‘Dhadak 2' and ‘Saiyyara': Two romances, miles apart

Indian Express

4 days ago

Early on in Shazia Iqbal's Dhadak 2, on being asked what is most important in a marriage, a character replies, 'caste'. What about love, the heroine Vidhi Bhardwaj (Tripti Dimri) asks. The upfront mention of love and caste together tells us that the film is invested in the transgressive potential of the star-crossed-lovers trope of popular melodrama. It is interested both in the fantasy of love and in the reality of caste. Though a remake of Mari Selvaraj's Tamil film Pariyerum Perumal (2018), this makes it reminiscent of Nagraj Manjule's Sairat (2016) too. In doing so, the film names what author Aarti Wani called the 'seldom named' in the romantic fantasy of Bombay cinema — where caste had an 'absent presence' but was never named explicitly. Even when lovers rebelled against families, the conflict was rarely contextualised as a caste-based one. In contrast, Dhadak 2's protagonists belong to different castes. Vidhi comes from a Brahmin family of lawyers; Neelesh Ahiwar's (Siddhant Chaturvedi) Dalit family traditionally worked with leather, and he now has a dhol group called Bhim Baja Dhol Boys.
The opening gives us two contrasting scenes. One is a realist situation of violence against the idea of intermingling between castes. This is seamlessly followed by the possibility of the fantasy of romance. Yet even in the latter, the film intermingles fantasy and reality. Vidhi and Neelesh lock eyes with each other at a wedding. Neelesh and his friends are very aware that Vidhi is looking at him and that this is an atypical situation. When Vidhi finally approaches Neelesh and asks for his number, it is because she sees him as a dholwala who can play the instrument at her sister's upcoming wedding. The boundaries that this scene plays around with about how caste dictates who we fall in love with are fascinating.
Eventually, because this is a fantasy of romance, Neelesh does end up at her sister's wedding. But there has been a change of roles — he is now a guest invited by Vidhi. 'Love will find a way' plays at the wedding. And yet, he is reluctant to dance and claim space, aware of his caste location. It is a brief dream sequence that enables him to let go. He even ends up playing the dhol, but this time the dynamics have changed. The possibility of Vidhi and Neelesh interacting like this is entirely due to his admission, through a caste-based quota, to the law university where they are both students. For the romantic genre, this is a moment of great transgressive possibility and not of caste anxiety.
It is precisely this that irks Vidhi's family, and the reality of caste intervenes as Neelesh is brutally reminded of his so-called place in society. What follows is a long and stark sequence, making use of melodrama to express Neelesh's inner turmoil, but also considering what it says about the deeply casteist nature of upper-caste families. Vidhi's father, who is her 'hero' and has brought her up without gender bias, is threatened. He is an educated, second-generation lawyer who tells Neelesh that they do not become equal just by studying together. What he finds difficult, as Neelesh reminds him later, is to accept even his humanity. The contrast with the redemptive arc reserved for Bollywood fathers of the great love stories of Hindi cinema is obvious.
The film's critique of the complicity of the education system includes a Rohith Vemula tribute from whom Neelesh learns the value of solidarity and resistance. A classroom scene, where student introductions rely on surnames ('titles') could be a regular scene in any other film. But viewed from the perspective of Neelesh's terror about his caste identity being revealed, the implication of the focus on surnames becomes visible. This classroom 'introduction' becomes a performance of caste privilege. The sequence reminded me of an introductory exercise in my first year in Delhi University, where a fellow student 'accidentally' mentioned that her mother is a well-connected journalist, and our teacher said 'not bad' in admiration. What was being admired?
Two weeks before the release of Dhadak 2, the massive box-office success of Saiyyara, also a romance, hinted at the return of the love story to Bollywood after an onslaught of films celebrating masculine anger and violence. But while Saiyyara is a somewhat traditional film, where masculine self-pity disguises itself as a romance, Dhadak 2 dares to challenge its audience by making visible the violence at the heart of a caste-based society. Its female protagonist questions codes of honour and sacrifice. And its male protagonist makes a choice not to resort to the finality of violence, even though the film plays around with the audience's expectations of the same in its ending moments. Instead, it gives us an almost metaphorical sequence where the target of violence is the casteist mindset itself, personified by the henchman Shankar.
In the final moments of Saiyyara, as the hero was singing on stage, phone cameras came out in full force in the cinema theatre. This was a moment of awe on screen, and everyone wanted to consume it through their phones. In contrast, in Dhadak 2's shattering finale, no one at the South Delhi multiplex where I saw the film seemed to want to do this. Here, the shock and awe of the popular form was embedded in a politics that made a powerful argument against caste. You couldn't admire the form without also acknowledging its politics. A phone camera would not be able to contain it.
The writer is a film scholar and critic based in Delhi