My US-based friend and film buff Raza Mir puts it perfectly: “A new generation of lovers and youngsters was created, who do not question the intra-family status quo, and for whom the approbation of adults is an altar upon which passion must be sacrificed." The rest is history. When Raj decides to leave without a fight for his love, it was the ultimate-and heroic-surrender to sanskar (tradition), as director Aditya Chopra may deludedly have imagined it. Of course there is a happy ending, and the film ends with the line “Come… Fall in love", but if this is how men are ideally supposed to love, maybe Indian women are better off as spinsters.ĭDLJ took one of Hindi cinema’s most celebrated tropes-rebellious lovers-and neutered it. Just compare this to the portrayal of women in 1958’s Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi (). You, better than anyone else, know what’s good for Simran." The girl has no agency at all, and Raj is not about to give her any. We have no right to make our parents unhappy for our own happiness." In fact, when her father comes to know the truth about them, he tells him: “I give back what is yours. As the big fat Punjabi wedding nears, she repeatedly begs him to take her away, but he turns profound: “We run away from strangers, not our own. Simran comes to Punjab to get married as per her father’s wishes, and Raj follows, to cozy up to her father and get his approval. I realized then that I was in love." The concept of the unequal and submissive woman is taken to new heights. Yet, later, Simran tells her mother that when they returned from their holiday and parted at a London station, “I wanted him to look back at me, I craved for that, but he just walked away. When she is boarding a train as he waits on the platform, he keeps muttering “Turn! Turn! Turn!"-if she turns to look at him as she gets on the train, it would be proof that she loves him. Raj gives the impression that they had had sex by revealing his chest covered with lipstick kiss marks, and when Simran is aghast, he explains it’s a joke and then turns self-righteous: “I am an Indian man and I know what honour means to an Indian woman." There is no allusion to the fact that he appeared to have pressed an unconscious Simran’s lips on his chest. Stranded in Switzerland, they get drunk, and when Simran wakes up in the morning, she can’t remember what happened the night before.
He drops her on the floor after a dance he has physically forced her to have with him in a crowded ballroom and walks away. He presents her with a joke flower, which squirts water into her face. Raj woos Simran by systematically humiliating her, often publicly. The philosophy and subtext of the film is amazingly regressive. But Simran’s father has already fixed her marriage to the son of an old friend in his native Punjab, and Raj will not marry her unless her father willingly gives her daughter’s hand to him. Raj and Simran, born and brought up in London, meet on an Eurail tour of the continent and fall in love.