This week Yash Chopra’s Chandni (1989) turned 30, and, as expected, there were trips down the memory lane that relived the glory of the film as well as celebrated the impact it had on the romance genre in Hindi films. As a film, Chandni cemented Chopra’s reputation as the pasha of romance and became a testimony to Sridevi’s stardom in the late 1990s where her presence, at times, was bigger than the male ‘hero’ and even the narrative. Even with such legacy, the film would not make it to the Top 3 in Chopra’s oeuvre and just about managed to feature in Sridevi’s greatest works if only one were to disregard her entire body of work in Tamil cinema. In that light, reliving Chandni three decades later makes you wonder if ‘nostalgia’ can make a film better, and at the same time, ponder if the past is being celebrated too much.
In her book The Future of Nostalgia, the late Svetlana Boym, a Professor at Harvard University, highlighted how popular culture was a vessel for national myths that a nation exports. Boym went on to note how nostalgia also provides restoration of extinct creatures and a conflict resolution, something that is more than evident from the content available on television and online streaming platforms.
Nostalgia had always been a factor across popular media, be it movies, literature or music for as long as one can recall, yet the marked increase in celebrating the past in the last decade has been different. Present-day popular culture now looks at the past in a fashion that is probably more restorative than reflective. Consider the case of Chandni—we are as far removed from it today as we were from films such as Mother India, Pyasaa and Naya Daur when the Yash Chopra film first released and try as hard, one can’t recall films of Mehboob Khan, Guru Dutt or BR Chopra being lauded as much three decades after their first appearance. The three films, Mother India, Pyasaa and Naya Daur, included nostalgia as an element but not in a straightforward way, and at the same time were also a searing indictment of the then present-day society.
Unlike Great Britain in the 1980s that unleashed heritage cinema with films such as Chariots of Fire (1981) and A Room with a View (1985) or films featuring Gérard Depardieu that put France’s past on display in full glory with Le dernier métro (1980), Le retour de Martin Guerre (1982), and Camille Claudel (1988), nostalgia is still largely reflective in Indian popular media. But more than being reflective, contemporary Bollywood’s love for nostalgia appears to stem out of gratitude.
Mirroring the early Indian television content that was largely cinema-inspired, the subjects and themes of today’s popular films are also rehash of the past films, and therefore, one can hardly differentiate between the cop in Akayla (1991) and the one seen in Dabangg (2010), Singham (2011) or Rowdy Rathore (2012). There is enough research that suggests that memories of the past can help alleviate anxiety and other troubles of life; however, nostalgia shouldn’t get to a point where popular culture refuses to let go just because it’s a money-spinning formula.gautam@chintamani.org