'''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]]