25 years of DDLJ and how ‘tradition’ replaced ‘state’

With liberalisation, ‘family values’ became more important than ever before

Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995) is completing 25 years this year but it is still widely regarded as among the best Bollywood films of all time, and it is probably the film that Shah Rukh Khan will be most remembered by.

If Hum Aapke He Kaun (1994) announced the arrival of the liberalised era three years after PV Narasimha Rao’s economic liberalisation changed the nation’s ethos, DDLJ took it a step further.

To elaborate, if one were to look at the films of the ‘socialist era’, which include even Rajkumar Santoshi’s Damini (1993), although that was made in the liberalised era, to which Hindi cinema was not yet responding, one finds the nation-state to be a strong presence through the police and the judiciary.

The liberalised era, on its arrival, was interpreted by cinema as meaning the withdrawal of the state from the public realm, and the films, therefore, tried to represent the nation as a community without the state in attendance.

HAHK was such a film with the family gatherings around Kailas Nath representing the nation (as ‘Ramrajya’).

Although the nation had places for those of other religions as well, it was no longer one in which everyone had an equal share (which might make it ‘socialist’) and the economically poorer sections were placed in the position of servants, duly enjoying the patronage of their masters.

Once the state was absent, the issue was what binding force would keep the community together and HAHK hit upon ‘tradition’ as the binding force.

DDLJ reached the sharp understanding that if tradition was what held the community together, those belonging to the community need not even be Indian nationals.

The film is, therefore, a romance between non-resident Indians united not by being Indian nationals but by respecting the ‘Indian tradition’, which mainstream cinema largely identified with Hindu practices.

Simran (Kajol) and Raj (Shah Rukh Khan) live in London but they meet accidentally on a train only when they both embark on European tours. They fall in love with each other but Simran’s conservative father, Baldev Singh (Amrish Puri), who runs a convenience store in London, has promised her hand to a friend’s son named Kuljeet in Punjab.

DDLJ begins with Baldev (Amrish Puri) feeding pigeons at Trafalgar Square and a first-person voiceover tells us how much he longs to return to India.

The rest of the first part of the film is then taken up with Baldev Singh’s plans to re-establish ties with his old friend Ajit Singh in the home country. The proposed alliance between Simran and Kuljeet is to strengthen these ties.

The ‘home’ cherished by Baldev Singh is not the actual Indian nation but an autonomous Punjabi community united by affinities and separate codes, an ‘imagined community’ like those portrayed in the other films but held together only by adherence to tradition.

The happy-go-lucky Raj has no particular yearning for ‘home’ but he chooses to respect ‘community codes’, intent upon getting paternal approval for his suit although Simran’s mother beseeches him to take the girl away.

Shah Rukh Khan had just played an anti-hero role in 'Baazigar' and his impish role here as Raj uses that to reassure that for all his ‘mischief’, he is deeply mindful of tradition and will not violate it.

This brings us to the negative portrayal of Kuljeet in the film since he stands in Raj’s way.

The culminating fight scene in the film in which Raj is beaten up may even be the last one from the ‘dishoom-dishoom’ era. If the film is valorising tradition, the question is why it is representing someone of the home country in this way?

Other films of the era like Bansali’s 'Hum Dil De Chukhe Sanam' (1999) do not accommodate a villain at all.

The mustard fields in Punjab present an alluring view of India in DDLJ, but Kuljeet is a cad. My own understanding is that Hindi films used villains as obstacles until the liberalised era was acknowledged since right and wrong submit to the judgement of the state even in vigilante films.

With the state notably absent in cinema from the mid-1990s, tradition alone could be the judge — even if it was strict as Baldev Singh.

HAHK, we recollect, used the parental figures of Kailas Nath and Prof Choudhury to represent tradition — the protagonists also submitting to their decision over their union — and Baldev Singh takes on that role here. It is also the apparent intent of the film to erase the distinction between Indian nationals and non-residents since tradition is the binding force rather than the nation-state.

With the advent of globalisation in the new millennium, new film motifs became visible but DDLJ remains a cultural landmark.

(The author is a well-known film critic)