I was in England when the 2001 Bollywood comedy-drama film ‘Dil Chahta Hai’ (DCH) was released. Social media hadn’t taken off back then, so I missed all the hoo-ha it caused.
But when we relocated back to Goa in 2008, I kept hearing about it in some context or the other. That this or that scenic location (notably Chapora fort) had become a tourism magnet because some parts of the film had been shot there. I knew the broad outline of the story, but I hadn’t actually watched the film.
It's only now, 23 years later that I popped my own DCH cherry, to understand what the fuss was all about.
It is easy to see why it caught the popular imagination; it ticks so many boxes: romance, comedy (or at least what passes in Bollywood for romance and comedy), the bromance of a ‘dosti’ trio, song and dance, a foreign location (Sydney, Australia) and the next-best thing to a foreign location in India….Goa!
None of the characters, male or female, had much depth. The two Khans just clown around through most of the film, and the least unlikeable of the trio (Akshaye Khanna’s ‘Sid’, Siddharth Malhotra) doesn’t have to act very much more than purse his lips into an upside-down smile and philosophically shrug his shoulders now and then.
The opera scene probably grew out of the choice of foreign location. If you’re shooting in Sydney, its iconic opera house is hard to ignore. The scene is a sort of role-reversal of the one in the 1990 Julia Roberts- Richard Gere rom-com ‘Pretty Woman’ (PW). In PW, the guy takes the girl to the opera to expose her to ‘high’ culture; in DCH, the girl (Preity Zinta’s Shalini) takes the guy (Aamir Khan’s Aakash) to the opera to prove that “a thing called love exists in this world.”
So far so good, but then we’re told that the romantic duo in the opera are Troilus and Cressida (henceforth T&C)! And we hear the love duet sung in French. The only well-known opera called ‘T&C’ was written by British composer William Walton in 1954 with an English libretto, (not French), based on Geoffrey Chaucer’s epic poem ‘Troilus and Criseyde’. The music quite obviously wasn’t Walton, so it wasn’t a French translation (and why would it be, in Anglophone Syndney). So, what gives?
T&C are legendary characters associated with the story of the Trojan War, about which there is indeed a French-language grand opera (‘Les Troyens’, the Trojans) in five acts running for five hours, completed by Hector Berlioz in 1863. Thankfully for Aakash, this wasn’t the Berlioz opera either, and in any case T&C are not in it.
I learned from the end-credits that the ‘T&C’ scene had its music composed, arranged and conducted by someone called Michael Maurice Harvey, who apparently is well-known on Australia’s music scene. So, mystery solved; it wasn’t an actual opera.
(Incidentally, the end-credits thanked the “people of Sydney.” No thanks to the “people of Goa”).
But why zero in on T&C at all? They are hardly the first romantic ‘jodi’ you’d think of, in or out of opera. Walton’s T&C is hardly ever performed, and even the eponymous Shakespeare play (which is better known than the Chaucer poem avatar) gets little or no outing on the stage. Cressida, in fact, would become the archetype of ‘the faithless lover’ because in the Shakespeare play, she betrays Troilus’ love.
Shakespeare’s ‘T&C’ is considered one of his ‘problem plays.’ Why? There’s no clear resolution; its tone alternates between bawdy comedy and tragic gloom. In this Shakespearean play (unlike the fictional DCH ‘opera’), T&C are neither central to the plot (despite the name), nor does either one die. What dies is their love.
(In the Walton opera, however, they both do die; first Troilus is stabbed in the back, and a little later, Cressida stabs herself. But there is no ‘Pearly Gates’ scene as in DCH).
One reading of Shakespearean plays described his unequivocal tragedies as generally moving from a sense of ‘order to disorder’, whereas as his comedies go in reverse, from utter confusion and ‘disorder to order.’
So I’m still not clear why T&C were chosen as specific subject material for an operatic “lesson in true love” in DCH. Apart from the obvious Romeo and Juliet, there are Violetta and Alfredo in Verdi’s ‘La Traviata’ (used in PW); Mimi and Rodolfo (Puccini’s ‘La bohème’); Wagner’s ‘Tristan und Isolde’; Gluck’s ‘Orfeo ed Eurydice’ and many more. Maybe Michael Harvey liked this ‘jodi’, and the film writer-director Farhan Akhtar just trusted his judgment.
Having a look in the film at what Goa was like in the late 1990s, when it was filmed, I ask myself: is Goa too in a sort of Shakespearean ‘problem play’? DCH unleashed an unparallelled tidal wave of interest in Goa. Other Hindi films were shot here earlier, but DCH, for better or worse, may have been the watershed film.
In the middle of the film, Dimple Kapadia’s Tara tells Sid: “This is the problem with your generation. Tum log samajhte hain ki sab kuchh chalta hai.” (“You lot think that anything goes.”)
This is the Goan tragedy. We’ve gone from a semblance of order to utter anarchy. A whole generation spawned by DCH, in a bid to savour the film’s ‘magic’, really think ‘sab kuchh chalta hai’ here.
There’s one scene in DCH’s Goa segment where Sid uses a parable of a fistful of sand to tell Deepa (tormented by unrequited love) that the more tightly one holds onto something, the quicker it slips through the fingers.
Goa’s natural beauty is like that fistful of sand. The more people ‘desire’ it, want to ‘possess it, the more quickly and surely it vanishes. Forever.
That is the tragedy of the world’s ‘heart’s desire’ for Goa. Lekin Goa kya chahta hai? Just to be left alone to recover and heal from the insanely relentless revolving-door of Cressida-like ‘faithless lovers.’
(Dr Luis Dias is a physician, musician, writer and founder of Child’s Play India Foundation. He blogs at luisdias.wordpress.com)