Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge

I watched my first Bollywood film yesterday, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge or DDLJ, for the Red Lantern group. Our host, who is from India, said it would be a good starter film if you'd never watched any Bollywood before, because it was one of the most popular movies from the nineties, having run continuously in a Mumbai movie theater for 25 years. Everyone knows the songs, almost everyone has seen the film, and it was a big boost to the career of one of its stars, Shah Rukh Khan, who went on to become one of India's most globally famous actors. The film's characters include NRI (non-resident Indians) or Indians residing abroad, and their conflicting relations to tradition.

Despite a few moments in which characters lament the constraints gender roles place on their lives, the movie strongly upholds the idea that women are the property of men and must be governed by their will.  Apparently, at the time the movie was made, the usual Bollywood trope was that the rebellious pair of lovers would elope, but this movie breaks with that trope by having the man (Raj) seek the woman's father's permission, going so far as to showing him leave when he does not get it. At the very last minute the father changes his mind and the daughter (Simran) has to run to catch the departing train with Raj hanging out the door--a scene that is supposed to read as romantic but that does nothing to contest patriarchal authority to dispose of women.

The opening sequences that introduce the two main characters contrast their gendered roles: she is reciting a poem in which she imagines her future lover, while he is playing sports, swimming, riding a motorcycle, literally racing an airplane as it takes off, just a ball of testosterone. 

Simran is played by the beautiful Kajol (who remains a big superstar as well0 and is a young woman who has grown up in London but whose family expects her to maintain her "Indianness." And she does, sort of, but the two daughters switch off the pop music when dad comes home and put on more acceptable music, with the mother's complicity. She begs to be allowed to travel around Europe on a Eurail pass with her girlfriends for a month, and the father agrees but the friends are a lot racier than she is. She is Westernized but still conservative and obedient to her father's dictate that she go back to India and marry a man she has never seen.

We're supposed to find Raj charming, but the first half of the movie shows him as a spoiled, disrespectful, lazy, sexual harasser whose idea of a joke is to let Simran believe he has raped her while she was drunk--and getting her forgiveness by saying "I'm not a scum, I'm Hindustani" and that respects her honor.

In the second half of the movie, when Simran's family goes back to India for her arranged marriage, our lovers have to hide their relationship as engagement and wedding preparations advance. Raj tries to ingratiate himself with the family in order to win Simran's father's approval. Simran wants to elope, her mother wants them to elope because she wants Simran to have the freedom she never had (her speech about this is a blunt moment when the film foregrounds its contradictions), but Raj is still holding out for a resolution that will allow their love match to also be accepted by the family. When the father finds out that they know each other already (from a photo of the two together that blows out a window and lands at his feet), he is enraged by Raj's duplicity. Simran's unpleasant fiancee and his gun-toting friends set upon Raj and beat him bloody, but Raj wins the fight against the gang in the most wacky fight scene I've ever seen in a movie. Maybe this fight follows Bollywood fight conventions, I couldn't say.

The film presents notions of Indianness from its opening sequence of the father feeding the pigeons in London while lamenting how he still feels foreign living there, in obedience to his role as provider. His goal has been to keep his family Indian, and he believes he has been successful with is obedient daughter. He is furious with Raj's behavior when Raj and his friends try to buy beer from his shop when he is closing up--and with good reason. Raj lies to him then grabs the beer and throws money at him while running away laughing. The father's fury is specifically about how Raj is a typical westernized Indian in his bad behavior. By contrast, Raj's wealthy father brags about the family tradition of  failing at school as they stand looking at family portraits in their mansion, and indulgently gives him a month's vacation before he is to start working at the family business because he wants his son to enjoy what he did not.

Later,  Raj wins Simran (after his horrible joke) when he says he knows how important honor is to an Indian woman and that he would never harm that. When the action returns to India there is a lot of discussion about Raj's family's relation to the homeland. The final fight scene is where Raj asserts his manhood and thereby proves to her father that he will love Simran the most, which is how he justifies his last-second change of heart when he gives his daughter to Raj. Ultimately the conflicts between the tradition of arranged marriage and the love match are resolved by the father's acceptance that Raj is enough of an Indian man to be acceptable.

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In our discussion we talked about: the nineties as a period of globalization for India and the ways this film represented aspirations for an affluent class; how it promoted Stroh beer and a kind of mindless capitalism; gender expectations and how the film's version of NRI life was a kind of fantasy.