Opinion Netflix’s The Romantics: How Yash Chopra’s subversive love stories changed Hindi cinema

One of Chopra’s most transgressive films was Silsila (1981), a rare mainstream film addressing extra-marital love. Shockingly for its time, the film’s sympathy lay with its adulterous lead characters, their story framed as one of star-crossed lovers. Silsila also showed the vulnerability of each character: The lovers who were torn apart when younger and then reunited, and their spouses who try their best to navigate this new twist in their lives. In Chopra’s hands, nothing is sordid, even as the film manages to discuss the possibility of love and marriage being mutually exclusive. The film flopped, despite its conservative ending (the married couples stay married and even fall in love with each other).

Lamhe (1991) was another film by Chopra that dealt with a love not entirely accepted by society. As a young man, Viren (Anil Kapoor) falls in love with Pallavi (Sridevi) who is a few years older and in love with another man. Decades after her death, he falls in love with Pallavi’s grown-up daughter Pooja (also played by Sridevi). While the first half showed that it is possible to love someone and still let them go, the second half showed the inner turmoil of a man who comes to love a woman much younger than him, complicated by the fact that she looks exactly like the woman he once loved, despite having a very different personality. Incidentally, Chopra had been warned by his son Aditya against making Lamhe, which he described as “dangerous”. He told his father that the country was not ready for the film, thus revealing himself to be the more conservative filmmaker of the two.

It’s not surprising then that Aditya’s directorial debut, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jaayenge (1995) was YRF’s next big love story. In a way, it signified the reins being handed over from one generation to the next (Chopra did not stop being involved in films after his son’s debut). At the same time, DDLJ, even as it retained the glamorous trappings that YRF romances were known for — the stunning natural beauty of Switzerland and grand sets and costumes — had very little of the earlier films’ subversiveness. Over the course of the film, the hero Raj transforms from a “bad” British-Indian who steals beer from a fellow NRI to a man with such deep reverence for Indian “morals” and traditions that he refuses to elope with his beloved Simran — no matter how much she and her mother beg him to — insisting that he will win her father’s approval for their relationship.

What changed? Much can and has been said about the turn that DDLJ marked, not only in YRF’s films, but in the Hindi film industry in general, and how it was influenced by and influenced post-liberalisation changes in India. The new romance reflected the new Indian – a consumer who bought more and became more global while holding on to a conservative, almost reactionary notion of “sanskaar”. However, one thing is certain: Yash Raj Films would never be the same again.

arushi.bhaskar@indianexpress.com