Retake | The great Indian marriage and its discontents after globalisation

Our cinema has fought the class wars well but it couldn’t for the longest time look past marriage as a conclusive point. It wasn’t until the years after globalisation that we began to suspect the pursuit of this mythical destination.

Asif’s Mughal-E-Azam is perhaps the grandest ever evocation of love taking on class disparities. Everything that has followed in Bollywood, be it Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak or Dil are you could argue, inheritors of the grandest, most epic tale of them all. Marriage after all is inextricably stitched into the fibre of India. You could in fact argue, that it is the fibre that helms this vague concept of Indian-ness and comes closest to answering the question, what it means to be Indian. We often treat marriage as ritual proof of statehood as seen through the lens of culture. It’s why Bollywood has for ages framed marriage as the end all of everything you can possibly be. Love, companionship, socio-economic placement, pretty much everything culminates in marriage. But the 90s, especially the post-globalisation era interpreted this union as more than just a destination, as maybe a cynical means to an equally perceivably glorious end.

Govinda’s Dulhe Raja, is a curious entry in the pantheon of Bollywood’s on-screen class wars. Largely because it is a comical take on the battle between two widely divergent classes. Kader Khan plays KK Singhania who gets into a back-and-forth battle with Raja (Govinda) a small-time entrepreneur who has erected his tardy dhaba outside the gates of Singhania’s five-star hotel. Both trade pot-shots, witticisms and tricks to usurp the other. As a sub-plot, Singhania’s daughter Kiran (Raveena Tandon) wants to marry Rahul (Mohnish Bahl), a con-artist who dupes rich women into marrying him to have a shot at their money. Kiran finally comes around to fall for the Raja’s nobility and audacity but it is really the class-breaking theatrics of the film that entrusted India’s growing inequality, in that whirlwind decade, to still retain a soul. The clarity of Rahul’s intentions is defeated by the vague morality of Raja’s rescue act that though sentimental in nature end with more than just love as the prize. Do good and good comes to you, the film tells us.

Class wars have been fought across the fault lines of family and lineage for decades, but things really came to a head in the late 80s with Qayamat se Qayamat Tak and Maine Pyar Kiya, releasing back to back. Both films cast conservative patriarchs as the villains and love as the antidote to the misery that is socio-economic poverty. Fast forward a couple of years after globalisation and while the landscape of Indian marriage began to evolve and expand, so did the premise. In Andaz Apna Apna, two wasteful men set out to marry a rich woman. In fact, there is an entire contingent of such men in the film that openly regard marriage as the ladder to some sort of success. You could argue this is a detrimental take on dowry, but by lampooning those chasing it, the film makes a subtle point. At the end of it all, everyone just needs love?

A year after Andaz Apna Apna Govinda’s Coolie no 1, used a class-breaking marriage as a punishment for the elite and casteist (though not mentioned) ways of the elite. In the film, a coolie cons an elite family into believing he is rich. In Andaz Apna Apna, both men pretend to be well-to-do to earn the trust of their respective women. In Anil Kapoor’s Judaai, inspired perhaps from Indecent Proposal, a wife convinces her husband to marry his boss’ daughter so they can finally have the life ‘they deserve’. By the time the impact had begun to set in, cinema, as evidenced by Judaai’s moral centrism and Dulhe Raja’s prideful flamboyance had begun to reflect the distance that inequality and inequity were beginning to carve in our social landscape.

Thanks to these films though, the aura of holiness around the idea of marriage received its first dents. That said, every cultural era has its counter-forces, or in this case, the dominant ones like Sooraj Barjatya’s multiverse of marriages and families, where class, cast and everything you could possibly imagine as a deterrent was absent. This was the heaven, that marriage, as a product at least was always meant to be.

Shahid Kapoor and Amrita Rao in a still from Sooraj Barjatya's Vivah | Twitter

Considering how the late 80s pushed Hindi cinema into a spiral of love at all costs cinema that it took comedies to wrest marriage from the clutches of self-serious profundity. In a country where arranged marriages outrank those held in love, and practices like dowry and honour killings continue to ail the social system, maybe the ‘greatness’ of the Great Indian Marriage could have been understated for the purpose of rationale. It’s something that Sairat partly addressed and Photograph subversively decimated as a trope that has run our cinema thin in terms of places it could take love to. The 90s are blamed for a lot that is wrong with our cinema but in trivialising the depth of marriage, its genesis and motivations, accomplish something, if not exactly to widespread acclaim. 

Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.

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