Dil Se...

I once studied a Persian folktale, a variation on Aesop’s story, about a fish and a mouse who become friends. The story ends with both being eaten by a bird, and the moral is that you should never befriend people who are different from you. It is a chilling tale, with a chilling moral, and with this story in mind, we turn to the highly stylized, politicized, sexualized, domestically rejected and internationally lauded Dil Se… (1998). But before we do that, lets all take a moment to re-watch “Chiya Chiya”. Maybe three or four times, because too much of a good thing is wonderful.  The premise of Dil Se... is straightforward: boy Amar (SRK) meets girl Mhegna (Manisha Koirala), girl rejects boy, boy goes back to Delhi and meets new girl Preeti (Preity Zinta, in her break-out role), first girl returns. Inter-religious drama, singing, dancing, etc. ensue. Director Mani Ratnam takes a straightforward premise and turns it into a gorgeous, if problematic, reflection of nation, gender, love, and power.

A.R. Rahman’s music and the highly charged, unusual dance sequences, choreographed by Farah Khan before she was a director and producer, illustrate Amar’s journey through the Indian state from Aasam to Kerala, and through the seven phases of love from Arabic tradition (attraction, infatuation, love, reverence, worship, obsession, and death): from the infatuation of "Chiya Chiya" through his dramatic, inevitable end, Amar’s love is accompanied by a haunting score and soundtrack. The lush settings of the dance sequences make each choreographed song an expressionist painting in motion, disconnected from the narrative but integral to the story. The athletic eroticism of the choreography makes Dirty Dancing (1987) seem dully vanilla, and is highly unusual even in an industry known for eyebrow-raising dance numbers. 

The cinematography by Santosh Sivan is equally captivating, and complimented by intense background noises- breathing, gasping, crying, fighting, wailing- which make the action feel immediate and hyper-real. The final five minutes of the film are my favorite- the intimate final moments of two women, one dressing the other, cutting to soldiers on a noisy, kinetic parade ground, cutting to Mhegna striding purposefully alone, cutting to Amar framed by darkness and the old fort, creating a jarring, heightened confusion of noise, emotions, and tensions. Shah Rukh Khan, Manisha Koirala and Preity Zinta are all excellent. SRK over-acts when he has to cry, but that is equally true in all his films. Otherwise, he is as charismatic as ever. The on-screen chemistry between SRK and Koirala is also impressive; their shared scene in the desert, in which Amar declares that what he most likes and dislikes about Mhegna are her eyes, and the fact that he cannot read the secrets behind them, is particularly powerful.

Mehgna is a laudably complex anti-heroine, torn between a passionate love and a final mission. Irritatingly, she is also a bit of a cliché: she was a victim of political violence, and more specifically of rape, and it is this violence which leads her to political engagement. One of my MA papers focused on women who actively participated in or encouraged political violence, and exampes of goddess imagery used by women to justify their own violence means to political ends. I never once came across a woman justifying her political engagement by identifying herself as a rape survivor.

Perhaps some of the women I read and wrote about were survivors, and did not describe themselves as such due to the social stigma surrounding rape- but the complete, glaring absence of rape and rape-survival narratives suggests to me that either women did not find such justifications useful, or did not find such justifications relevant to their own political engagement. Then why do films including Dil Se…, Dhokha (2007), and others, insist that female terrorists be rape survivors- why do they insist that women engaged in political violence be “broken” by male violence? As if political engagement somehow required male intervention, male action and female reaction, to justify “unfeminine” acts of political violence. Rape-surviving women becoming terrorists is a depressingly popular trope- sex, wanted or unwanted, continues to be an easy explanation for women’s actions.

The politics of Dil Se… are more unusual and less "easy". Released six years after the assassination of Rajiv Ghandi by a female terrorist and only one year after the celebration of India’s semi-centennial, politics are omnipresent, and especially the violent means by which national coherence is maintained. The conflict in Kashmir is most (in)famous, but the conflict over sovereignty in India’s peripheries- in India’s North East (the seven sisters) and Naxilite-controlled regions, in Kashmir, and the conflict over sovereignty in Punjab which left Rajiv Gandhi’s mother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, dead by assassins- was and is an often poorly understood and under-discussed facet of India as Nation-State, rather than India as Idea.

Key here is remembering that although this film is ostensibly about Amar, it is in truth about his ambivalent feelings towards Indian national policy towards India’s periphery, recreated in his passionate love affair with Mehgna. Quite a few reviewers compare Amar-as-Nation-State to a golden retriever demanding Mhegna’s love, assuming that his love and a steady marriage will domesticate her. Although that reading lends itself to the notion that Dil Se… is national allegory and Amar the Indian Nation-State, I question the too-easy analysis. Amar, an employee of All India Radio, is certainly a representative of the Nation-State, and Amar is certainly a nice boy from Delhi. Nevertheless, there is more to his character than meets the eye; his marked preference for complex women and his insatiable curiosity to learn more about the world muddy the waters of the metaphor, and his end, embracing Mhegna in a pantomime of protection, unable to save her- does this suggest the center’s love of the peripheries will destroy the center? The rest of the film suggests that the Nation-State doesn’t love the peripheries at all, but rather seeks to control the peripheries by force. The metaphor is incomplete.

But then, what do love stories do if not create problems and muddy the lines we draw between one another? Love stories illuminate shared humanity and human tragedy. Perhaps the fish and the mouse shouldn’t be friends. However, the persistence of the folk story, and the enduring popularity of doomed love stories set in times of conflict, suggests to me that even in the face of overwhelming odds and inevitable loss, we need to know there are some among us who still believe in the power of love.

Film: Dil Se… (1998)

Director: Mani Ratnam

Writers: Tigmanshu Dhulia, Sujatha  

Runtime: 158 minutes

Language: Hindi
Country: India