Shuddh Desi Prem Kahaani

10 years of Shuddh Desi Romance, Bollywood then and now, Karan Johar and Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani

“Shit bhi bolti hai to lagta hai FM baj gaya” quips Bittoo (Ranveer Singh making his debut) about an upmarket wedding planner in Band Baaja Baaraat (2010). Maneesh Sharma, director, another debutante. Yash Raj Films had launched Anushka Sharma two years earlier and with this film, also starring her, not one but two bonafide stars broke into the scene. Exactly ten years ago in the first week of September, Maneesh Sharma’s Shuddh Desi Romance, also produced by Yash Raj and written by Jaideep Sahni, was released. We were convinced Parineeti Chopra was the next big actor, it was Vaani Kapoor’s first film and Sushant Singh Rajput’s second. Shuddh Desi Romance challenged Bollywood’s idea of ideal romance and took family and marriage out of the equation. The metro city too went out of the window.

The film starred the biggest what-if in Bollywood in recent times and two talents whose prospects are as unidentifiable as Bollywood is today. Looking back, it feels like a different era and another what-could-have-been for Hindi cinema, especially with romance. This was a time when the streets of old Delhi were attractive to writers. Like Band Baaja Baaraat and several films during this period, Bollywood stepped out of the financial capital to widen its social capital. Every top filmmaker in the height of their powers was working with stars. Cut to today there are no experiments in the mainstream, that’s for the OTT/streaming space which is not a medium beholden to the stars. Chances are taken in increments and only when viable. The landscape is vastly different, mix of polarizing political atmosphere, pandemic and streaming means that makers are better off staying safe or in their lane with an audience increasingly weary and suspicious of star charisma. All this till someone delivered something familiar in a new bottle. But before that, a rewind.

Shuddh Desi Romance is set in Jaipur, a complete contrast to Mani Ratnam’s choice of Mumbai as the base for his film on live-in relationships two years later. Sahni and Sharma considered the idea that deeper within India flourished a socioeconomic class that strove to be free and open minded. They broke stereotypes and were mobile in ways that would shock a city slicker. The kind of shock your uncle and aunt who left India for US in the 90s express when they pry into your life. The film featured all three leads talking directly to the camera, it begins with Rajput’s Raghu—Raghuram Sitaram if one alludes to the ultimate upholder of tradition—saying pyaar theek hai, kaam ki cheez hai. Love is handy, he says, a Hindi inflection that harks back to a holy trinity in a Yash Chopra film singing mohabbat bade kaam ki cheez hai, a phrase Chopra, his son and many minions perfected and together built the Great Bollywood Romantic Epics. Two leads sing in unison of love and sincerity, and the third sings with cynicism. Raghu too is cynical here but for different reasons. He is a tourist guide who moonlights as fake invitee in wedding processions, those planned and executed by Goyal (Rishi Kapoor). Gayatri (Parineeti Chopra) becomes one of those part timers in Raghu’s wedding and suddenly he encounters a heady concoction of love and phobia. A runaway from his wedding (to Vaani Kapoor’s Tara), Raghu and Gayatri become inseparable, a fusion of traumatic past and uncertain future makes them give in to the attraction of the present.

The toilet is a recurring motif in Sharma’s film. It’s a marker of escape and loneliness. A place where thoughts turn into bubbles and find new life outside the head. It’s where Raghu and Gayatri take comfort and then flight. Sahni’s script eschews India’s traditional cultural prisons. There are no parents or families in sight, only uncaring guardians or spying neighbors and landlords, and Goyalji. This is a ruse, but the film is fastened to the precipice of a ruse—Goyal’s wedding processions for couples who have no family and therefore no guests. As Gayatri remarks to the audience—six years before Made in Heaven—Indian weddings are where the country’s lies, fault lines and hypocrisies get out in the open. The film’s structure devotes itself to a methodical dismantling of the collective Indian man-child (he is a bungling idiot and Tara remarks “tum bacche ho”) represented by Raghu. His testy volatility is a counterpoint to the many capricious heroines of the past. Sahni and Sharma refuse to reform him, they allow their characters’ imperfections without the need for comeuppance. This is rare today when many works of art list lessons so the audience can go home with a message or post a screenshot. Gayatri and Tara are shrewd enough to use and throw Raghu and not manic enough to be his pixies. If he has no commitment ki himmat, they too are looking for that middle ground between shaadi and chakkar. The film possesses a cyclical structure where characters go through the same motions and the editing rhythm complements this formal ingenuity, the scenes as ephemeral as the relationships. Though characters break the fourth wall, it’s for us to make of their worldviews what we will. Sahni encapsulates the central conundrum in a throwaway dialog at a wedding feast—tikki soft hain kofte hard hain yeh koi tareeka hai? It’s all upside down and going sideways.

It’s been like that for Bollywood for some time now. 2005 to 2014 were some of Bollywood’s most productive years. It wasn’t an era of perfect films but imperfect films bustling with ideas and pre-Instagram aspirational aesthetics that reflected the quality of the industry (for the purpose of this essay we’ll not consider quality of the output as synonymous with industry hits and 100+ crores and other parlance that became fashionable in the last decade). Bollywood had what James Gray described as broad-based slate. There were films of all kinds and people weren’t afraid to fail, like Yash Raj making a Band Baaja Baaraat or Shuddh Desi Romance. In the immensely enjoyable and nostalgic roller-coaster that was Netflix’s The Romantics, Yash Raj Films and Aditya Chopra’s corporate advertisement doubling up as Smriti Mundhra’s archival attempt, this 2013 film barely gets a nod. Instead, for the sake of the box office aficionado, a huge chunk is dedicated to the Dhoom franchise. Now that we are in romance territory, let’s consider the romantics alone—between a larger-than-life Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi and a minor Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na, there was Bachna Ae Haseenon. A Love Aaj Kal sandwiched Dev.D and Love Sex Aur Dhokha. Dharma allowed Shakun Batra to make an inventive romcom while Imtiaz Ali, Anand L. Rai and Bhansali did their own thing, succeeding and failing. We didn’t even get to Lootera, same year as Shuddh Desi Romance, Humpty Sharma all the way till the underappreciated Meri Pyaari Bindu from Yash Raj again.

Several seemingly unrelated things happened at this time. There was belief that present mainstream experiments somehow devalued the past. Bad, isolated readings of star driven 90s hits in new media channels and YouTube meant that we developed a fear of charm itself. Genre conventions were ignored in the quest for realism and the audience developed a distaste for melodrama and world building. But something else happened in 2014 that gradually contracted the slate. We elected a government so far to the right that just two years in, the culture was Islamophobic enough for Karan Johar to apologize for casting a Pakistani actor in his most ambitious film and promise not to repeat it. We felt let down. It would take a few more years for us to realize the true power and reach of this regime. It tipped the government that Bollywood is a tool with immense cultural value and soft power. It can be wielded in ways hitherto unimaginable and like they did with several other institutions in the country, a systemic overhaul began. Consider the events soon after—Kangana Ranaut opened a can of worms bringing up nepotism in Johar’s talk show. Johar announced his Mughal era multi-starrer Takht in 2018 and quietly shelved it. Hindi cinema, at least outside of streaming, made Islamophobic films where past and present interlaced to confound and throw us off our own timeline. As I write this, a rabid hate film won the Best Feature Film on National Integration at the National Awards.

A fraternity that remained united all these years through controversies, backslapping and ideologies was divided within and each side had a champion for dystopian era entertainment. And then Sushant Singh Rajput, already with an enviable filmography, died by suicide. Hate could be orchestrated with assembly line precision, we learned, focusing less on the mental health aspect and more on suicide, nepotism and an anti-establishment fever against Dharmas and Yash Rajs. There is research to show that the anti-Bollywood wave on the Internet that sustained virality for months was well organized and had right wing¹ backing². This didn’t cool down till it reached Shah Rukh Khan’s doorstep³. In the meantime, the south where stars still held cachet because they were seldom allowed to step out of their mass avatar, edged its way in. Pan Indian films became the norm—mythical, politically malleable and utterly sexless. The Bollywood romance that was on the right path ten years ago took a Luv Ranjan themed detour in addition to all the other vices deployed by contemporary climate. A smarting fan base felt apologetic about retroactively rejecting what they relished. To paraphrase James Gray again, the idea of making the same kind of films reduced the cultural value of cinema and alienated different classes of audience. Suddenly, the older folks—we can call them millennials if you insist—longed for those much-maligned 90s opiate of extravagant romance and melodrama that had gone completely missing from the big Bollywood picture. History, even the recent kind, has this uncanny ability to hold a mirror in front of us. It taught us what we missed, what we took for granted in our arrogance and impatience to display performative maturity. Shiny big ass mirrors across shiny stars instead, yes please.

The YouTube algorithm suggests Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham next to Shahid Mallya’s version of Kudmayi from Karan Johar’s latest film Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani starring Ranveer Singh and Alia Bhatt. But the chorus that begins the song—salma sitaron wali shagna di shab aayi re—allows a seamless transition to dekha tenu pehli pehli baar ve from Shava Shava. Its values clash but a spiritual connection powered by parents, family and old-fashioned rigor runs through both films. Goyal in Shuddh Desi Romance laments to Raghu—kabhi to buzurg log ki sun liya karo bhai. Maybe Karan Johar had a similar awakening. We went from his sophomore film about loving toxic parents unconditionally to the dispassionate lot in Dil Chahta Hai till the quixotic ones in JTYJN who wanted their kids married straight out of college. Family went from cheesy to real with good reason—almost always in Shakun Batra films—even in romance with Sahni dismissing them altogether. Johar realized he had to bring both sexy and parents back. Here was a man scrambling for both creative outlet and reinvention of business who spent the last few years doubling down on criticism, reducing his talk show from fun playful banter to open book multiple choice test. Most gifted filmmakers make films they would like to watch but Karan Johar expressly makes only what he’d pay to watch. And like the rest of us, he took his sweet time to get here. He would keep the parents, the biggest stars and introduce a clash of class and tradition.

Thirteen years after Band Baaja Baaraat, Ranveer Singh’s Rocky Randhawa once again says “kya nanu FM ki tarah bajne lage”. The 2011 Singh, unrefined and fresh to stardom, appeared for the first time on Koffee with Karan with the more experienced and possibly media trained Anushka Sharma. He made both Sharma and Johar laugh, cringe and cringe laugh. Nobody could have hazarded a guess that Johar would take him under his wing few years down the line; he admitted how he hated Ranveer in the flesh as well as in the promos of his debut film. Rocky is a throwback to Singh from that episode, moneyed but old moneyed with a mouth that does cartwheels in a potpourri of gauche accents. He is an ice pick of panache that could pierce through the heart of the classy Bengali stereotype that is Alia Bhatt’s Rani Chatterjee with generational wealth. “I hate him as much as I like him”, says Anushka Sharma in the episode and Rani’s blushes betray that sentiment when she asks herself “why are you smiling” after another encounter with Rocky. The central conflict in Rocky Aur Rani is identifiable in 2023, when a classist family is left to deal with their own biases and a traditionalist one is made to recognize their toxicity. Its maker decided to remain teachable, its characters realized they must be teachable and so did the audience. Look what great things could happen if everyone allowed themselves to learn from each other? And after a long time, it did all of this while making the actors look and feel expensive and attractive like that double the life-sized mirrors. It’s coded into the screenplay and dialogues of Ishita Moitra, Shashank Khaitan and Sumit Roy, the bedrock of this dynamic—the joie de vivre of Rocky (and Kanwal Lund) reanimating the savoir vivre of the Chatterjees.

Of all the victories the sweetest is Johar’s realization that art is the best way to push back on everything he’s had to push back on in the last five years. In his twenty-fifth year as a filmmaker in the industry. There is the visible disregard for politicians of all ilk in throwaway scenes, the defense of historicity of Bollywood romantic expression and aesthetics in the nostalgia trip through its songs, and above all, a firm stand against the anti-Bollywood brigade. When Tota Roy Chowdhury’s Chandon says they will break their anti-Bollywood rule and dance the evening away, it’s more than Rocky using his lachak to Kathak. An artistic rebuke of everything happening against the industry off screen takes shape in the form of Bhansali (whose Padmaavat incidentally began the great fall) tribute, the red of Dola Re as much a celebration as seething anger.

There is a lot of chatter about the soap operatic nature of the film but with a whole generation watching Korean dramas out there with beautiful and vulnerable men and women being subversive in the tiniest ways, it’s a wonder that it took this long for Hindi romance to return to basics. Kabhi sahi bhi karna padta hai na yaar says Raghu Sushant Singh Rajput at the end of Shuddh Desi Romance. Nobody did right by him, but it is time to course correct in all possible ways. A lot of things are wrong with Bollywood (see Made in Heaven, where Jazz’s faith in dreamy wonderland of love shredded by two hapless marriages is restored by a starry wedding so quickly that Tara asks, “So you believe in love again?”). We seem to be recovering like Jazz. We don’t know what the future holds but it took just one film to renew our trust. It’s a complicated potion of love and hate with Bollywood and its romances in the last ten years. And as Chandon Chatterjee will tell you, “Pyaar kahan perfect hota hai Rani”.

1. https://twitter.com/joyopal/status/1313671679399260160

2. https://twitter.com/joyopal/status/1573602947493236738

3. https://twitter.com/joyopal/status/1460301325074243589