Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge

1995 192’ col/scope Hindi d/s Aditya Chopra p Yash Chopra dial Javed Siddiqui lyr Anand Bakshi c Manmohan Singh m Jatin-Lalit lp Kajol, Shah Rukh Khan, Farida Jalal, Amrish Puri, Anupam Kher, Satish Shah

1995’s top-grossing Hindi film following on from the successful Hum Aapke Hain Koun ... ! (1994). Choudhury Baldev Singh (Puri) is a London-based newsagent pining for his native Punjab. He wants to return to his roots by forcing his daughter Simran (Kajol) to marry the son of his old friend (Shah), whom neither has met for 20 years. Simran goes on a European tour before going to India, but there she meets and falls for Raj (Khan). This causes her tyrannical father to uproot his family overnight and return to Punjab, where he is received by dancing peasants in waving paddy fields. However, Raj turns up there and promises to rescue Simran from her intended marriage, but only with the approval of their respective parents. To achieve this, he inveigles himself into the household under a range of masquerades and false promises, until, having made the scheduled marriage impossible, he wins the girl from her reluctant father. As with HAHK, this film also allows for a limited space within the terms of a feudal patriarchy where young people may aspire to a kind of watereddown version of modern subjectivity, represented in consumerist terms, before ‘returning to the fold’. An alternative reading of the film could see it as chronicling the hero’s passage from British-Asian diaspora into traditional Indian patriarchy, with the love story (despite the film’s slogan, ‘Come, fall in love!’) simply sugar-coating the prescription. A remarkable feature of the film is the elimination of e.g. the staple Bachchan formula of the State as a contested site, being replaced here by an unproblematic subsumption of feudal patriarchy into ‘postmodern’ globalisation and the selling of ‘authentic’ identity as something that can only be achieved via consumerism.

Film