Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi: Death of the Bollywood Romantic Hero?

Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi is no path-breaking venture. Neither is it a blockbuster. Yet it is of immense interest to those who eat and sleep Bollywood. It is not simply about a simple middle class man’s desperate attempt to make his bubbly wife fall in love with him. It is actually an attempt at deconstructing the image of the Bollywood romantic hero constructed through the past five decades. The super-dynamic hero such as Raj of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge or Rahul of Dil to Pagal Hai has been so far an object of desire. I consciously use the word “object”; for a human being cannot have all the qualities he possesses. Even the epics could not create such a character; so why Draupadi had to marry five men. The qualities she asked for in a husband could not possibly converge in one man. Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi is the story of a human being who endeavours to appropriate the qualities of that “object” to woo his wife who says that she would never be able to love him, and ends up proving to himself and to his wife that true love perhaps has no connection with an outwardly romantic “image”. Surinder is Raj and Raj is Surinder; both sides of the same coin, literally. The conflict between the two selves of the protagonist is actually a conflict between reality and illusion. For Tani, Surinder is a reality which she shies away from; on the other hand, Raj is an apparent reality of the image of several Bollywood heroes she has so far worshipped, and therefore highly desirable. However, it is Surinder she finally falls in love with. The film becomes her bildungsroman whereby she rediscovers her husband and falls in love with him, him who she thought she would never be able to love. Her refusal to elope with Raj underlines her maturing into a woman who learns to separate true love from the filmy paraphernalia surrounding it. Consequently, the unfashionable middle class man who used to envy the Bollywood hero and feel belittled by his unmatchable zing and irresistible sex appeal, breathes a sigh of relief. For, the SRK who had created this hero now deconstructs the same. The film demands a willing suspension of disbelief; but such suspension is worthwhile. The film would remind of the Hrishikesh Mukherjee blockbuster Golmaal; but thematically it is closer to another SRK flick Paheli. And most interestingly, the film also marks a journey of Aditya Chopra, the filmmaker: he seems to engage in dialogue with the Yash Raj films released so far, and his new hero Surinder seems disruptive in the light of the other Chopra films. This disruptive hero however would give Bollywood commercial cinema a new mileage, whereby it might abandon its self-constructed romantic realm to live closer to reality!