Yash Raj Chopra was always an extension of our family. No, we aren’t related to the Chopra khandaan. We just felt that he was one of us. The living room, in which Pinky and Vicky’s parents (Kabhi Kabhie, 1976) celebrated their children falling in love with each other, was an extension of ours. Whiskey flowed. Punjabi profanities tinged with love were sprayed freely. The punjabiyat that he swathed over his films and in turn over Bollywood was familiar and familial. He seduced us with apnapan.
Even as his remarkable and illustrious career ends with his dengue-induced demise, there is a continuous reference to the romance he infused into Indian cinema, now the very essence of “Bollywood”, and the commercially significant production house he leaves behind in legacy. Was Bollywood’s King of Romance really just the King of Romance? There are at least two essential elements to Yash Chopra’s position in Bollywood lore that must go beyond that epithet. First, his films were extremely political, particularly tuned to India’s overt and subliminal post-Partition pain. Second, his films were about complicated personal relationships questioning social norms.
YRC’s earlier films explored the post-Partition trauma of religious identity, loss and displacement.
In his first film, Dhool Ka Phool, he challenged the notion of hardened religious identities through the story of a Hindu (by birth) child brought up by a Muslim parent and eventually placed in a court of law adjudicated by his birth father. In Dharmputra, a nawab’s grandson grows up as a Hindu and eventually becomes a Muslim hating extremist. In Waqt, alongside introducing the resplendent upper class multi-starrer (one that Karan Johar still emulates), he used an earthquake (probably the 1935 Quetta earthquake that struck when he was three years old) as alliteration for India’s painful Partition. The film outlines the loss of one’s status and a deep sense of displacement, not just vis-à-vis family but also social context, familiarity and economic well-being. The film’s protagonist is a family whose members are separated for over two decades, each one following a different trajectory in life. In genre terms, YRC’s films were political melodrama subliminally expressing the significant pain of the post-Partition Punjabi and offering catharsis.
Deewaar and Trishul use familial structures of power to address the notion of separation and polarisation in a post-Nehruvian Indian state now tottering to establish a new ideologue for itself. Deewaar is perhaps the most classic Bollywood tribute to the film noir genre. Even as the swerving ethic of the elder son takes him via crime and lawlessness to material success, his younger brother’s relatively sheltered life allows him the luxury of becoming the protector of the law. The film’s lead is the mother of the two brothers. She serves as much as the Freudian lover that the two boys are fighting for, as well as the representation of a beatific nation-state battling itself to protect its statist purpose of existence. Trishul engineers a masculine face-off between father and illegitimate son as the latter sets out to avenge his now dead mother’s humiliation (for being rejected by the man she loves who impregnates her but chooses to marry another for social status). The backdrop and the battleground of the masculine face-off is New Delhi’s extremely corrupt and ruthless construction industry, rotting with bribes, favours and lobbies.
The other genre that YRC practically defined (and was almost the lone-deliverer of till the 1990s) is adult contemporary cinema. Love almost always bloomed amongst couples of the same social milieu. There were no social barriers — caste, income, region and language. Except, love always challenged convention. Love, outside marriage. Love, for a man who loved your mother. Love, for the woman your brother loved. Love, for more than one person at a time.
In Kabhi Kabhie, Yash Chopra weaves an intricate web of complex-interrelationships — of loves pre-dating marriage and extending their long shadows well into the marriages in the shape of illegitimate children, poetry and nostalgia. Kabhi Kabhie challenges a society where marriage overrides any “wanton” experience of love outside a social contract. It exquisitely critiques the hypocritical masculinity of its lead poet-protagonist (Amit, Amitabh Bachchan) who continues to stay mentally committed to his pre-marital love even as he enters a marriage with another woman but cannot accept or “forgive” his wife for her past love (which resulted in an illegitimate child). Amit is posited against a seemingly regular man (Shashi Kapoor’s Vijay Khanna), the female protagonist Rakhee’s husband who not only accepts his wife’s past love but also feels ashamed about questioning his wife’s loyalty (when he discovers she had a lover before marriage). Even as Amit wishes that his ex-lover’s son becomes the lover/husband of his daughter, he discovers that the ex-lover’s son is, in fact, in love with the illegitimate first child of his wife. While social contracts triumph, Chopra bends the notion of love and romance so often that by the end of the film, one is left in a daze with a myriad of interrelationships that collectively pull apart any social conservatism the viewer may find comfort in. In Silsila, he posits the question whether a marital contract can indeed be enforced to dictate love and emotion. When the protagonist needs to step up to rescue his brother’s girlfriend from shame, he sacrifices his love. The film is about his struggle to live without his love. Circumstance reconnects him with his lover (who is now married) and he chooses to stay true to his love rather than his duty (in the face of a culture where marriage is supposed to erase past loves, instantly and permanently). The film concludes that social contracts and norms will invariably crush “illicit” desire, and it says this at various levels — including as a tense reassurance on the alleged real-life Amitabh-Jaya-Rekha triangle — making it a rare, voyeuristic Bollywood treat. In Lamhe, YRC crosses another taboo — intergenerational love. The daughter of the woman the protagonist loves and cannot have falls in love with him. The love relationship is bizarrely incestuous and yet it poetically unfolds to challenge social norm.
The web of interrelationships straddling social contracts and love has been defined by YRC in Bollywood. The richness of the complexity built into his storylines and characters was, almost certainly, the reason why his films were relatively less successful (than, for instance, his son’s later attempts at relatively uncomplicated romantic love). Yet, he helped Bollywood discover that there was a reasonable sized “market” for politics and adult contemporary within the mainstream.
As we celebrate a master-Bollywood director’s work while we mourn his death, it’s clear that Bollywood is much more than oversimplified popcorn romance, or conservative family drama. It’s a style of storytelling that speaks to a large Indian audience, while throwing in complex issues and emotions oppositional to the social norm. As we say goodbye to the mortal Yashji, I do hope that his avuncular apnapan lives on in Bollywood, challenging the audiences’ thinking on social constructs and politics in the most endearing and accessible manner.

The writer is an adviser on strategy, media, education and healthcare. He wishes to be a filmmaker.