Bobby… Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak… Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge – 1

(this first installment deals with Bobby, the next one will take up DDLJ, the final one QSQT)

Between the masala epic conceits of Raj Kapoor’s Bobby and the bourgeois fantasies of Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge intervenes Mansoor Khan’s Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak. The latter, a youth love story that in a way splits the difference between those other two films. The distance traveled between Bobby and Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge is immense. The former marks Raj Kapoor’s turn toward masala cinema and this was often an uneasy mix for the director. This mode in the director’s vision was wedded with an increasingly darker view of the ‘structures of kinship’ as well as a more direct representation of and simultaneous recoiling from sexuality. The juxtaposition of these elements often produces in the late Raj Kapoor a grotesque mix. One could risk a psychoanalytic explanation and venture that as Raj Kapoor ages a concern with sexuality becomes paramount. This first emerges in Mera Naam Joker(even if there were always hints of greater candor on the subject in earlier RK films.

For an older director it is remarkable that in a youth romance like Bobby it is precisely the sexuality of the lead pair that is rendered normal even as it appears under the sign of greater liberation. But in every other instance that sex and sexuality come to the fore in the narrative there is an element of darkness and ‘near-sin’ to the proceedings. With Rishi Kapoor’s parents it is almost as if their standing in the upper echelons of the social sphere has been achieved by a turning away from marital intimacies as well as [and this is always the cardinal crime in the late Raj Kapoor], in the woman’s case, the refusal to breast-feed [the ‘breast’ being one of Raj Kapoor’s lifelong obsessions.. his Satyam Shivam Sundaram and Ram Teri Ganga Maili being extended ‘commentaries’ on this fetish.. the breast does ‘double’ duty… it operates on this side of virginal purity as the idealized symbol of feminine erotic beauty, it then re-appears with the woman who has ‘known’ a man but where the marriage is always questionable for one reason or another as the lactating organ and hence a symbol of an even greater purity.. in social terms the trope of a ‘fallen woman’ is invoked.. one might risk yet again.. the darker view of ‘society’ is the necessary staging ground for the director’s own attraction/repulsion complex with respect to the feminine erotic, itself always fetishized by the ‘breast’]. Another older pair in the film that even supersedes Rishi Kapoor’s parents in terms of social standing begets a ‘retarded’ daughter. But barring the lead pair youth culture itself seems to belong to a ‘swinging 60s’ model of darker revelry. So diseased is the human ‘sociality’ within which the love story of the film blossoms (incidentally Dimple Kapadia’s father is as the film’s fisherman denied a sexual coding though not necessarily his own private grotesquerie) that when Prem Chopra shows up toward the end one is almost relieved to discover a petty criminal with normal villainous urges!

Whatever one might think of this problematic mix with its own conservative dead ends the film’s opposition nonetheless inclines in favor of the younger pair. They are never at fault even when they engage in the most dramatic actions. It is always the older generation that is responsible for every one of the story’s central ills. This is another ‘Independence’ generation that has not turned out well at all! At any rate Raj Kapoor is light years removed from Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge and Aditya Chopra’s bourgeois imaginings where the youth love story becomes the excuse for the ‘extended family’ to be fully realized! More on this another time.