Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri

Twenty-five years later, two defining films of 2001 look very different through the lens of time

Twenty-five years can do strange things to our memory of a film. What once seemed inseparable from greatness may, with distance, reveal itself as something more complicated: the excitement of discovering a film at exactly the moment when we were ready for it. Something about the film, something about the time, something about ourselves comes together, and for a while it becomes impossible to separate the three. That was how I experienced Lagaan and Dil Chahta Hai in 2001. I loved them, completely and unreservedly. I thought they were great films. More than that, I thought they represented something new in Hindi cinema. Twenty-five years later, I find myself in the slightly uncomfortable position of arguing with my younger self.

I no longer think either film is the masterpiece that its reputation has made it. That isn’t to say that either film is bad. Quite the contrary. Both are important, influential, hugely enjoyable films. Both captured something about Hindi cinema at a particular historical moment. Both altered the possibilities of mainstream film-making in ways that continue to be felt. But somewhere along the way, we began confusing what these films represented with what they actually achieved. Perhaps we mistook the importance of the moment for the greatness of the films.

In 2001, that distinction was much harder to make. Hindi cinema seemed to be standing at an interesting threshold. Liberalization had begun to manifest itself not merely in economic statistics but in lifestyles. Satellite television had altered the cultural landscape; MTV had changed the way young Indians listened to music and looked at themselves; the multiplex was emerging as a new exhibition space; and a professional urban class was earning more, travelling more, consuming more and, inevitably, wanting to see some version of itself on screen. The old Hindi-film grammar had not disappeared, but it was beginning to look increasingly out of step with the lives of the people who were now becoming its most enthusiastic consumers.

And then came Lagaan and Dil Chahta Hai within three months of each other. It is difficult now to convey quite how significant their arrival felt. They seemed to announce, in completely different ways, that Hindi cinema was entering another age. Lagaan took us back to colonial India: a drought-stricken village, an oppressive British officer, caste and religious divisions, and a cricket match that becomes a battle for survival. Dil Chahta Hai took us into the bedrooms, cars, cafés, holidays and emotional lives of three affluent young men who seemed to have very little to worry about except themselves. One was a fantasy of collective freedom; the other was a fantasy of individual freedom. In 2001, both were intoxicating.

Lagaan

I remember the experience of Lagaan almost as much as I remember the film. It was the kind of movie that seemed to justify the multiplex itself. The audience response became part of the entertainment. When the cricket match gathered momentum, the theatre became a stadium. We weren’t merely watching Bhuvan and his team; we were willing them to win. The premise was irresistible: villagers unable to pay an exorbitant tax imposed by their British rulers are given one impossible chance: defeat the British at cricket and the tax will be waived. It was a wonderful piece of popular storytelling, and Ashutosh Gowariker had the audacity to mount it on an enormous canvas. At the time, its scale seemed inseparable from its greatness.

Twenty-five years later, however, what strikes me is how conventional the actual storytelling is. The villagers reject Bhuvan’s impossible proposition; he persists; a team is assembled; each recruit brings a particular skill; differences threaten to destroy the group; they overcome those differences; training begins; the British seem unbeatable; and the match goes down to the wire. It is the classic underdog sports movie transferred to colonial India. The originality lies in the setting and the conceit. The emotional machinery is familiar. That doesn’t make the film unsuccessful. Popular cinema has always depended on familiar structures. But it does complicate the idea of Lagaan as a revolutionary masterpiece.

Its characters, too, are less complex than I remembered. The film’s celebration of India’s diversity was one of the things I admired most in 2001. A Hindu, a Muslim, a Sikh and an untouchable become part of the same team. It was an image of India that was enormously reassuring. But the characters are often required to represent ideas before they are allowed to be fully human. Kachra is the untouchable; Ismail is the Muslim; Deva Singh Sodhi is the Sikh. Each contributes to the film’s larger argument about unity. Kachra’s inclusion is particularly telling: the man excluded by caste is welcomed when his skill with the ball becomes indispensable to the team. The gesture is progressive; the characterization is less so.

Bhuvan himself is almost impossibly virtuous. He is brave, persuasive, generous, physically capable and morally certain. He is a splendid hero, but he isn’t a particularly complicated human being. The colonial world, meanwhile, is drawn in broad strokes. Captain Russell is almost pure villainy, while Elizabeth is the sympathetic British outsider who recognizes the humanity of the Indians and helps them learn the game. The historical conflict is consequently reduced to a moral fable. Perhaps that is precisely what Lagaan needed to be to work as popular cinema. But again, the more I look at it, the harder I find it to sustain the word ‘masterpiece’.

There is another thing I now notice about Lagaan: it is extraordinarily good at manufacturing emotion. Every obstacle becomes an opportunity for uplift; every difference becomes an occasion for reconciliation; every weakness acquires a compensating strength. The socially excluded man has the crucial skill. The villagers who know nothing about cricket learn the game. The team fractures only so that its eventual unity can become more stirring. The film doesn’t merely discover emotion; it manufactures it, and it manufactures it extremely efficiently. I was happy to be manipulated. I wanted the six. I wanted Russell defeated. I wanted the villagers to win. I still do. But I don’t necessarily mistake that emotional satisfaction for complexity.

The film’s nationalism is also wonderfully uncomplicated partly because its enemy is the British. The conflict is safely external. For the duration of the story, caste, religion and social divisions can be suspended because there is an obvious oppressor standing outside the community. But what happens when the conflict is internal? What happens when Indians are divided not by a colonial tax collector but by the structures of caste, class, religion and power that exist within the country itself? Lagaan isn’t particularly interested in those questions. It doesn’t need to be; it is a fairy tale. But perhaps we should stop asking a fairy tale to carry the intellectual weight of greatness.

The film’s length has also become harder to ignore. At nearly four hours, Lagaan sometimes confuses expansiveness with grandeur. Since the result of the cricket match is a fait accompli, some of its narrative machinery becomes painfully visible. Perhaps the most embarrassing discovery for me is that I haven’t watched the film all the way through again in twenty-five years. A great film doesn’t have to be endlessly rewatched, but I expect a masterpiece to invite rediscovery. I expect the suspense to disappear and something else to take its place. A character, an idea, an ambiguity, a detail I had missed. With Lagaan, much of the first-viewing experience remains bound up with anticipation. What remains is still considerable: the performances, the production, Rahman’s music, the sheer ambition and the ability to sustain a huge popular narrative. It is a terrific film. I’m simply no longer convinced it is a great one.

Its Oscar nomination complicated matters further. Lagaan became more than a film; it became an Indian achievement. Its international recognition was celebrated as proof that Indian cinema could compete on the world stage. The film acquired a halo, and once a film has a halo, criticism becomes strangely impolite. We begin defending what it represents rather than examining what is actually on screen. This is perhaps the first clue to understanding the enduring reputation of both Lagaan and Dil Chahta Hai: they were not simply successful films. They became symbols of something we badly wanted to believe about Indian cinema and, more broadly, about India itself.

Dil Chahta Hai

My relationship with Dil Chahta Hai is more difficult because I was personally part of its early celebration. I was seduced by it when it released. I remember thinking that Farhan Akhtar had somehow discovered the language of a new India. I wrote a paean to the film in the Hindustan Times with the confidence of someone who believed he had spotted the future before everybody else. Twenty-five years later, I read that enthusiasm differently. I wasn’t wrong about the freshness. I was wrong about what freshness meant.

The haircuts helped. The goatees certainly helped. Aamir Khan, Saif Ali Khan and Akshaye Khanna looked unlike the Hindi-film heroes we had been accustomed to. They didn’t seem to be ‘playing young men’; they seemed to have arrived from somewhere outside the movie. They spoke differently. They interrupted each other. They irritated each other. They had private jokes. They could be selfish and immature. Their friendship felt lived-in rather than scripted.

And then there was the language. English wasn’t being deployed as a badge of sophistication. It was simply part of the rhythm of their lives. Hindi and English existed together, as they did in the lives of many urban Indians. That was liberating. The film also had a visual confidence that felt completely new: the editing, the split screens, the architecture, the clothes, the cars, Goa, the production design. It all seemed to belong to a cinema that had finally stopped looking over its shoulder.

Previous Hindi films had already brought us designer clothes, foreign locations and Westernized characters. But they often remained anxiously connected to tradition. Their protagonists could look modern, but eventually they had to prove that they were still good Indian children. Look no further than Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, six years ago, and Hum Aapke Haun Kaun? seven years to 2001. Dil Chahta Hai largely dispensed with that apology. Modernity didn’t need to be explained. That was the revolution.

Except that, looking back, it was also a very specific kind of revolution. Urban Indian cinema had already been moving in this direction. Films such as Hyderabad Blues and Bombay Boys, and the urban strands of Hindi cinema that preceded Dil Chahta Hai, had already experimented with contemporary speech, locations and characters. What Farhan Akhtar’s film did was arguably more consequential: it gathered several of these currents together and made them mainstream, aspirational and cool. It didn’t invent the new Bollywood. It gave the new Bollywood the confidence to walk into the mainstream.

But the India it carried into that mainstream was extraordinarily small. Akash, Sameer and Siddharth have the luxury of worrying about identity, relationships and friendship because money has insulated them from many of life’s harsher questions. They can go to Goa on a whim. Careers are choices. Beautiful homes and expensive cars are simply part of the landscape. Nobody worries about rent. Nobody loses a job. Nobody has to calculate the cost of a holiday. There is almost no economic India outside their bubble.

I remember, while thinking about the film years ago, imagining an essay on Dil Chahta Hai that I never got around to writing. The title, or perhaps the refrain running through it, would have been: ‘Hamara dil bhi chahta hai.’ Because that, ultimately, is the uncomfortable question the film raises for me now. Of course, the heart of someone less privileged also wants friendship, romance, travel, freedom, beautiful spaces, the ability to choose a career, the possibility of simply taking off for Goa. The difference is that many people cannot have this world. Their hearts may want exactly what Akash, Sameer and Siddharth take for granted, but their economic circumstances make the world of the film inaccessible. Dil Chahta Hai could make that privileged life look like the natural condition of being young. It wasn’t. It was the condition of being young and affluent.

There is nothing wrong with making a film about privileged people. The problem came later, when Dil Chahta Hai became shorthand for an entire generation. It wasn’t. It was a film about a very particular generation of affluent, English-speaking, urban Indians. Its greatest innovation was also its greatest limitation. The film’s world was so seductive that its exclusions became invisible.

Its gender politics have also become harder to overlook. For all its reputation for modernity, the men get most of the freedom. The women largely enter the story when the men need romance, emotional growth or tragedy. Shalini is the most fully realized of them, but her story ultimately contributes to Akash’s maturation. Priya exists largely within Sameer’s romantic confusion. Tara, played with enormous sensitivity by Dimple Kapadia, is easily the most interesting and wounded character in the film, but even her story becomes part of Siddharth’s emotional education. The three men’s friendship is the film’s great subject, but the friendship is also possible because women remain largely outside its centre. The men get to have an expansive emotional life; the women are more often part of that emotional life. That doesn’t invalidate the friendship. It does make the film’s claim to represent a liberated generation considerably more complicated.

The Siddharth-Tara relationship, which I found deeply moving at the time, makes me considerably more uncomfortable today. Tara is older, vulnerable, alcoholic and lonely. Siddharth’s feelings may be genuine, but the film’s romantic framing largely prevents it from examining the uncomfortable power dynamics underneath. What I once saw simply as a beautifully unconventional love story now seems much more troubling in its assumptions.

And yet, Dil Chahta Hai remains wonderful when it is doing very little. The little moments are still the film: the conversations, the jokes, the silences, the irritations, the friendship. When it needs its Big Moments, however, it often falls back on conventional Hindi-film machinery: declarations, separation, confrontation, emotional catharsis. The film that appeared to have escaped Bollywood occasionally remembers that it is Bollywood.

Are the Films Overrated?

Both films created remarkably persuasive worlds by simplifying the contradictions within them. Lagaan could construct an uncomplicated idea of Indian unity because its enemy was safely outside the community. Dil Chahta Hai could construct an uncomplicated idea of youthful freedom because the economic conditions that make such freedom possible were safely outside the frame. One externalized the political conflict; the other erased the class conflict. And yet we loved them partly because we wanted those simplifications to be true.

Lagaan announced that Indian cinema could make an epic, mount it on a huge scale and take it to the world. Dil Chahta Hai announced that Hindi cinema could be young, urban, bilingual, contemporary and unafraid of its own modernity. We were hungry for both announcements. They arrived at exactly the right moment to become symbols.

This is why I now think the question is not simply whether these films were overrated. It is why they became overrated. Both films benefited enormously from their historical timing. Lagaan became part of the Aamir Khan mythology and acquired additional prestige through its Oscar nomination. Dil Chahta Hai became the foundational text for a new urban Hindi cinema because film-makers and audiences subsequently used it as a point of reference. Their influence became part of their reputations, and their reputations in turn made their influence seem even greater.

Perhaps what we remember as invention was sometimes consolidation: several things that had been happening separately suddenly arrived in the same film, with enough confidence and commercial force to make them impossible to ignore. That is a significant achievement. It just isn’t automatically greatness.

History asks: What did this film make possible? Art asks: What does this film contain? The answers aren’t necessarily the same.

Lagaan made the Hindi-film epic feel possible again. Dil Chahta Hai made the urban youth film feel central. Neither film necessarily exhausted the possibilities it opened. And perhaps 2001 needed these films to be masterpieces. We needed Lagaan to prove that Indian cinema could make something large enough to travel. We needed Dil Chahta Hai to prove that the new India could finally see itself on screen. We then gave them greatness in return.

There is one curious thing that has happened to my memory of these films. The music has survived my disenchantment. With Lagaan, it is A.R. Rahman’s ‘Ghanan Ghanan’, ‘Mitwa’, ‘O Paalanhaare’ and the extraordinary musical world he created around the film. With Dil Chahta Hai, it is even more pronounced: ‘Dil Chahta Hai’, ‘Jaane Kyun’, ‘Woh Ladki Hai Kahan’, ‘Tanhayee’, ‘Kaisi Hai Yeh Rut’. I can listen to these songs without wanting to qualify my affection. Perhaps the songs were never carrying the burden of representing an era. They were simply songs.

And perhaps that is one of the tests time applies to cinema. Take away the novelty. Take away the first viewing. Take away the Oscar nomination, the multiplex excitement, the feeling that something historic is happening. Take away twenty-five years of people telling you that these are masterpieces. What remains? With these two films, quite a lot remains. But not, for me, the masterpieces we have made them out to be.

Today I can see the formulas in Lagaan, the emotional manipulation, the schematic characters, the simplification of history. I can see the privilege in Dil Chahta Hai, its narrow social universe, its limitations in the way it imagines women, its conventionality beneath all that surface freshness. I can see what I couldn’t see then. But I don’t want to erase what I felt then. That would be another kind of dishonesty.

The films mattered. They changed things. They opened doors. They gave film-makers permission to try something different. They gave us songs we still listen to. They gave an audience the exhilarating feeling that Hindi cinema was capable of moving forward. What I no longer believe is that moving forward automatically makes a film great.

So I am taking Lagaan and Dil Chahta Hai off the pedestal. Not throwing them off it. Just bringing them down to eye level. Let Lagaan be a terrific, overlong, emotionally manipulative sports epic whose historical and political simplicity is disguised by its enormous charm. Let Dil Chahta Hai be a wonderfully fresh, hugely influential, beautifully observed and deeply privileged urban coming-of-age film. Let us admire what they changed without pretending that everything about them was new. Let us love the songs without having to love every minute of the films. And perhaps let us separate the films from the memories we have attached to them.

Because perhaps what I was really in love with in 2001 was not entirely Lagaan or Dil Chahta Hai. It was the feeling that something was beginning. Something was beginning. We just mistook the beginning for the destination. Twenty-five years later, I can see why we needed them to be greater than they were. They arrived at a moment when Hindi cinema seemed to be opening itself to new possibilities, and we wanted these films to embody that change.

Perhaps that is what they finally gave us. Not masterpieces, but the ability to imagine what might come next.