DDLJ@30: The love story that redefined Bollywood romance still casts its spell

Three decades after its release, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge continues to enchant audiences with its timeless romance and iconic moments. Despite being rooted in traditional values, the Aditya Chopra classic still draws crowds and inspires generations of love stories.

New Delhi: Can a film age like fine wine, mellow and satiny smooth, be recalled wistfully whenever you think of romance, yet sit uneasily with contemporary times? “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge” is that contradiction – a much loved film cast in a conservative-patriarchal mould but one still finding takers in this age of swipe right and swipe left.

“Come fall in love” was the tagline of the Shah Rukh Khan-Kajol starrer that released 30 years ago on October 20, 1995. And people did. They still do, some rekindling an old romance and others perhaps starting one.

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The love story, about two London-bred youngsters who fall in love but won’t get married until they get parental consent, marked the directorial debut of Aditya Chopra. Unfolding in lush Swiss meadows and snow-capped mountains and moving to Punjab’s mustard fields, it went on to become one of the greatest hits of Indian cinema and is still being screened in Mumbai’s Maratha Mandir.

Out of sync in the age of dating apps like Tinder, Bumble and Hinge, the story centres around Raj, a carefree, rich boy who falls in love with Simran when they meet on a European holiday.

Simran is enjoying the last bit of teen freedom before she travels to Punjab to marry a man she has never met and one her strict father Chaudhary Baldev Singh has chosen for her. Lovelorn Raj follows her there with the promise to win over her father.

Couples, young and old, come to the theatre even today to watch the romance, sepia tinted maybe but still fresh and gentle, said Manoj Desai, executive director of Maratha Mandir.

On weekdays, about 70 to 100 people come to watch the movie in the 11:30 am show. On weekends, the number goes up to 200-300, according to Desai.

The ticket prices for the movie are Rs 50 for balcony seat and Rs 30 for dress circle.

According to film historian SMM Ausaja, “DDLJ”, as the film came to be known, struck a chord at the time because there was a saturation of David Dhawan-Govinda comedies.

“It was a landmark film in terms of romance, music, brilliant dialogues, iconic scenes including the train sequence. Performances were top class, and had a crackling onscreen chemistry of Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol. No film has been able to recreate this kind of magic in the romantic space,” Ausaja told PTI.

The enduring love story, set against close knit families, boisterous patriarchs and nostalgia for ‘mera desh’, is coded in the memory of cinema-lovers.

With an ensemble cast that included Farida Jalal, Amrish Puri, Anupam Kher and Parmeet Sethi, it’s the perfect mélange of songs, dialogues, costumes and scenes, quoted endlessly for three decades and counting.

Its songs “Tujhe dekha to ye jaana sanam”, “Mehndi laga ke rakhna”, “Ruk jaa…”, “Mere khwabo mein…”, “Ho gaya hai tujhko to pyaar sajna” live on. So do the dialogues – you may or may not have seen the film but you are likely to remember “Bade bade deshon mein, aisi baatein hoti rahti hain Senorita…”, the “Palat” moment when Raj wills Simran to turn around and of course the “Jaa Simran ja, jee le apni zindagi”, the final acceptance from the crusty father to his daughter.

Aditya Chopra wrote the film with Javed Siddiqui while Manmohan Singh served as the cinematographer and Jatin Pandit and Lalit Pandit composed the music for it. The film was edited by Keshav Naidu. The team couldn’t have come together better, “DDLJ”, like “Sholay”, came at the right time, said Ausaja.