For a long time it was largely assumed that unless specified most stories were set in what was then Bombay and now Mumbai. It was towards the second half of the 1950s that filmmakers started exploring Delhi as a location, and the affair has only grown stronger
The hallmark of any good story is its universality, which by allowing it to transcend the boundaries of space and time makes it strike a chord across generations and people. Amongst the factors that contribute most to a tale is the place where it is set, but in spite of the uniqueness that the location brings, good yarns, ironically enough, still manage to connect with people far removed from that setting.
When it comes to detailing there are two kinds of Hindi films — one that are set in some place and the other which could be set anywhere. location in popular Hindi cinema on more occasions that one would care to notice is generally an afterthought unless it’s a part of the story. While for the last decade or so the place where a Hindi film is set and its influence on the story has become a factor as important as the writing or even the performances, for a long time it was largely assumed that unless specified most stories were set in what was then Bombay and now Mumbai. Popular Hindi cinema always loved to travel out of Bombay in the past to set a story but excursions like Ab Dilli Door Nahin (1957), Johar Mehmood in Goa (1965), love in Tokyo (1966) or An Evening in Paris (1967) were primarily for novelty.
Yet this extended focus on the location rarely failed in adding an extra dimension to the storytelling and in some special cases like Naya Daur (1957), it made all the difference between a good and a great film. Set in a village, Naya Daur explored the stand-off between man and machine where Shankar (Dilip Kumar), a horse-carriage driver, must win a race against a bus in order to save his livelihood, and BR Chopra’s decision to shoot the film in a real village as opposed to a studio blessed the film with realism that made it come alive.
For a better part of the 1950s, most Hindi films were either set in the city or involved characters that came to the city and even though the sets as well as the backdrop depicting the city were generic to the extent of being nondescript, they were automatically assumed to be Bombay. At a basic level, stories were broadly either rural or urban and the latter often translated into cities such as Bombay or in some cases Delhi.
Post-Independence Hindi cinema laid great emphasis on depicting a newer India and the popular hits of the early 1950s such as Albela (1951), Baazi (1951), Do Bigha Zameen (1953), Boot Polish (1954), Aar-Paar (1954), Taxi Driver (1954), Shree 420 (1955), Devdas (1955), Munimji (1955), Mr. & Mrs. ’55 (1955) were dedicated to show urban India.
Towards the second half of the 1950s, filmmakers started exploring Delhi as a location and although this romance with the Capital might have began as a break from the visual homogeneity attached to Bombay as urban setting, the affair has only grown stronger with the passage of time and in nearly six decades has practically come to be identified as a sub-genre unto itself.
Vijay Anand’s Nau Do Gyarah (1957) was one of the earliest films to introduce Delhi as a specific visual setting where Madan (Dev Anand) undertakes a road trip from Delhi to Bombay in order to collect his dead uncle’s wealth that has been bequeathed to him. The hard-pressed Madan gets a loan on the basis of the letter that informs him of his good fortune and buys a rickety truck for the journey that starts with the Kishore Kumar song, Hum hai rahi pyar ke (lyrics Majrooh Sultanpuri, music SD Burman) that was shot around iconic Delhi sites such as Rajpath, India Gate, Purana Quila Road.
The same year also saw the release of the Raj Kapoor produced Ab Dilli Dur Nahin (1957), which although largely shot in a studio is attached to the city, thanks to the title, and featured a young boy, Rattan (Master Romi), deciding to walk to Delhi to meet the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to urge his intervention to free his father wrongly implicated for murder. It was once again Vijay Anand with Tere Ghar Ke Saamne (1963) who based an entire film in Delhi where an architect (Dev Anand) unwittingly falls in love with the daughter (Nutan) of his father’s (Om Prakash) arch rival (Harindranath Chattopadhyaya) both of whom ask him to design an exclusive house for them on plots facing each other. Best recalled for the song, Dil ka bhanwar (vocals Md Rafi, lyrics Hasrat Jaipuri, music SD Burman) that was shot inside the Qutub Minar, Tere Ghar Ke Saamne explores the early expansion of the city when South Delhi suburbs such as Defence Colony were coming up, the film also initiated the phase of shooting songs in Delhi, something that would become a trend of sorts with Yash Chopra’s Waqt (1965) and later Trishul (1977).
Along with Tere Ghar Ke Saamne, Nasir Husain’s Phir Wohi Dil laya Hoon (1963) also featured Delhi as a location for some portion. Around the time Delhi was on its way to becoming a dedicated setting for the entire story as opposed to being an option for some parts or a few songs, Hindi cinema discovered the charms of the foreign location with films like Sangam (1964), love in Tokyo (1966) andAn Evening in Paris (1967).
Although films shot abroad were rare and in between, they nonetheless offered a far more exotic setting than Delhi or Goa, and while the former still featured prominently in films from the 1970s, such as Roti, Kapda Aur Makaan (1974), it would still be a few years till Delhi’s full potential as a fixture in Hindi cinema came to the forefront.
It’s not just the discovery of foreign locales at the end of the 1960s that momentarily shifted the focus from Delhi. Ever since Independence, Bombay was largely synonymous with the location of a majority of films and some likeShree 420 CID, Mr. & Mrs. ’55 (1955) entwined it as a character in the narrative. But it was in the 1970s that the city of Bombay was paid the ultimate tribute in films like Anand (1971), Deewar (1975) and Chhoti Si Baat (1975). At its coreAnand featured a dying man,Anand(Rajesh Khanna), who hails from Delhi and comes to Bombay ostensibly for treatment but ends up living many lifetimes in his last few weeks, thanks to a city whose spirit simply refuses to die. In fact, director Hrishikesh Mukherjee even dedicated the film to the city of Bombay and its much-fabled spirit.
IfAnand was about Bombay’s undying spark, Deewar solemnised the city’s dark side where no dream was too small and no means too big to achieve it through the tale of shifting morality in the face of circumstances. Deewar’s Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan), a longshoreman, justifies his taking to crime as an end to the hardships his upright mother (Nirupa Roy) underwent in order to raise him and his younger policeman brother, Ravi (Shashi Kapoor), who much to Vijay’s chagrin doesn’t accept his reasons.
Nestled in between the two, Chhoti Si Baat depicted common men and women of Bombay whose entire life transpired between office hours with such freshness that the realism of the struggling romance between a mild-mannered Arun (Amol Palekar) and Prabha (Vidya Sinha) created an entirely new genre called the middle cinema. The film featured recognisable Bombay imagery such as BEST bus and the three main characters (Palekar, Sinha and Asrani) enjoying a meal at Café Samovar among others to go beyond the usual Juhu Chowpatty or then Victoria Terminus locations.
The shift in the mindset of Hindi cinema in the years ensuing the imposition of Emergency by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, where popular cinema became more escapist post-1975, also impacted the choice of the location of most stories. A huge chunk of films mundanely situated their story in nameless places that looked like Bombay but barely any effort was made to make it stand-out —Nagin (1976), Dus Numbari (1976), Kalicharan (1976),Adalat (1976), Hera Pheri (1976), Don (1978), Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), Imaan Dharam (1977), Hum Kisise Kum Naheen (1977) and some likeDharam Veer (1976) were set in a fantastical land that had no parallel.
The foreign location, too, made a re-entry viaCharas (1976), Aashiq Hoon Baharon Ka (1977) and The Great Gambler (1979) where it seemed like the filmmakers wanted the glitzy European setting to help elevate otherwise sub-standard and mediocre writing.
Interestingly enough Delhi’s rediscovery as a location would be through a filmmaker who later singlehandedly popularised shooting in foreign locations and made that a must of sorts for big-budget productions.
Among the films that Yash Chopra directed, Trishul would be the odd one whose location or more importantly the setting acted like an extended release medication that subtly played on the mind of the viewer. Watching the story of an illegitimate son, Vijay (Bachchan), take on his land baron father, RK Gupta (Sanjeev Kumar) unfold in Delhi at a time when the city was expanded into the satellite towns such as Faridabad added a layer of authenticity that was well juxtaposed with the naturalism of standard locations such as the lodhi Gardens, the Delhi Golf Club, the Gymkhana, the offices and hotels.
Prior to Trishul, a few films set in Delhi imbibed the environs so intricately into the narrative and although one could argue that set pieces such as the climax that was shot at a deserted Pragati Maidan could have been engineered to adorn the film with Delhiness, but being close on the heels of a Chhoti Si Baat, the film gave Delhi its very own distinctive city-film.
Chopra would once again immortalise Delhi on celluloid in his ill-fated Silsila (1980) where Qutub Hotel and the lodhi Gardens were featured prominently in the doomed love story of a playwright, Amit (Bachchan), whom fate ordains to marry his deceased Air Force pilot brother’s (Shashi Kapoor) pregnant fiancé Shobha (Jaya Bhaduri) instead of the one he loves Chandni (Rekha). Silsila wound up being remembered for Holland’s tulip gardens where the song Dekha ek khwaab was shot (vocals lata Mangeshkar, Kishore Kumar, music Shiv-Hari, lyrics Javed Akhtar), but like Trishul the film was very high on Delhi quotient.
The same year also saw Sai Paranjape’s Chashme Buddoor (1981) where Delhi’s texture —right from the antics of a bunch of Delhi University students (Farooq Shaikh, Rakesh Bedi, Ravi Baswani), the barsati living, the girl next door (Deepti ‘Miss Chamko’ Naval), the neighbourhoodpaanwaala with a heart of gold lallan Miyan (Saeed Jaffrey) to boating in Purana Quila gardens or bike rides — was captured organically.
Going beyond the picturesque drive down the Rajpath to India Gate, which unfortunately still remains the signature cinematic Delhi visual, Chasme Buddoor set a new template for filmmakers when thinking of Delhi, and even after three decades the naturalness of the film’s setting as well as writing remains unmatched.
The timing of Chasme Buddoor’s release, too, was interesting as this was a time when popular Hindi cinema was undergoing a serious transition with Bachchan fast moving to become a one-man industry where he had become too big to do multi-starrers or even two-hero projects, and new star like Mithun Chakraborty becoming the top draw in an almost parallel industry. The old school of Rajesh Khanna, Dharmendra, Shatrughan Sinha were relegated to doing the same kind of films that they had made a name for themselves in the 1970s, and younger star sons were being launched in hordes — Kumar Gaurav, Sanjay Dutt, Sunny Deol and Anil Kapoor — and Jeetendra had started dominating the box-office with his southern remakes.
In this scenario the art house or parallel cinema, which only a few years ago in the mid-1970s had to carve a niche for itself, had come to be seen as an offshoot of the mainstream and even though these films didn’t have the escapism or the song-and-dance routine, they nonetheless seemed to be vying for the same space with films such asAakrosh (1980), Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai (1980), Kalyug (1981) and Ardh Satya (1983). What separated these films from the run of the mill commercial fare was the emphasis on the location or the setting, and in every single instance this detailing changed the rendering of the film.
The 1980s furthered their exploration of cities especially Delhi and Bombay from a microcosmic point of view and in addition to Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai or Ardh Satya, Arjun (1985) and Meri Jung (1985) looked at the disparity among classes and power-centres in Bombay and films like New Delhi Times (1986) joined the dots that connected the complicity of some politicians and journalists in a murder in the nation’s Capital.
In the last decade and a half, there has been a substantial increase in the number of films based in Delhi and the fact that the majority of these films are not only set in Delhi but also use the cityscape as an integral part of the story makes this more compelling. Besides the visual change that Delhi brought about as a location to films, filmmakers in the past welcomed the prospect of shooting in Delhi or shooting outside of Bombay for the simple reason that stars seem to have lesser distractions and work would get done faster.
Perhaps that’s why in the past it didn’t make a difference to the narrative even though some films were said to be set in Delhi but were still shot in Bombay as in the case of Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988). Post-Dilwale Dulhaniya le Jayenge (1995), which neatly divided the standard of detailing in the production and art design of Hindi films into two segments, using the location as a breathing entity came to the forefront and one can see how since the late 1990s Delhi’s projection as a location changed noticeably.
The volume of films where Delhi was more than a location mushroomed with 1947-Earth (1998), Dil Se (1998),Sarfarosh (1999), Monsoon Wedding (2001),Yaadein (2001), Mujhe Kuch Kehna Hai (2001),Fanaa (2006), Khosla Ka Ghosla (2006), Oye lucky! lucky Oye! (2008), Dev D. (2009), love Aaj Kal (2009), Delhi-6 (2009), Peepli [live] (2010), Band Baaja Baaraat (2010), Do Dooni Chaar (2010), Aisha (2010), Rockstar (2011), No One Killed Jessica (2011), Vicky Donor (2012), Raanjhanaa (2013) and Tanu Weds Manu Returns (2015) to name a few.
Going beyond the usual trappings of Old Delhi, East Delhi or lutyens’ Delhi where lakshya (2004) made characters say dialogues like “I’m off to IIC” in the name of detailing, Delhi’s counter culture has also become the subject in Delhi Belly (2011) and Fukrey (2013).
A city that exists across centuries, Delhi lives thousands of years in a single moment and one could go from 12th Century AD in Qutub Minar to 14th to 16th Century AD in Hauz Khas while traversing on the Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road where at the one end there’s Gurgaon, the shiny metropolis that houses offices of some of the biggest brands in the world, and the remains of the Raj in form of North and South Blocks and Connaught Place on the other end. Delhi continues to inspire a new generation of filmmakers such as Atul Sabharwal whose Aurangzeb (2013) turned the focus on Gurgaon and the land mafia, Navdeep Singh’s NH 10 (2015), a gritty thriller that looked at the undercurrent of crimes such honour killing that are prevalent in areas adjoining Gurgaon, and Meghna Gulzar whose upcoming Talvar, previously titled Nyodda, explores the 2008 Noida Aarushi-Hemraj double murder.
Chintamani is the author of the best-selling Dark Star: The loneliness of Being Rajesh Khanna Tweet him @gchintamani