Dil Se..

I watched Dil Se.. last night and without the proper context I had a completely unreasonable reaction. I was disturbed and disgusted by Amar’s stalking and misogynist treatment of Meghna—how many times does a woman have to say no before you leave her the fuck alone. Following her home, threatening to barge in on her family, bribing an official to see what numbers she called, assaulting her because she “lied” about being married.¹ Ugh!

It didn’t help that TIME (where we found the film) don’t clearly provide the context of that there are 17+ groups fighting the government in north-east India and the conflict has been going on there since at least the 60s. Emphasizing that Dil Se..

…is probably best known for the A.R. Rahman-penned hit “Chaiyya Chaiyya” — performed on the roof and flatbeds of a moving train — during which you hope the hip-gyrating dancers don’t fall off.

Doesn’t exactly convey the serious topic that the film is addressing. As an ignorant American, I thought the reference to a “terrorist leader” and “a mission to assassinate the prime minister” were more along the lines of the absurdity of Tropic Thunder or Zoolander. Oh, what fun—a romantic comedy about terrorism!

No mention that seven years before the film was made Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a woman wearing a suicide bomb. The closest analogy I could think of is making a romantic film in 1970 with a lead character named Oswald. Who went to South Vietnam to interview rural people about their American defenders.

I’m not saying that the film is sacrilegious. It’s the third in a trilogy about terrorism. It uses the romantic form to interrogate India’s relationship to its marginalized citizens and separatist movements. From an article by Lapata:

Thus the dogged, macho, and obsessive pursuit of Meghna by Amar becomes emblematic of the State’s ‘desire’ to hang onto the peripheral regions and crush out opposition at all costs, rejecting the possibility of separation, or even dialogue about separation or demands.

Suddenly things start making a lot more sense. Though the romantic mode in Bollywood films is stalker-ish,² Amar is supposed to be at a dangerous extreme of it (Shahrukh Khan was know for a role where he played a lover/stalker/serial killer). When Meghna’s family beats him up and he assaults her in the dessert, it parallels the Army’s reaction to an insurgency: kill everyone in the villages. When she has a panic attack later in the dessert, she has the same affect as her younger self does after seeing her teenaged sister raped by soldiers. The “flirting” when she talks about loving her mother’s arms has the context of her mother who Amar’s government has killed.³ His love and hate for the mystery of her eyes is the state’s intrigue towards and repulsion from the exoticism of the north-east. The deadly explosion at the end alludes to the ultimately mutually destructive nature of India’s internal conflicts—the State is going to end up destroying itself along with the separatist movements.

• ← A Total Wreck
• Wise Advice →