The faults in our stars - II

The second part of a two-part Mumbai Mirror column (published in August 2020).

What Indian Matchmaking doesn’t tell us about arranged marriage, and popular Hindi cinema increasingly does.

A scene from Motichoor Chaknachoor, where Nawazuddin Siddiqui reprises his 'permission' scene from GoW in a new context

One of the unaddressed problems with Indian Matchmaking, as I suggested last week, is that it seeks to club too many disparate worlds under Sima Aunty’s umbrella – leaving some out in the wind and weather. But if you think about it, many of the candidates with whom Sima Taparia has the least success – Aparna the opinionated lawyer, Nadia the hopeful dance trainer, Vyasar the good-humoured schoolteacher, Rupam the divorced single mother – are Indians in the West, for whom she is but one of a bouquet of options. Taparia’s claim of custom-made choices may seem a great option to these people bruised by past relationships and the dating game, but they also know can always go back to meeting people online or off-: to non-Indian matchmaking, if you like. This is true even when they want a partner from a particular community: Rupam, for instance, manages to find a Sikh American man on Bumble who fits better with her familial priorities than Taparia’s prospects. Also, though the explosion in dating apps and marriage websites is kept rather obviously to the sidelines of IM’s India-set narratives, the reality is that Pradhyuman in Mumbai and Ankita in Delhi, too, have many options besides the mythified personal matchmaker.

Taparia’s inability to match most of her clients on the show ends up making her look foolish, even redundant. But it’s a set-up designed to fail. No lone matchmaker, no matter how well-networked, can possibly provide the range and variety of prospects needed to cater to IM's selection of clients: so distant in location, age, social and educational background. It’s no accident that the only success on IM is the engagement of Akshay, whose mother is the real mover on both marital deadline and choice of bride. And while the show doesn’t vocalise it, the way Akshay and Radhika’s families greet each other with “Jai Shree Krishna” suggests membership of the same religious sub-community.

In Mundhra’s 2017 film on arranged marriages, A Suitable Girl, all three young women she tracks get married: two within their communities, and the third to someone off Shadi.com, only after failing for years to find a match within her caste. Meanwhile, other than Rupam’s dad wanting only a Sikh husband for her (interesting, given that her sister's husband is African American), IM mostly elides the biggest factor in real-life Indian matchmaking: caste and community. The ‘reality show’ also leaves out an even more ubiquitous vector of Indian arranged marriages: money.

These realities that reality TV apparently can't deal with appear constantly in our filmi fiction. The Hindi film and OTT industry has, in recent years, revelled in weddings as sites of ugly social revelations. From Mira Nair's 2001 Monsoon Wedding (MW), to Bittoo Sharma and Shruti Kakkar in 2010’s Band Baja Baraat to the rather posher Tara Khanna and Karan Mehra in 2019's hit OTT series Made in Heaven (MiH), our fictional content is positively chock-a-block with the planning of weddings. Weddings, as anyone who's organised one knows, are not just logistical nightmares but sites of social drama. Runaway brides have been with us since DDLJ, but there have many more since (MW, Tanu Weds Manu, Three Idiots, Shuddh Desi Romance to name just a few). More recent crises have included secretly gay grooms (MiH, also Shubh Mangal Zyada Savdhan), cross-cultural wedding negotiations (Vicky Donor, 2 States), an immature groupie bride who sleeps with a celebrity right before her suhaag raat and an uber-genteel IAS groom emerging as cowardly dowry-seeker (both MiH).

In many of these depictions, comedy works to make the medicine go down. At least two films -- Habib Faisal’s Daawat-e-Ishq (2014) and Dolly Ki Doli (2015) -- have featured trickster-brides who dupe the men lining up to marry them. What screenwriters likely depend on to make these heroines remain likeable is the commonly understood fact that marriage in India is a market, and a market loaded so unfairly in favour of the boy’s side that the girls are being driven to illegalities.

That Indian weddings are social and financial negotiations is becoming clearer and clearer in Hindi films -- and any deceptions at the time of signing can later make the contract radd. In Bala (2019), the Tiktok-famous bride (Yami Gautam) marries Ayushmann Khurrana for 'love', but when she learns his floppy hair comes off at night, her love turns to be skin-deep, too. In Motichoor Chaknachoor, Athiya Shetty’s tall, fair Annie (urf Anita) believes Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s Pushpinder is employed in Dubai. When it turns out, post-shadi, that the Dubai job is long gone, Annie’s only reason for marrying – Pushpinder or anyone else – crumbles, and suddenly she can only ses that he's shorter than her, and darker.

Motichoor has been much berated for its political incorrectness. Indeed, the fat-shaming of Pushpinder’s (Nawazuddin) first marital prospect feels like a horribly unfortunate throwback to our Tuntun-obsessed childhoods, and there’s an exasperated slap he delivers that he never verbally apologises for, but his non-verbal attempts to make up for it felt more persuasive to me than Thappad’s. And I was as impressed as Annie by his dowry-rejecting stance. 

But what’s refreshing about these comic plots is that they’re honest about Indian marriages, showing them as exactly the fat-shaming, skin-colour-obsessed, dowry-driven transactions that they are -- but also as the inescapable structure within which most Indians must seek whatever agency they hope to have. Even the conventionally attractive and wonderfully sassy Annie in Motichoor doesn’t feel free to actually refuse an arranged marriage – so her only leverage is in rejecting rishtas. And with no other way to see the world, she decides a foreign-located husband might as well be her ticket to ride. Age, looks, jobs and dowries are openly treated as chips to bargain with -- but how else is one to play if arranged marriage is the only game in town?

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30 Aug 2020.

Dreamy pictures, earthly selves

My Mirror column:

Made in Heaven fails in the Delhi authenticity department, but there's some promise in its protagonists' struggles to embrace themselves. 

(The second of a two-part column. The first part is here.)

Last week, I suggested that Made in Heaven is a posh update on Band Baaja Baaraat, with a nostalgic dollop of Monsoon Wedding (MW) feels. MIH's creators actually rejig certain specifics from Mira Nair's 2001 film: MW's child-molesting uncle is transformed into a teen-molesting father-in-law, and at least two actors re-appear. There is the tragically underused Kamini Khanna, making the most of her minutes as a memorable aunty in 2001 and in 2019, and in a much larger part, Vijay Raaz: then playing a hangdog tentwala besotted with the pretty family maid, now appearing as the wry, edge-of-dangerous Johari, a plumber with a plan.

More than any of these things, though, what's common to MW and MIH is the use of English as the primary language. By which I mean it is the language in which this world is imagined, and the language primarily spoken by most characters, sometimes even when a character's social background can't carry it off: witness Vinay Pathak talking of unscented soap. Conversely characters who speak in Hindi or Punjabi often sound excessive: witness Tara hissing at her sister at the opening of her husband Adil's new factory: “Naali ki kutti ki tarah baat mat karo”.

Band Baaja Baaraat knew the Delhis into which it shepherded us. MIH doesn't. So wedding after wedding feels like a PR video seen from the objectifying distance of Bombay – a tastefully well-off older couple get an old haveli setting, an organic-seeking IAS groom gets a trip to Dastkar Haat, a poor Muslim bride gets a rooftop sangeet. A character like Jassi/Jazz is interesting in theory – the Dwarka girl doing South Delhi – and she gets a couple of great moments, like when she shows up in a blingy dress for Kabir's ultra-dressed-down house party. But most of the time MIH can't pull off Jassi's in-between-ness – her clandestine liaisons with a motor mechanic are even more unconvincing than her desire for Kabir. The dialogue verbalises things in a way no-one living it ever would. For example, no Delhi person, no matter how rich, would use the word “vernac”.

So is MIH still worth watching? I'd say yes, for the riskiness of its central characters. MIH is rare in this regard – and not only because Karan is gay and Tara is married. When we first meet Tara (Sobhita Dhulipala), we're primed to empathise with her, perhaps because she's trying to make it as a businesswoman, and her rich industrialist in-laws don't seem to trust her or her acumen. Ditto for Karan (Arjun Mathur), who seems to have a domineering father and not-so-nice friends who bring up his all-too-real money troubles at inopportune moments.

But as the series progresses, we learn new things about both. Karan's backstory focuses on his sexuality. He is a gay man who's out to his friends and colleagues, but still straight at the family dinner table. His dating life, which seems to frequently begin at The Piano Man and end in bed at his rather nice barsati apartment, must be conducted away from the prying eyes of landlords and policemen alike. But if the forced secrecy of Karan's life presents him to us as a victim, MIH also successfully complicates our perspective by showing us someone Karan once victimised. (This happens with other characters, too – turning their victimhood or villainy upside down – and it might be the best thing about the way the show is written.)

Tara's backstory is even more interesting. On the surface, it's about class – she's the good-looking girl who managed to marry the boss. But it is also, quite vividly, about her sexuality. If sex is Karan's Achilles' heel, it is Tara's secret weapon. The flashbacks that trace Tara's relationship with Adil (a very sexy Jim Sarbh) are among MIH's most interestingly crafted sections, with Dhulipala turning in a fascinating performance as a woman aware that her sexiness is her most monetisable asset – but also realising that it isn't a stable one.

Karan and Tara's problems don't seem comparable at all. And yet, as the series progresses, for both the question of selfhood emerges as the crux. Karan has hidden his inner self so long that he doesn't quite know what life outside the closet might entail. Tara has polished her exterior so successfully that she fears she may have rubbed herself out.

Some of the show's most ambitious arcs involve a central character recognising themselves in another. Example: Tara is a lot like the first bride we meet in MIH – a journalist marrying a business scion she'd first met to interview. At another level, Tara is a successful version of Jassi: she's successfully transitioned out of her old class. Sometimes a situation allows for unspoken resonance: when an older character I won't name sees himself in Karan, or when Karan seems to identify, unwillingly, with the young girl who thinks a monetary compromise is a better deal than a public battle. 

Sometimes we only see ourselves in the mirror of other people.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 Mar 2019.

Heading to the Wedding

My Mirror column:

The new series Made in Heaven is a meaty addition to a genre that has captured our imagination for the last two decades: the big fat Indian shadi. (First of a two-part column)

As I succumbed to social media peer pressure and binge-watched the new web series Made in Heaven this week, I started to wonder when weddings in our movies went from being the all's-well-that-ends-well freeze-frame at the end of all the drama to becoming the locus of the drama. 

The original moment of change, it seems to me, might have been Monsoon Wedding. Mira Nair's 2001 film used an upper middle class Delhi wedding as the setting for a social and familial unravelling. Nair and her screenwriter Sabrina Dhawan unveiled the deep, dark secrets of the Indian family with a frankness that felt shocking at the time – but managed to use the glitter, the banter, the infectious energy of the North Indian wedding as the perfect foil for all the intense stuff.

In retrospect, Monsoon Wedding was the sophisticated prototype of something that would define our era. Among South Asians, a daughter's wedding had always been something to spend on. But a decade after liberalisation, the country's burgeoning middle classes suddenly had more money to spend – and were increasingly unabashed about being seen to spend it. The big fat Indian shadi and the high-gloss, exportable version of Hindi cinema that we call Bollywood arrived in the world more or less together, film and life cross-fertilising each other. Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham released the same year – 2001. Through the 2000s, aided by Karan Johar and others, the shadi became an essential part of Bollywood – and Bollywood became essential to the shadi. Across regional/linguistic boundaries, in India and in the desi diaspora, a with-it wedding now had to have a choreographed Bollywood sangeet. Across national boundaries, too, the newly performative Bollywood-style wedding established itself as a hegemonic cultural export – as a graduate student in New York in 2004 or so, I had the enjoyably surreal experience of watching my university's Pakistani Students Association stage a Bollywood-style faux-wedding as their big cultural event of the year.

Nearly a decade after Monsoon Wedding, in 2010, came another era-defining wedding movie: Band Baaja Baraat (BBB). Written by Habib Faisal and directed by Maneesh Sharma, BBB was also set in Delhi, but with a much more expansive socio-economic canvas than Monsoon Wedding's elite, English-speaking South Delhi family. BBB opened with Bittoo Sharma and Shruti Kakkar (Ranveer Singh and Anushka Sharma) meeting at a wedding, as so many Hindi movie couples have from Chandni to Saathiya – but then cleverly subverted expectations until at least halfway through, by making them partners not in love but in business. A wedding planning business, to be precise, which let Bittoo and Shruti – and their audience – work their way through a series of different Delhi milieus.

Made in Heaven (MIH) – conceptualised by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti and co-written by Alankrita Shrivastava of Lipstick Under My Burkha fame – often feels a cleverly reworked combination of Monsoon Wedding and Band Baaja Baraat (BBB), expanded to series length and set in the present. As in BBB, the protagonists run a wedding planning business, and each wedding they organise gives us a ringside view of a particular Delhi social setting.

Only Tara Khanna and Karan Mehra (Sobhita Dhulipala and Arjun Mathur) move in more moneyed circles than Bittoo and Shruti. And consequently, so do the couples whose weddings they organise. The poshest echelon of golf-playing industrialists and their rummy-playing bitchy wives are straight out of Akhtar's 2015 film Dil Dhadakne Do (DDD), as are the Punjabi-speaking business families one notch down, whom the top tier fraternises with but also scorns. And as in DDD, these jokes at the expense of non-English speakers – a rich aunty saying “twat” instead of “tweet” – often feel like a stretch. Sometimes it’s the placement that's off. I'm not saying the Delhi rich don't mispronounce English words, they do – but if your daughter's marrying their son, you don't correct their pronunciation.

There are other glitches that show up the lack of Delhi detailing by a team of Bombay people who can't be bothered to go beyond visual and class clichés. Sure, this is fiction – but if you're going to say a character lives in Dwarka, then don't show her getting off in Sheikh Sarai, at the other end of Delhi. And definitely don't show her in a home that isn't a DDA flat. Don't give us a Delhi-based character who describes himself on his website as a “Mughal historian” and then responds with baffled surprise to the existence of a late Mughal haveli. Don't bung in a troupe of hijras from a “Fateh Baba Ki Dargah” when there isn't one in the city. As a Delhi person, I rate MIH sadly low on the authenticity scale – a matter I bring up only because every second episode seems to end on a platitude about Delhi delivered by Shashank Arora's video-camera-wielding Kabir – apparently Akhtar's human replacement for Pluto the dog, who delivered them in DDD.

But then what makes Made in Heaven worth watching isn't Delhi. If BBB acquired some cool in 2010 from not making its central pair start romancing immediately, MIH is immeasurably cooler because the couple at its centre are not a romantic couple at all.

The second and concluding part of this column is here.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 17 Mar 2019.

Bittoo Boss: Bit too goody-goody to be funny

The opening sequence of Bittoo Boss is pure delight. A large Punjabi family is gathered in the sprawling courtyard of an old-style house – the aunties have assembled with the dholak, the groom is waiting for his haldi, the uncles are fretting silently – but nothing can move forward, because the video-wala isn’t here yet.

“Aaj tak koi rasam video-wale ke bina shuru hui hai?” says the sharp-tongued young woman in the fetching yellow choli, swinging her long black plait in emphatic disdain. And then finally the elusive video-wala arrives, galvanising this bored, almost grumpy gathering into a sudden storm of activity. Director Supavitra Babul begins with a bang, showing rather than telling us what we all already know: that life is no longer really lived – or liveable – unless it’s choreographed for the camera.

The camera should have really been the star of this film, which starts off feeling like a slightly risque version of Band Baaja Baraat, but then moves more and more in a Love Sex aur Dhokha direction. But Supavitra Babul is no Dibakar Banerjee, and so the star of Bittoo Boss is Bittoo, the strapping young video-wala, played by a floppy-haired, rather winsome Pulkit Samrat. Bittoo is the hero of every wedding in Anandpur Sahib. The ladies love him to bits: he’s always up for a raunchy dance move or two, he’s perfected the art of the flirtatious caressing gaze that pre-empts his camera, and he always makes everyone look good.

But the thing about Bittoo which Bittoo Boss is at pains to establish – much to the film’s detriment – is that Bittoo is a good boy. He may flirt outrageously with every arch young thing in the house, he’s alright to steal a kiss or two, he isn’t even above a secret peek into the window where a pretty girl is getting dressed. But just as he turns his camera determinedly away from that broken window, he draws the line at the sex video business that his boss Varmaji (the always effective Rajendra Sethi) is constantly urging him to get into. It’s the most kudrati (natural) thing, says the persuasive Varma. Nah, says Bittoo. Looking is one thing, and making money off what you see is another.

If it had stayed put at this point, this would have felt like a great scene. Unfortunately this exchange is merely the cue for the film’s rapid transformation from lighthearted nudge-nudge wink-wink comedy to a moral tale full of homilies about how money isn’t everything. To cut a long story short, Bittoo falls in love with local rich girl Mrinalini (the utterly uninteresting Amita Pathak) and even when she finally reciprocates and lets him take her to the gurdwara, the gulf between their social status is too glaring to go away easily. Bittoo, determined to pay off his debts and become rich, succumbs to Varmaji’s advice and goes off to Shimla to shoot honeymoon porn.

The Shimla section is enlivened greatly by the presence of a hilariously lascivious taxi driver named Vikki (Ashok Pathak) who, when he learns about Bittoo’s project, decides to become his apprentice. The introductory scenes, when Vikki decides to impress Bittoo by calling the girls with whom he has a ‘setting’ – har sheher mein, boss – and making the embarrassed Bittoo listen in, are a riot. After this revealing glimpse of its unapologetic sadakchhaap soul, the film gets quickly derailed into good boy terrain again, with the heart-of-gold Bittoo unable to use his hidden camera to do anything but help sort out various people’s tangled lives. So we get to see the resolution of the lives of a mismatched newlywed couple, and the reconciliation of a stern rich man (Mohan Kapoor) with his runaway schoolgirl daughter (“aayi toh khud ko liberate karne thhi, par main toh ek illusion mein trapped hoon”).

Several silly twists and turns later, Bittoo is reconciled with his Bitti-ji, and all is saccharine-sweet ever after (though I must note that all the girls in the film are kept in the dark while Bittoo plots to improve their lives). The last half an hour of the film is a bit of a hotchpotch, with Bittoo tying up loose threads we didn’t even know existed, and bringing the narrative to its necessarily hypocritical anti-porn conclusion. But suffice it to say it’s not the half-baked climax that’s the real trouble with Bittoo Boss, it’s the ham-handed morality tale that’s hung around the neck of a film that might have actually been frothy and fun.

Published in Firstpost.

Cinemascope: Ladies vs. Ricky Bahl

In an early scene in Ladies vs. Ricky Bahl, a lean, limber young man with floppy hair and a winsome smile appears at a Delhi businessman's doorstep with the businessman's 20-something daughter passed out in his arms. It's the middle of the night, and the parents look worriedly at each other and their sleeping daughter. But when the young man – who's just introduced himself as Dimple's boyfriend and her gym trainer – makes to lay the sleeping girl down on the living room sofa, the mother says to him, "Beta, oopar hi lita do..." (and after a minuscule pause that already contains an undeniable trace of admiration for her daughter's catch) "Bodybuilder ho na?"

As you watch Ranveer Singh carry the pleasantly-plump Dimple Chaddha effortlessly up the stairs, and then effortlessly charm the pants off her gun-toting dad on his way down them, you can't help but think of the last captivating burglar who appeared on the Hindi film screen: Abhay Deol in Oye Lucky Lucky Oye (2008). In establishing his conman protagonist as the sort of supremely affable guy who can walk into strangers' homes and out with their televisions (or their daughters) because everyone just trusts him at first sight, it's clear that director Maneesh Sharma is channelling Dibakar Banerjee. But it's equally clear that Ricky Bahl (whose name we know from the title but never hear until the film's final scene) is a kind of Lucky-lite. Ladies vs. Ricky Bahl is quite obviously intended to be a much more light-hearted film than Oye Lucky ever was. If Lucky was all about the nuanced, perfectly narrated backstory – complex relationship with a dominating but distant father, needy childhood, desire to join the English-speaking "gentry" – then Ricky is very deliberately a man without a past. So deliberate, so total, in fact, is this characterisation that the one time we hear Ricky speak of childhood, deprivation and emotional attachment to family (okay, to a family bungalow on Delhi's Barakhamba Road), we pretty much know this has got be a con.

Maneesh Sharma has made a breezy, fast-paced, intricately plotted film which wouldn't be half as much fun if its conning hero had depth and interiority – if we already knew what he was really like inside, how would he ever surprise us? So we don't know, and neither do the ladies he turns the charm tap on for: Dimple from Dilli, the pampered, wilful daughter of a "self-made" Punjabi businessman; Raina from Bombay, the hard-headed, no-nonsense executive with a reputation for making the impossible possible; and Saira from Lucknow, the demure young widow who works in her in-laws' small textile store.

Forging these three very different women from their madly different backgrounds into an unlikely sisterhood against the man who conned them is a masterstroke, and provides a lot of great moments. Though there is no doubt that the film's makers, including the inimitable Habib Faisal of Band Baaja Baraat and Do Dooni Chaar fame, who's written the dialogue here too, know the Dimple-from-Dilli milieu a hundred times better than the other two, so much so that poor Raina-from-Bombay (Dipannita Sharma) and Saira-from-Lucknow (Aditi Sharma) don't have much of a chance. They do perfectly well in their well-cast and competently-written little parts, but it is debutante Parineeti Chopra as Dimple who walks away with the trophy. From her first moment on screen, pulling irritatedly at the deep neck of her blingy blue top to show some cleavage before she reluctantly wears a choli over it for the benefit of her parents who think she's going to a sangeet, to her genuine disbelief that any boy could ever choose another girl over her, Dimple has us eating out of her hands. We might laugh at her continued schoolgirlish besottedness for the 'Sunny' who stole her heart and then her father's money, or at her unsophisticated blabbermouth ways even when faced with the cool and collected Raina, but she's the one person in this film we know inside out. And we can't help but love her.

Without giving away too much that you haven't already guessed, let me say that Ranveer and Anushka Sharma get to rework something of their Band Baaja roles: here too they become business partners in the third meeting, and are meant to be entirely professional about it before emotions get in the way. Anushka is perfect as a super-chirpy Hometown salesgirl who can sell anyone anything (even if this channelling of her inner aspirational Punjabi girl could start getting tiresome if she does it one more time). And she and Ranveer, even though they don't get anywhere near the surprising goosebumpy chemistry of Band Baaja, do achieve an easy, believable camaraderie that most Bollywood couples never will.

It's a really fun film overall, and like I said, it's not setting out to be profound. Though between the Hometown section, with its hilarious references to people buying things they don't need, and the other brilliant episode where 90-rupee Goan wines are packaged in vintage bottles and cheap factory seconds sold off as Prada, it feels like the film might just have a secret message about conmanship after all.

Published in today's Sunday Guardian.

Twist in the Wedding

Why the shaadi is still a staple of Bollywood romance

Bittoo Sharma first meets Shruti Kakkar at a wedding. She’s rude to him, but he’s quite taken with her. He borrows his friend’s video camera to shoot her dancing, turns up in her U-special the next day to present her with a DVD exclusively devoted to her performance. The opening of Band Baaja Baraat makes one think you know exactly where it’s going. The girl seen by the boy at a shaadi, the wooing that ensues, leading up to the couple’s own wedding — it’s among the oldest tropes in the Hindi movie universe. And Band Baaja Baaraat’s opening scene is a clear tribute to Yash Chopra’s own contribution to the genre: Chandni (1989), where Rishi Kapoor first sees Sridevi at a wedding, starts photographing her in secret, and later, in one of the dramatic high points of the 1980s filmi romance, reveals a roomful of pictures he has taken of her.

The Indian wedding has always been a traditional mating ground. It was a rare, socially sanctioned space where young women of marriageable age were on display, for matchmaking aunts — and potential husbands. (Ask around in any north Indian family and you’ll find at least one uncle and aunt who got married because he saw her at his brother/ cousin/ friend’s wedding and set his heart on her.) The shaadi ka ghar, with its dressing-up and dancing and suggestive songs, was the natural setting for romance, a place where banter between young men and women was laughingly condoned and flirtation was almost traditional.

These days, one might think, urban young people don’t need the socially sanctioned space of the shaadi to meet a potential partner, either on screen or off it. The CCD-mall-multiplex generation should have no time for wedding movies. The days of Hum Aapke Hain Kaun...! (1994) are over.

Yet it seems that the 2000s — after Karan Johar’s K3G (2001) — were when the choreographed Bollywood sangeet really became de rigueur, first in movies and then in weddings across the country and the diaspora, and I can think, off the cuff, of three Hindi films in the past few years where the hero first properly sees the heroine at a wedding: Saathiya (2002), Love Aaj Kal (2009) and Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (2008). And at least three 2010 films derive much of their energy from weddings — Aisha, Do Dooni Chaar and Band Baaja Baraat.

Do Dooni Chaar is least obviously preoccupied with the wedding — it serves mainly to kick-start the plot, which is really about the middle-class family’s desire for a car. And yet there is a way in which, despite all their travails and tribulations in getting to it — the borrowing of the car, the cost of the wedding present, the potential theft, the potential exposure — the wedding itself has the power to create a generally celebratory mood, successfully drawing in the glum father and the teenage cynic alike.

Aisha — which sets Jane Austen’s Emma in contemporary Delhi — is possibly the most traditional of the three, in that it opens with a shaadi where we first see the heroine, Aisha, and ends with Aisha’s own wedding. But the hero already knows the heroine, so the wedding is not the setting for their romance. On the other hand, it sets in motion a definite trail of matchmaking — only the matchmaker in question is the heroine herself. Almost the whole of the film is taken up with pairing off young people who appear in the original wedding scene, culminating in the final wedding, where we have the pleasure of seeing them all matched up (in more ways than one, since this is the most alarmingly colour-coordinated wedding you’ll ever see).

The film that really takes the wedding movie theme and runs with it, though, is Band Baaja Baaraat. It seems to play by the old rules — introducing the heroine and the hero at a wedding, following their relationship and culminating in their own wedding — but, in fact, it brilliantly subverts both the genre and our expectations by making them wedding planners. Shruti refuses Bittoo’s romantic overtures. She accepts his DVD and, later, his partnership, only on condition that he isn’t going to line maaro her. She arranges weddings, and she’s going to have an arranged match herself. She has Plans — and love isn’t part of them.

Yet, as we watch the two of them lean laughingly into each other at wedding after wedding, complementing each other perfectly in the exaggeratedly comic flirtation-rejection of the wedding song, we know that the shaadi movie will have its way. It’s as if the well-done north Indian wedding — with its glitter, its banter, and, crucially, the zippy song that gets the whole family on its feet — casts a kind of spell, temporarily erasing the rules of the ordinary world and making romance seem somehow inevitable. Much like the well-done Hindi film.

The writer is a Delhi-based writer and anthropologist.

Published in the Indian Express, Friday Jan 14, 2011.