Table For Two

Popular Hindi cinema’s enduring love-affair with heterosexual romance has had an eventful history. This passionate preoccupation has exhibited the kind of productivity that such cinema normally likes to see in conjugal couples: it has birthed a new set of ideas about normative sexuality and romance with and for each new generation.

Consequently, depictions of heterosexual couples in popular Hindi cinema offer the opportunity to chart contemporary social and political anxieties. In the trajectories of these love stories, socio-political tensions are articulated, simplified, and often entirely resolved through a deus ex machina that most often symbolizes a collective social fantasy.

Popular Hindi cinema has more or less consistently endorsed marriage as the inevitable culmination of heterosexual romance. But in the films of the 1950s and the 1960s, such as Shree 420 (1955) and Naya Daur (1957), marriage also appears as the mechanism through which the young couple, regardless of the many revolutionary acts they might have committed while buoyed by love, is decisively pulled back into a the framework of a feudal family.

Popular Hindi films of this era that center on married couples tend to valorize conjugal relationships.

While romance is legitimized through the route of marriage in most films in this era, only heterosexual love that passes the tests of social acceptability and morality culminates into conjugal bliss. The closure of marriage is normally denied to romantic couples that dare to transgress social boundaries, on indulge in behavior that could be classified as villainous or indecent.

Protagonists who attempt to woo paramours through falsehood or deception also meet tragic ends.

Thus, since it is enmeshed in discourses of worth and value, love is always found by characters that are considered “deserving” and worthy of conjugality.

In the films of this era, love is also seen as being purified by suffering and sacrifice.

In Arzoo (1950), Kamini (Kamini Kaushal) gets married while presuming her childhood friend and lover Badal (Dilip Kumar) to be dead. Badal, who survived a lethal fire, returns to Kamini’s life with a vengeance, assuming that she has been unfaithful to their love. Kamini is torn between ideas of duty and desire, and the narrative is resolved when she is accidentally killed by a bullet shot by her husband, meant for her former lover.

Ideas of morality around love and conjugal relations were also mediated by religion, reflecting tensions between a newly formed country’s secular ideals, and its history of communal conflict.

Arzoo, for instance, was strongly criticized by Filmindia’s Baburao Patel for making a “mess” out of the sanctity of Hindu marriage, and “distorting” its character. As Aarti Wani observes in her book Fantasy of Modernity, Patel directs his virulent moral outage at Dilip Kumar, writer Ismat Chughtai and director Shaheed Latif, and arbitrarily holds their “Muslimness” responsible for this perceived transgression.

Popular Hindi films during these times were often advertised for their depictions of love. Suraiya-starrer Char Din (1949), for instance, was promoted in Filmindia as a “love story that will warm every lonely heart and thrill every happy one.”

However, these depictions were heavily entrenched in discourses of tradition and morality: while these filmic couples held hands, hugged, and sang to each other, they seldom engaged in displays of sexual desire on screen, in stark contrast to several Indian films produced in the 1920s and 1930s. Consequently, a film such as Raj Kapoor’s Gopinath (1948) was advertised as “not the story of lovers, but of love”.

Several historians have commented on popular Hindi cinema’s self-censorship with regard to the kiss, stating that it is emblematic of the anxieties of the state and educated classes with regard to the presumed gullibility of the “uneducated masses”. Ashish Rajadhyaksha underlines that the prohibition was also meant to foster “a better cinema” that would be “worthy of incarnating the citizen as the filmgoing subject”. It was assumed that a cinema that adhered to a puritanical, statist ideology with regard to decency and morality would contribute towards the task of "refining" the sensibilities of the educated Indian audience.

While the kiss between couples was deferred, the void left by the missing displays of passion was filled by the Hindi film song. Although the bodies of filmic couples were fettered by many social dictates, their voices rang with colourful and explicit metaphors.

Songs thus prolonged and nuanced the viewing pleasure that would have otherwise been offered by the kiss, sometimes serving to add layers of meaning to the couple’s relationship, while also allowing the film to capitalize on additional avenues of profit.

As their voices articulate what is forbidden to their bodies, couples in these films define their relationship while they sing together.

The locations and spaces in which these couples demonstrate their love for one another also underline the nature of their relationship.

Popular Hindi films of this era were seen as the primary source of young audiences’ notions of sexuality and love, becoming the bridges which allowed them to reconcile a traditional Indian society with the promises of modernism. Several commentators have configured cinema as the space in which young audiences dreamed of the promise of the individualism afforded by modernity.

While films were cast in popular discourse as manuals on modern ideas of love and romance, stars were often seen as the instructors who could provide guidance in matters of conjugality. Wani finds that popular actors in the 1950s were inundated with questions about love and romantic relationships when they answered Stars Advise You columns in the popular film magazine Filmfare.

Stars rumored to be in relationships or affairs were seen as making for more credible couples on screen. For instance, the depictions of love between Dilip Kumar and Kamini Kaushal, and Raj Kapoor and Nargis, were perceived as inherently believable.

On the other hand, films were criticized for corrupting the youth and children with indecent songs and displays of affection. In her book Outside the Lettered City, Manishita Dass quotes director K A Abbas, who in a column in Filmindia wrote that Hindi cinema had led to a “newly-awakened erotic sense” among Indian youth.

Thus, Hindi cinema of this period found itself caught between being regarded as a viable source of entertainment and escape for young audiences struggling to grasp at modernity, and being seen as responsible for the corruption and “westernization” of the Indian youth. Consequently, films produced in the 1950s and 1960s are replete with internal contradictions, espousing a half-hearted modernity even as they glorify tradition.

This conflict looms large in the narrative of Awaara, in which Rita (Nargis) uncomfortably bears the burden of representing both, tradition and modernity, and finds herself torn in the process.

The tensions between modern ideas of heterosexual romance and traditional constructions of authority are resolved most smoothly when love for a partner is conflated with respect and deference for the nation.

While answering a reader’s question in a Filmindia issue in 1949, Baburao Patel comments that the moon, which figures prominently in Hindi film songs, “spoils the character” of the love of young couples by “sprinkling desire on it”.

As this exhibition demonstrates, the paradox inherent to popular Hindi cinema’s relationship with heterosexual love in the couple of decades after 1947 is perfectly encapsulated in Patel’s disdain for physical desire and his frustration with cinema for finding a way to allude to it, albeit tangentially.