as good as Dil Chahta Hai. “I… realised that this is what the new cool was. Up till that point I was the cool guy, because I had got Polo Sport and DKNY into my films. But my film was wannabe-cool. What was really, intrinsically, authentically cool was Farhan Akhtar’s depiction of urban youth, the way they dressed, spoke, the mannerisms.”
Bollywood’s template was usually escapist; even when it used realism, it was still in the fantasy space, says Meenakshi Shedde, film critic and India and South Asia Delegate to the Berlin International Film Festival. Dil Chahta Hai was real and, in many ways, finely balanced. “Though it’s about three young men, it treats its women characters really well, especially Dimple Kapadia’s character (the older woman Sid falls in love with, who is battling addiction amid a terrible divorce in which she has lost custody of her child). Even the smaller characters had so much complexity.”
Twenty years on, it’s a film that has also aged well. For those who were in their 20s then and are closer to middle-age now, the pull is still there but it’s different — not so much about aspiration as yearning, for the freedom of those fleeting years when everything can still line up just right.