Dil Se.. at 25: how a daring political romance became a Bollywood classic
Its songs became a sensation, but this expectation-defying romantic thriller was a risky move for star Shah Rukh Khan, which subverted his heroic image.
- Spoiler warning: This article gives away plot details.
When Dil Se.. was initially announced to the Indian public during the summer of 1998, it was through premiering its songs on TV. I was visiting my grandparents in Mumbai that summer and like many Indian kids during the 90s, I was obsessed with Shah Rukh Khan. The premiere of each new Khan movie was an exciting event.
In fact, though it may be regarded as a classic 25 years on, Mani Ratnam’s film failed to win the hearts of audiences or critics at the time. It was those songs by A.R. Rahman that became the sensation. Spontaneous street performances of ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’, the most popular track, erupted across India, and Rahman’s career was launched into the stratosphere. Subsequent films became noted for his involvement often more than the director or acting talent. The song even found its way into a Hollywood movie, Spike Lee’s Inside Man (2006), and indeed an episode of CSI: Miami. When a family friend threw a Millennium Eve party, we played ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’ on repeat from 11:30 to midnight, dancing into the year 2000.
Mixing politics, music and romance, the film sees Khan – perhaps the biggest of all Bollywood superstars – playing Amarkant Varma, a radio jockey for the government-funded All India Radio based out of Delhi. Amarkant travels to Leh in Kashmir on the anniversary of Indian independence to research local views on the state of the nation. The indigenous farmers and herders he meets share near unanimous feelings of neglect, discrimination and oppression by the central government. Amarkant also pursues an enigmatic young woman (played by Manisha Koirala) with ambiguous political motives who he repeatedly crosses paths with on his journey.
In many ways, Khan’s character is the same sort of pathetic but charming romantic he’d played in his most popular hits Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman (1992) and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995). Both his patented laugh and his blubbering and stuttering in tragic situations are on full display here. But Amarkant also faces a political and moral dilemma, which disrupts his romantic aims at nearly every turn and eventually crushes them to dust. Khan’s stature as a hero is subverted in a way that renders his persona smaller than the actual film, something rare to see in Bollywood movies.
In turn, Manisha Koirala was one of the most respected actresses in 1990s Bollywood, but not a superstar like Kajol, who’d often been paired with Khan and had been Ratnam’s first choice for the role. Kajol’s characters were often plucky and snarky, where Koirala more typically played coy and sheepish love interests. But Koirala also had a track record of taking on challenging films, including Ratnam’s own controversial 1995 film Bombay, another political love story, in which she played a Muslim woman who falls in love with the Hindu lead.
Koirala’s performance in Dil Se.. tows a very tricky line between confidence and furtiveness. When Amarkant first encounters her, late at night at a deserted train station, he initially thinks the silhouetted figure is a man. Her eyes dart around to avoid him noticing her, but once it’s too late her returned glare becomes unwavering. Later in the film, once her name, Meghna, and her dark purpose to launch a suicide attack on the the Delhi Republic Day Parade are finally revealed, the pair’s romance begins a turbulent dance with their politics: she is a young woman with a severe distrust in the government and a dangerous mission to carry out; he a naive representative of a government-funded media organisation.
Each step of their dangerous romance is scored to Rahman’s rhythmic music, which draws heavily from Indian folk themes and various traditions in film music. ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’ is based on the Sufi folk song ‘Thaiyya Thaiyya’ by Bulleh Shah and features the powerful rustic voices of playback singers Sukhwinder Singh and Sapna Awasthi alongside rips of electric guitar and the beats of a hand drum called a dholak. ‘Satrangi Re’ incorporates the didgeridoo, while ‘Dil Se Re’ mixes Rahman’s own voice with jazzy guitar strums. Most of the songs in Dil Se.. aren’t tied to the realistic story world of the film, but are more like expressionist dream sequences that erupt in the minds of the characters. Taking place atop a train travelling through misty mountains, ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’ is an explosive longing for companionship, its lyrics referring to walking in the shades of mutual love.
The poetic visual style was typical of Ratnam, whose movies incorporate the romantic arcs and musical showmanship of Indian cinema’s mainstream epics but with a rare eye for beauty in colour and lighting. His work has been influential in shattering “the division of Indian cinema into art and commercial”. But his films are also conspicuously laced with political turmoil, often featuring inter-religious, inter-caste or inter-racial romances and conflicts. Retrospectively, Dil Se.. has been seen as the third entry in an unofficial political trilogy with Roja (1992) and Bombay, the latter of which prompted a bomb attack on Ratnam’s home for its depiction of Muslim-Hindu romance at the time of the demolition of the Babri Masjid and subsequent riots.
The setting for Dil Se.., the northeastern state of Assam, a former independent kingdom before the British Raj, is inherently political. So are the film’s shooting locations, Ladakh and Leh, disputed territories between India and Pakistan that have seen several military interventions. These Himalayan regions are turbulent, but they are also uniquely picturesque and were popular shooting locations for many Hindi cinema classics, including Junglee (1961), Bobby (1973) and Silsila (1981). In Dil Se.. a separatist group (based on the real-life United Liberation Front of Asom) are in conflict with the police and the military. When Amarkant interviews their leader, the militant tries to make the case for his movement as a liberationist struggle rather than terrorism.
The political elements of Dil Se.. might not have proved such a problem for the fate of the film if they hadn’t led to the death of Khan’s character at the end, dooming the central romance. As film critic Nandini Bilal recounted: “I can still see the befuddlement on everyone’s faces … As we filed out of the theater, thoroughly confused, I heard a grumpy auntie complain to her husband: ‘Imagine! We paid to watch Shah Rukh die!’” This was a time when heroes simply didn’t fail, their romances never flamed out completely, and love interests certainly weren’t suicide bombers.
Yet in the years since, as global interest in Hindi cinema has grown, a younger generation of filmmakers, including Anurag Kashyap, Nagesh Kukunoor and Dibakar Banerjee, began to shift the dial on what mainstream Indian cinema could typically encompass. What were once considered disappointing elements in Dil Se.. began to look more like its greatest strengths.
It’s a film that took India’s greatest romantic hero, sees him once again try to win the love of a beautiful woman – but then flips audiences over in their chairs by making that woman a suicide bomber. In doing so, Ratnam suggests an impasse between an urban-rooted optimism in India’s progress, represented by Amarkant, and the tattered and tragic plight of the rural and indigenous, especially women, represented by Meghna. It was a daring play with audience identification, but it would eventually earn the film the respect it always deserved.
Dil Se.. is currently available on Netflix.
