Deadly Love

(This is an essay from our September 2013 print quarterly, 'Under the shadow of the Bollywood tree'. See more from the issue here.)

Boy stalks girl. Passes lewd comments, harasses and humiliates her, intimidates her family and friends. Threatens to kill himself or her, if she does not reciprocate. On screen, this bullying is not the act of the dastardly villain, but of the hero, and this menacing cocktail of obsession and infatuation is dressed up as undying 'love'. The outcome of this one-sided imposition is usually the heroine not only succumbing to the hero's attentions, but being transformed into a simpering and giggling bundle of acquiescence. Ah, the power of love!

This absurd dance of courtship has played itself out on screen countless times since the movies came to Southasia a hundred years ago. One of the more recent offerings, Raanjhanaa (Mad Lover, 2013), appears to be either horrifyingly prescient about the recent incident at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi this July – where a thwarted suitor brutally hacked his fellow student, the object of his obsession, and then proceeded to commit suicide – or one must concede, with despair, that real life takes its cue from reel drama.