THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN CONSERVATISM AND MODERNITY
In India, one movie still draws crowds 27 years after its release
I DON’T SEE ANY OTHER FILMS, JUST THIS ONE
Well past the film’s intermission, the crowd keeps trickling in. Some pay at the ticketing window with a couple of taps on their phone; others dump fistfuls of coins. They are students and office clerks, prostitutes from the waning red-light district nearby, day labourers still chasing dreams in India’s “maximum city”, and the homeless with dreams long deferred.
India’s film industry puts about 1,500 stories on the screen annually. But the audience that files every morning into the Maratha Mandir cinema in Mumbai is here for a movie that premiered 27 years ago — and has resonated so intensely that this once-grand 1,100seat theatre has played it every day since, save for a pandemic hiatus.
The film, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge — which translates as The Big-Hearted Will Take The Bride and is known as DDLJ — is a boy-meetsgirl story set against the backdrop of a moment of immense change and unbridled possibility in India.
The Indian economy had just opened up, bringing new opportunities, new technologies and new exposure to a rising middle class. But it has also brought new strains as the choices afforded by economic opportunity — to decide your own love and your own life — ran up against the protective traditions of old.
In many ways, the India of today looks like India reflected in the movie. The economy is still on the rise, and it is now about 10 times the size it was in the mid-1990s. A technological revolution, this one digital, has opened new worlds. Women are seeking more freedom in a male-dominated society. And the forces of modernity and conservatism remain in tension as an ascendant political right-wing appoints itself the enforcer of conventional values.
The sense of unlimited possibility, however, has receded. As the early rewards of liberalisation peaked and economic inequities deepened, aspirations of mobility have diminished. For those left behind, the world of DDLJ — its story and stars, its music and dialogue — is an escape. For those still striving, it is an inspiration. And for those who have made it, it is a time capsule, the starting point of India’s transformation.
“It grew and grew and grew and went on to, you know, become an heirloom,” said actress Kajol, 48, who played the female lead Simran in the film.
When the pandemic closed theatres for a year, many speculated that DDLJ’s record run would end. But the film is back on for its 11.30am slot at Maratha Mandir, often drawing crowds larger than those at afternoon screenings of the latest releases.
Some of those who show up have watched it here so many times that they have lost count — 50, 100, hundreds.
A taxi driver who was in the line outside the theatre one morning this fall had seen it six times, a welder about a dozen.
Then there were the regular regulars, those who trek here nearly every day. Madhu Sudan Varma, a 68-year-old homeless man who has a part-time job feeding neighbourhood cats, comes about 20 mornings a month.
The woman with her head wrapped in a plastic bag?
“I come every day,” she said. “I like it every day.”
No one knows her real name; it may be Jaspim, but even she is unsure. It doesn’t matter, because everyone calls her by the name she prefers. Simran, just like the star on the screen.
Lying at night in the room she keeps as a prostitute in Kamathipura, Mumbai’s red-light district, she sometimes dreams of the film’s scenes, she said. In the morning, she makes sure she doesn’t miss the show — not even on this day, when the henna she used to dye her greying hair hadn’t yet dried. She would rather come wearing a plastic bag than not make it.
“I don’t see any other films, just this one,” she said. “I feel great when I come here. I get lost in the songs and dance.”
DDLJ is a love story. But it is also about compromise.
Kajol’s character, Simran Singh, is brought up in London, though her father uses the income from the family’s corner store to raise his children in the traditions of India. On a European trip with friends, Simran meets Raj Malhotra, played by Shah Rukh Khan, a wealthy young man raised by a single father. The rest of the film’s three hours are spent on the couple’s efforts to persuade Simran’s conservative father to let go of the arranged marriage he had planned for his daughter and bless their union.
“Go, Simran, go,” the father declares at the end, after the film barrels through tears, bloody fistfights and many songs of longing. “Live your life.”
Kajol said that the movie’s middle path had broken new ground. Before DDLJ, she said, “we only had films that talked about either this way or that; either we had films that celebrated marriages and everybody was involved from uncles to aunties, or it was ‘us against the world; we will fight it out; we will live together, die together.’ I think DDLJ came up with a very simple thought: to say that maybe we can walk a line”.
When the movie was released in 1995, Kajol and Khan were both relative newcomers. Kajol went on to become one of the most successful actresses in Hindi cinema. Khan, 57, found even greater fame, becoming one of India’s most recognisable faces.
Bollywood has long favoured those with legacy and family ties. Khan resonates as an outsider, a child of middle-class struggle in Delhi who lost both of his parents when he was young.
The towering residence he now occupies with his family “is a middle-class monument to a man who didn’t own property”, said Indian economist Shrayana Bhattacharya. “He became this prism and this concept. He represents this idea of mobility.”
Bhattacharya wrote a book, Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh, about how Khan symbolises the possibilities that only India’s liberalised economy could produce and what he has meant to young working women as he has challenged perceptions of masculinity in Indian cinema.
Taking advantage of new channels of information, he has built an image of an empathetic partner who listens, helps with household chores and shares the spotlight with female co-stars.
India is still trying to decide where to set the line that DDLJ suggested it walk between conservatism and modernity. Added to the tension is a Hindu-first fervour under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with Muslims, in particular, becoming a target. Khan, despite his crosscutting appeal, has not been spared.
This month, right-wing groups vandalised cinemas promoting Khan’s latest film after a trailer showed its female star, Deepika Padukone, wearing a saffron bikini. The groups called the choice of saffron an offence to Hinduism, which is closely associated with the colour.
Khan is a product of a secular India — a Muslim who attended a Christian school and married a Hindu. Faced with attacks like these, he has largely stopped commenting on the country’s political direction.
“I am a Muslim, my wife is a Hindu, and my kids are Hindustan,” Khan said on a television show in 2020, using another word for India. “When they went to school, they had to write their religion. My daughter came to me once and asked, ‘What is our religion?’. I simply wrote in her form that we are Indian.”