I’m back to DDLJ!  Mostly because I have been so busy watching Sultan in theaters (4th time tomorrow) that I haven’t had a chance to watch any other movies at home.  But DDLJ is always there for me.

(part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, part 4 here, part 5 here, part 6 here, part 7 here, part 8 here, part 9 here, part 10 here, part 11 here, part 12 here, part 13 here, part 14 here, part 15 here, part 16 here)

I left off with Shahrukh having just had his prayer scene at the church and then meeting Kajol on the trail and teaching us all what it means to raise one pinky in South Asian culture.  But before I move on, I have to acknowledge the kind of huge shift that just happened here.

Back a few minutes ago in film time (and a few sections ago in my recap), I talked about the hugely important post-coital fake out scene.  Not important because of the very very poor taste “joke” that Shahrukh had actually had sex with her.  But important because it is the peak of Kajol’s attempts to figure him out.  All along, she has been trying to unpeel the layers from Shahrukh.  She keeps trying to dismiss him as a flirt, but then he keeps surprising her by being decent.  So, which is true?  The flirt or the nice guy?  That scene brings it to a fever pitch, suggesting her worst fears were right all along, before finally undercutting them and telling her, once and for all, that under all the bluster and big talk this is a sincerely good person who can take care of her.  Which then puts it on her, does she want him to take care of her?  Does she want something from him besides this cautious friendship and trust?

And now the same thing is happening with Shahrukh.  He sees Kajol praying in the church, and suddenly he is struck by her beauty and mystery and power.  Something has shifted inside of him and it is no longer an unconscious need to be around her, it as an overwhelming awareness of her and urge to understand her, to remove her power somehow by taking her apart and seeing what makes her tick.

And we, the audience, for the first time are placed in the position of knowing and understanding Shahrukh more than Kajol.  We know his prayer, but we do not know hers. Just like him, we know see her as a mystery that we need to unpack.

Which is where this next scene comes in.  Kajol is sitting on the train platform waiting for the train that will take them on the final stage of their journey.  This is another time when we get a brief establishing shot, showing her as the small still delicate figure, and Shahrukh as the larger figure who is aimed right at her.

(Shahrukh is in the green jacket in the lower left, Kajol is the tiny figure sitting on the stone wall on the right)

We watch her bent and still, and him walking across the screen towards her holding two cups of tea for about a milisecond longer than strictly necessary just to establish the location.  Adi wants to make sure we grasp the idea of Kajol as self-contained and self-sustained, and Shahrukh as needing her and moving towards her.

And then we move to a closer shot, Kajol alone, bent over the page as she writes.  She is living within her own mind, needing no outside sustenance.  Something Shahrukh is incapable of.  In the first part of this journey, it was all about Kajol’s inability to cope with the outside world, and fighting against accepting that and accepting that Shahrukh can help her navigate the world.  Now, she has made her peace with that.  She is fearless, sitting her alone at a train station, and she is casually accepting of Shahrukh’s ability to feed and shelter her in any circumstances.

But Kajol has her own world in which Shahrukh needs her guidance.  She has a direct line to God and spirituality in a way he can’t quite understand.  Thus his fascination when she was praying, and his struggles to follow her example and pray himself.  And now, he interrupts her while she is happily talking to her thoughts, insisting that she talk to him instead.

It’s a gender message, but it isn’t saying that Kajol is more spiritual and more connected to her inner self because she is a woman, but that it is a result of how women are raised versus men.  Remember, Shahrukh was raised without a mother (just as Kajol was raised trapped in her house by an authoritative father).  It’s not explicitly stated, and I think a lot of this is just personality (Shahrukh would always be more outgoing and Kajol more introverted), but I think that if Shahrukh had more waiting for him at home than a father who is always working, he would spend less time out in the world.  Think about the home that Amrish Puri comes back to every night after a day in “the world”, with music and laughter and food and loving family waiting for him.  Versus Shahrukh, alone and drunk in a swimming pool, relying on his friends to wake him up for his college graduation.  And look at his father, who is a wonderful wonderful man, but has parented by permissiveness, by letting his son run wild and consume everything that comes his way, rather than by restraint and teaching him how to find sustenance within.

Just as, I am sure, Kajol’s character will grow into comfort with the outside world, I am sure that Shahrukh’s character will grow into greater comfort with the life of the mind and spirit (heck, we see both those things happen over the course of this film!).  But they are both so young, and unformed, that they are still learning these tools, still struggling to overcome the gaps of their background.

And the background is an important point as well.  Both Kajol’s fear of the world, and Shahrukh’s fear of looking beyond the world, are a result of growing up overseas.  If Shahrukh had been raised at home, he would have been taught traditions and beliefs by his surrounding relatives, he would have had a home to return to every night, he wouldn’t have had to rely on his father to be his sole guide and mentor.  And if Kajol had been raised at home, her father might have been more willing to let her go out and explore in the real world, not just in the world she created within herself.

Okay, that was a lot to get out of about 3 seconds of screen time!  But it’s an important set up for this next conversation, where Shahrukh’s confidence and control in the world comes smack up against Kajol’s inner strength and bows down in front of it.

Shahrukh offers Kajol coffee, prepared just how she likes it.  She smiles and accepts.  Again, Kajol is very comfortable now letting him be her protector in the world.  She offers him a postcard to send home, in turn providing her guidance in the world of relationships and caring.  Shahrukh rejects saying “oh no, if a postcard reaches home, Papa will give me up for dead!”  Which is funny, but also a little sad, that Anupam parents by pushing him so forcefully out into the world.  But, Shahrukh adds, he will write home once, when he falls in love!

Okay, so he is flirting, and it works, he gets Kajol to actually look at him instead of at her postcards, but it is also a little true.  The only time that Anupam and Shahrukh will feel comfortable returning to the home, acknowledging a connection and a sacredness to that space, is when he falls in love and brings a woman into it.  Because they don’t know how to make a home sacred without a woman.

Now that “love” has come up, Shahrukh is all kinds of on edge.  He keeps biting his lip, fidgeting, and starring hard at Kajol’s face.  But she is all cool and casual, remarkably so.  She just expresses surprise that he has never been in love before, and Shahrukh replies he had many affairs, but never met the right one, again studying her face and looking for a response that she just doesn’t give.  She is so comfortable within herself at this point, relaxed and thinking of him as the nice guy who brings her coffee, that it honestly doesn’t occur to her to react to this obvious opening.  She just asks “what kind of girl are you looking for?”  Shahrukh gives her another look, like he is preparing himself to cross a line, but then looks away a little and starts to talk, not in a flirty way, but not in an unnatural way either.

He doesn’t deliver this speech like a “Monologue!” with a capital M!  But more like he is just kind of thinking out loud.  And he isn’t looking at her reaction at all.  I think it is more that her question kind of caught him up and he ended up just telling her the truth without thinking to much about it.  He wants a girl who will make all his dreams come true, who goes straight to his heart the moment he sees her.  He has never met her, but he can almost hear her voice, beyond the clouds, and someday soon, the clouds will part, and he will see her.  Hey!  It’s “Mere Kwabon”!  That song Kajol was singing when we first met her!”  Which is also what Kajol is thinking as, finally, she actually has a reaction to all this “love love love” talk Shahrukh has been spewing at her.

There’s two levels this scene works on.  First, FATE!  It’s FATE!!!  They are MEANT TO BE!!!!  This is the closest this film comes to taking that stand.  Sure, there were those moments earlier when they almost passed each other in the street or the coincidence of them both almost missing the train and then actually missing the train just now.  But this is the only time there is something really truly magical about their connection, and I don’t know if I necessarily like that.  I kind of like it that they are just two very different people who spark something in each other and grew together.  Not that they were inexorably brought together by fate.

So the second level is the part I like better.  That Kajol has rubbed off on him a little.  That he is beginning to see the world the way she sees it, including the idea that there is someone out there waiting for you.  And, that having met her, he is also more willing to believe there is one woman out there for him.  And Kajol is responding not just to the “Fate FATE!!!” yelling at her, but also to seeing him be legitimately introspective and serious, showing her a new side of himself and possibly indicating how she has changed him, just as he has changed her.

Shahrukh sees that he shook her up a little and leans into her, asking “any strangers ever show up in your dreams?”  Kajol looks shaken, and Shahrukh clearly thinks it is because she is feeling things for him that she doesn’t want to admit.  Which is kind of true, but it is also the blindness of men, that they think women’s internal struggles are just between their desires and their conscience.  It’s the same blindness he will have in the Gazebo scene with her in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (at the rate I’m going with this SRKajol rewatch, I don’t know, sometime in 2018?), he thinks she is free to do what she wants when she wants because that is how he is in his life.

But Kajol here is braver than she is in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, or perhaps just has less to lose.  Poor K2H2 Kajol had been in love for a decade, and now it was all in front of her, and she couldn’t let herself take it.  DDLJ Kajol just met this guy and isn’t even sure of his feelings.  Instead of running away and gathering strength and thinking through the mess that is her life, like K2H2 Kajol did (poor Salman!), DDLJ Kajol just nips it in the bud right away, looks him full in the face, and reminds Shahrukh to check his privilege, because “There’s no place for strangers in my dreams.”  Shahrukh kind of smiles, like he thinks she is being coy, and then Kajol slaps him in the face with “I’m getting married.”  And then they both kind of look at nothing and try not to throw up and/or burst into tears.

It feels like such a physical reaction, you know?  It’s not like they are sitting there thinking through “oh how sad and frustrating, that she is marrying someone else when we have such a good time together.”  It’s this immediate “the thought of this vibrant young woman being locked away in a marriage makes my body feel ill and I have to focus all my strength on controlling my reaction.”

There’s a lot of moments in this film that are anti-arranged marriages, but this is one of the most telling.  That arranged marriages aren’t a bad idea because of morals or logic, they are bad because they are unnatural, unnatural to the point that your body rejects them.  But at the same time, the message here (as it is elsewhere in the film) is locked to these particular characters in this particular situation.  It is unnatural for Kajol, so young and so inexperienced and so untouched by the world, to already be planning her wedding.  But for another teenage girl, say Kajol’s friend Tina, it could be the most natural thing in the world!  If she had already sewed her wild oats, if she was going into this marriage with her eyes open fully aware of what it would entail, than what’s the problem?  Someday I am going to write about Jeet, which has a very similar set up, and yet the arranged marriage in that turns out great and isn’t unnatural to the point of bodily revulsion to contemplate.

(See how well Karisma’s arranged marriage turned out? At least in film, if not in life.  Congrats again on the divorce Lolo!))

Shahrukh pulls it together before she does, managing to smile and offer a seemingly sincere “Congratulations!” and then to ask for the usually details, who is the guy and how did they meet, while she can still just barely manage monosyllabic responses.  Although, he isn’t doing that great either.  Shahrukh does a wonderful job of acting like someone who is acting like they are okay, when they really aren’t.  The smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes, he keeps moving about, like he is trying to distract himself from feeling something.  But it’s the nice guy thing to do, if she is getting married, he is respecting her decision and trying not to put his pain on her.

Until it shifts again when she reveals she has never met her fiance.  Suddenly, this isn’t “I feel really raw about this because of who you are and how I feel about you.”  It is “As a decent person, I am concerned about this situation, just like I would be concerned about any other helpless woman in your situation.”

Remember way way back when Farida tried to convince Kajol that maybe her fiance in India is the guy she has been dreaming about and Kajol shut that down immediately?  And I argued it was because she knew her “dream” guy would have to be an NRI, not some farm boy from the Punjab?  That’s what is dawning on Shahrukh here too.  He learns she has never met her fiance, AND that he is from India.  Even not knowing Kajol that well, even if he wasn’t clearly in love with her himself, he would know that this is NOT a girl who could handle being married to a traditional guy in India.

Amrish Puri wants to convince himself that he has raised a Hindustani girl in London, with no outside influences.  But, you just can’t do that!  The world will break through.  Kajol has been changed, forever, by her upbringing.  She doesn’t quite fit into Europe (although this trip is rapidly helping her with that), but she definitely doesn’t fit into a marriage in India with the kind of guy who would accept a bride he had never seen.

The other movie I can’t help thinking about is Nameste London, where the rural neighbor’s son and the London raised daughter do end up together.  But remember, he saw her first.  He fell in love with her before the wedding.  She isn’t marrying someone who wanted an obedient arranged marriage bride, she is marrying someone who knows exactly what he is getting and wants it all.

It’s a very different kind of guy than the rural farmer’s son who is willing to blindly marry some random girl from London, assuming she will fit perfectly into his household and life because it is the job of the woman to adjust.  That’s the nightmare, that Kajol is going to be abandoned overseas with a stranger to sink or swim on her own.  And that’s why Shahrukh really starts to question it, because it is no longer a matter of hiding his own desires, but of protecting her safety.

But, what is good and bad about this, is that Shahrukh is giving her the right to make her own choices about what she wants, a right her father never gave her.  This is always the problem with reform efforts.  You want to save people from having their rights taken away, but what if they want those rights taken away?  Is it your place to make that decision for them?  Isn’t it just as bad as everyone else who is treating them like they can’t take care of themselves?  You want them to say one word, give you permission to save them, but you can’t save them by force, because then you are no better than what you are saving them from.  And truly, I think at this point, Shahrukh wants her to say that word not because it would make him happy, or even because he thinks she might be in love with him, but because the thought of any woman being given away like that pains him.

And Kajol gives him the only response she can.  Which is, nothing.  She already told him that her father had decided this for her, that “this is how it is with us”.  All she can do now is look at him, and let her face show the pain this obedience and duty is causing her, but that she also has the strength to carry it out.

 

Shahrukh may think he is a “Hindustani”, that he “knows what honor means to a Hindustani girl”, but he has no idea of what a young seemingly fragile and untested Indian girl really has to go through and is really facing in her life.  And I don’t think this pain being hidden by strength is anything new to her.  I think she has been feeling it and living with it ever since that letter arrived from the Punjab and she had that conversation with her mother about how now it was time for her to forget her dreams.

Heck, even before that.  Every time her father forbade something, every time she gave up an experience or a dream that she knew he wouldn’t want her to have, she has been training for this moment.  For when she gives up everything about herself, as ordered by her father, in order to make his dream of her life come true.  The argument she gave him for this trip, that she wanted “just 3 months of my own life”, was real.  These 3 months are the only time in her life that she has been allowed to be herself, to be what she really is, not to be shoved into the torturous mold that her father has built for her.