![]() Sandhya, for her part, is not only oblivious to her husband’s sense of shame about her physical appearance, she is complex-free about her weight. His romantic and sexual aspirations thus crushed under the weight of economic pragmatism, Prem is bristling with resentment at his new bride. They are marrying their educated daughter into a family that’s financially inferior to theirs, and to a boy who’s a school drop-out, only because they believe-not without justification-that the marriage market is not very kind to overweight girls, no matter how qualified they might be. She is a financial lifeline for a family with dim economic prospects.įor Sandhya’s family, too, the arranged match is a calculated trade-off. qualification, and is in line for a secure government teaching job. But his father and other members of the family see an economic trade-off: so what if the bride is not conventionally attractive, they argue, she has a B.Ed. Marrying-or “being stuck" with a fat wife-is, for Prem, the last straw in a life marked by failures. Prem’s dreams of a slim and pretty wife-a wife that he can show off to his peers-crash when his father moots an arranged marriage with the overweight Sandhya. All the more so because it doesn’t happen often in Bollywood. The film’s gentle mockery of shakha culture-coming at a time when the RSS’s political influence is on the ascendant-is priceless. When he is not bullied around by his irascible father (Sanjay Mishra), he is busy trying to resurrect his repressed manhood in a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) shakha. Prem is 25, a class X drop-out, and runs a small cassette shop where he spends his days listening to his idol Kumar Sanu’s odes to love and longing. ![]() And it is his traversal of this trajectory-made by hundreds of thousands who came of age in the 1990s-that defines the narrative arc of the film. The great Indian (sexually and otherwise) frustrated male with a gigantic sense of entitlement is a common species not just in small town India but in the metros as well. And this journey-because it can give hard knocks to one’s self-esteem, to the fantasies one has erected about oneself-can often be traumatic. The journey from entitlement to reconciliation via disappointment is a journey that each aspirer would have to make for himself. It was the 1990s that gave birth to what we today call an “aspirational India".Īnd yet, for a vast majority of the aspiring classes, aspiration’s wait for fulfillment would be a long one, if not the proverbial wait for Godot. ![]() Everything seemed possible, and within reach. The ’90s was a time when India was opening up-both economically, and culturally, with the advent of satellite television. But it is actually about the outsized aspirations of the male protagonist Prem, and the heavy psychic burden of frustrations and resentments they inflict on him. The film’s tagline-“love comes in all sizes"-may give the impression that it is about the overweight bride, Sandhya. It marks a cinematic departure in the way it takes the rom-com out of the urban cool register and refashions it for the Indian aam aadmi (and I mean aam aadmi in a gender-specific, aurat-exclusive way). ![]() But DLKH is much more than a rom-com with a retro, small-town twist. It has been slotted as a heart-warming romantic comedy. Critics have largely praised DLKH as a fine rendition of 1990s nostalgia-citing its invocation of Kumar Sanu, cassette players, VCRs, and period detailing.
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