Film Review: DIL CHAHTA HAIN – Showcasing Vile Desi Masculinity
I saw Dil Chahta Hain for the first time in Gaiety-Galaxy. I was in a new college, not my first choice but filled with simultaneous reckless hope and paralyzing fear. I was the same age as the boys are in the movie. I went to watch the film because it was a thing that people did. I was very used to my peers not sharing my tastes (books!) or ideas about gender. So I tagged along in one of the many group plans that happened and then kept my thoughts to myself. Because I did not enjoy the movie.
It was everywhere that year. Our college canteen played Koi Kahe Kehta Rahen and Woh Ladki Hain Kahan on repeat. With the second, everyone in the canteen would pump their arms in that birdie step shown in the song. It was infectious and the peer pressure was HARD to love this film. It still is.
It came back to me as I was listening to the Dil Chahta Hain episode of the Khandaan podcast. And their conversation made me want to watch the film again. I don’t regret it. I noticed several things that I had missed 24 years ago, because I was too young and because I was too consumed by unarticulated rage at the story. First, the good stuff.
A woman who isn’t just a prop for a man’s growth
Tara, oh Tara. Streaming services today are opening up possibilities for stories centering people other than young, North Indian/white men. Even so, a Tara is such a rarity, I’m hard-pressed to think of another such depiction in Hindi cinema. Dil Chahta Hain showed us her in 2001. She has a daughter who is presumably still a minor since the child’s father is able to keep her away. She’s an independent woman with a career, a perspective on art and life, a history. Name one other ‘older woman’ in a Bollywood film who isn’t shown as a hallowed ma character or a predatory, laughworthy seductress.
At the time, I assumed her ex was a horrible person and with the might of wealth had crushed the life out of her. This time, I noticed as she said,
“My ex-husband is a wealthy man. He had his lawyers and many witnesses prove that I was an unfit mother. An alcoholic.”
…she took a swig from her glass. And Sid, the wide-eyed substitute for the audience protested that she was nothing like that. It came as a surprise to me later in the movie (during the boys’ fight) when Sameer says even Sid admits she has a drinking problem. And she does die of liver cirrhosis. None of these would be suprises to me today as they were back then. And Tara, was she an unreliable narrator? Even a greatly exaggerated fantasy of Sid’s? That is an awesome thing in storytelling.
I love this idea because this is a forty-something’s perspective on a 21 year old’s reality. I am a Tara. Not necessarily with a kid or the alcoholism but with life etching hard furrows down my body & mind, still with the abliity to lift a suitcase albeit with a struggle. And constantly facing the decision of when it’s time to give up the fight.
This is a special footnote for me, in a film that is about privileged masculinity. Why are coming-of-age stories always about men and the most toxic of men? Women have dils too and plenty of chahatein. Dil Chahta Hain a story for me.
The slow burn of Shalini & Akash
All these years I assumed that Shalini & Akash’s time in Sydney spanned a couple of weeks. After all, she was going to visit her uncle and she already had a family and fiance back in Mumbai. It was easy to assume these because Mumbai weather doesn’t allow for visual markers of time. And having never been to Sydney, my idea is fixed in it being sunny year-round like like my own city. Dil Chahta Hain likely had something to do with it.
In one scene, Tara tells Sid that her birthday is in April (while telling him about her divorce). The boys have a fallout on her birthday and Akash leaves for Sydney the next week. When Shalini returns to Mumbai, there is a long montage of her walking through Sydney airport (as Tanhaai starts belting out the bass in the background). And the airport is filled with Christmas trees and decorations. In the same song, back in India, she’s shown swathed in shawls and walking through foggy roads (though where and when ever in Mumbai?!).
I have a much greater appreciation for the Shalini-Akash storyline if it spans eight months instead of two weeks. Slow burns are so much richer. This attraction-of-opposites trope feels more meaningful since otherwise Shalini is a rather replaceable pretty young Indian woman.
It would have to happen far away from home where Akash is bereft of his pamper circle of admiring classmates and campus cool dude status. I have my doubts about how long this relationship would last but that’s down to Akash’s character.
Shalini is the convenient manic pixie dream girl with zero agency or complexity of character. I mean, what else could Akash possibly handle? And even so, he has to be served her up on a platter by his friends, parents and her family. Speaking of, what a weird dynamic with her family. If Shalini’s father figure truly considers her his daughter, wouldn’t his son Rohit be her sibling? What kind of effed up sexual slavery are they upto in this family? But well, Dil Chahta Hain is about mollycoddling the mighty men, after all.
Arranged Love Marriage – Pooja & Sameer
I realised in this viewing that this couple is the most formulaic in every desi sense. They’re the poster couple for what Indians would start calling ‘arranged love marriage’ – a relationship initiated and choreographed mostly by the family but including some western outfits and occasional moments of privacy. Always within the prescribed parameters of class & status.
In keeping with that, they’re also the couple that most stereotypically ends up together as soon as possible (because desi parameters allow no room for ambiguity or exploration). Are they compatible? Yes, because they’re family-approved, both look pretty. It doesn’t seem like either character is the kind to care beyond that. And that’s okay, I guess.
Khandaan’s Asim Burney pointed out that Sameer is probably the most emotionally stable of the three boys and best able to communicate what he wants and doesn’t want. Of course, this is played for laughs and he’s treated as the dumb friend. In how many ways does Dil Chahta Hain celebrate toxic masculinity? Let us count.
The vile masculinity of Dil Chahta Hain’s Akash
I detest Akash. He is the sole reason I did not like this film. He is casually cruel. He sabotages his friends relationships because it amuses him. He has no compunctions harassing women or talking about them in the vilest of terms, whether it’s Deepa, Priya, Tara or ‘woh moti opera singer’. He literally punishes people for trusting him or being nice to him. Men like these rage through life, humiliating and playing games with people and keeping the situations around them tense under the guise of humour and coolness. All three boys are shown to be hyper-privileged so I can’t imagine any back story that makes Akash’s behaviour sympathetic. Other than ‘boys will be boys’ and that’s just well 
.
I enjoyed the cinematic storytelling of Sydney station episode but I have a problem with the conclusion it draws. The scene gives Akash an opportunity (like numerous others, I have no doubt) to face the impact of his callousness on other people. They’re in a train station late at night because Akash has insisted on Shalini staying back to go on the funfair rides with him.
He runs into the train before her, without a care about whether she’s okay. And she gets left behind as the doors shut and the train pulls away – alone on a platform. The minute-long shot after this lays out her terror in excruciating detail as she folds in on herself. When Akash returns, he plays it off as a joke with her as the punchline.
“Did she scare you?”
he asks the homeless drunk man lurching towards her. Too many men react to situations like these by dismissing the woman’s terror. Nothing happened, they say. But it did. The terror of being in such a situation IS the trauma. Knowing that you can never truly rely on the man who the world is forcing you to depend on. To be mocked after that is the double whammy. At least he made her laugh, they say. That’s not humour or even relief, that’s a trauma response of negotiating the approval of men who will take turns attacking you, physically or emotionally. Akash has taken that opportunity to be a man and responded as a bad man.
This poor girl is tossed about between man to man. She practically begs Akash to show he cares and he just walks away. His progression after that just shows rage, not any kind of self-awareness on his situation. He is entitled enough to barge into her engagement.
Did you notice that the film never ONCE asks Shalini if she wants to be with Akash? The father figure announces to everyone that Shalini feels like she is duty-bound to be with Rohit as if that’s a personal attack on him. And then he hands her over to Akash. I found myself asking, why would this poor girl want to be with another identical toxic man who treats her with the same violent callousness as Rohit?
The film is dominated by Akash’s arc and it gives him redemption that he didn’t earn after he wrecking-balls his way through life. I remember a classmate asking me about this movie back in 2001 and when I said I didn’t like it, he grinned and said,
“That’s because you’re a girl. You don’t understand. This is how we guys are. This is how we talk to each other.”
I looked at him with great pity because I wanted to say, you poor thing, this is not friendship, it’s not fun or funny or cool or okay. It’s horrible. I don’t feel that pity anymore. Cis men fully benefit from being this way. And when the bill called accountability comes calling, they get to shrug and say, “Hey, I’m a good guy now.”
The Khandaan trio framed their analysis of Akash as being trapped in the role of toxic masculinity and not knowing how to communicate. They called him a douchebag but also suggested that it was a defense mechanism. I say bullshit. That framing presents him as a hapless victim. He is not. I’ve lived in a world of Akashes, my whole life. Like the filmi Akash, they’re presented the world on a silver platter and they choose to not learn, to be who they are because why make an effort when you can get away with being a destructive piece of shit?
His friends are really no better. Sid, the supposed conscience of the group doesn’t bat an eyelid at Akash’s horrid treatment of Deepa. He just mildly tsk-tsks at Akash’s bullying and wicked sabotaging of Sameer’s relationships. He only gets mad when Akash turns the same brutish insensitivity towards Tara. That is just not enough. Sameer is weak enough to support Akash even as he maliciously damages his relationship and shows zero consideration for his experience of getting scammed in Goa. This really damages the idea of soft masculinity as being strong.
The podcast pointed out two other depictions of masculinity in the film – Rohit and Subodh. We see very little of them so they are caricatures at best and represent two ends of the spectrum. Rohit, the violent, entitled rich brat is literally no different from Akash except that he’s shown glowering more. Subodh on the other hand, is played for laughs. He’s set up as an extreme version of Sameer, rather obviously as his romantic rival, the softboi in the most ridiculous of ways.
Dil Chahta Hain as Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara a decade later
When Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara came out in 2011, I spotted it as the same story ten years later. And not just because the directors of the two films are siblings. Imagine the Dil Chahta Hain in their thirties.
Sameer would go on to take over the family business and in his bumbling way propose to someone who was family-approved. As the older Kabir, he’d only dimly feel an unease about having played zero part in this important life decision.
Asshole Akash would stay the asshole, taking what he liked on whim, including if his whim extended that far, his friend’s girlfriend. As Imran, in his own mind, he would be the victim of a tragic backstory – the son of another equally toxic man.
And sensitive Sid would punish the world for his pain by going the opposite way and becoming cold, hard and ruthless. As Arjun, he would be the perfect sadboi for a manic pixie dream girl to dance into his life and rescue him.
Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara didn’t make me mad. It just made me roll my eyes at the petty dramas of masculinity. And it just never seems to stop. It seems an artefact of being a woke man today to ‘admit’ that you were an asshole in the past. I heard older men in the 90s advise my peers not to be the way they were. They still marauded their way through life. Now they get to talk down to the next generation with zero consequences. Who gives a damn about mild regret or slight inconvenience when their narcisissm impacts so many people’s lives?
We need to stop framing narcissism as male immaturity and romanticising it in these coming-of-age stories. They suggest that eventually things will be resolved once the man admits he was wrong. There are no reparations made to their victims. No apologies expected. And certainly no work required to ensure that other men don’t continue the same. How come Akash’s own father doesn’t teach him how to be a responsible man or call him out on this? It’s just an ongoing baba ko juice de do.
So what is Dil Chahta Hain saying? I think it’s saying that Akash’s vile masculinity is normal and healthy. Akash enjoys some plain good luck that Rohit’s parents are marginally better at reigning in their toxic son than his own are but the film suggests that this makes him a better guy. It’s saying everyone else is an oversensitive fool (Sid), a dumb weakling (Sameer), a joke (Subodh) or an aggressive jock without a sense of humour (Rohit).
I say Akash never comes of age. He throws a tantrum, gets flown back to India, barges into someone else’s engagement party, throws another tantrum and walks away with what he wanted. The Sameers, Sids, Subodhs & Rohits follow this lead, resenting women & society for not according them the same luck that Akash gets.
Two decades later, we are pointing to the Arjun Reddys as toxic and shrugging off the Akashes because they’re closer to who desi men really are. Who exactly has come of age and where is the growth?