'Dil Se' is still a puzzle and a feast for the senses

Well, yes. Nothing is simple in this film, released in 1998 and back in theatres this month, along with a handful of others, to mark Khan’s 60th birthday. But this much is undeniable: Amar pursues a reluctant Meghna to her hometown (likely somewhere in Assam), gets beaten up for his pains, then tracks her down in Leh. All the while she tells him she’s married, that she isn’t interested. This is Shah Rukh, so there’s great charm and no aggression until that moment in Leh. But it is, by any reasonable standard, stalking. The film is not only aware of this, but is at pains to tell you what it thinks of it. But for that, you have to tear your eyes from Shah Rukh and watch Manisha.

As Amar’s tone becomes more aggressive, you can see its evolving effect on Meghna. To start with, she’s calmly defiant, but when he grabs her mouth and then her waist, she’s shocked at the escalation. Her panic intensifies as he tries to kiss her; she struggles, puts her hand up in front of her mouth. There’s a short reprieve, but at night he again invades her space. This time Meghna goes numb with fear. Suddenly, she’s lockjawed, unable to breathe. Amar thankfully regains his senses and calms her down. In the years since the film’s release, a lot of the discourse (which saw a spike last week) has focused on this. Less acknowledged is Koirala’s astonishing physical performance and how clearly Ratnam centres Meghna’s betrayal and fear.

There’s an evident symbolism at play here. Entitled Delhi boy Amar is the ever-advancing state. Meghna is the “outsider" subject, overwhelmed and eventually suffocated. The film encourages us to make this association by having Amar repeatedly identify with the state. When his jeep is stopped by her friends, the first thing he tells them is he’s a “government servant" and that if anything happens to him “word could reach the government". Later, in Delhi, pulled in for questioning by the CBI, he again tells his interrogators he’s a government employee like them. He works for All India Radio, an identity he wears on his person as a name tag which he brandishes several times during the film.

Amar has the blithe confidence of an occupier. Granted an interview with an separatist leader, he asks him if he’ll speak in Hindi and is reprimanded; he compounds the error by telling the man he “looks normal, exactly like us". He teases Meghna for having small eyes and a flat nose, the kind of casual xenophobia people from the North-East have long endured. He’s so secure his mind keeps racing ahead—he’s pestering her to marry him when she won’t even give him the time of day.

To ascribe all narrative agency to Amar is to ignore Meghna’s quiet corralling of circumstances. The scenes before and after the altercation in Ladakh are key. Meghna, not yet revealed to us as a separatist, is visibly nervous for the bus to leave and take her away from an area crawling with army personnel. Ratnam frames her head-on, Amar chattering away in the seat behind. When soldiers start checking IDs, he shows his AIR badge; she quickly says she’s with him. It’s the moment she understands Amar is useful—which might explain her patience with the rough courting that follows. Though no one realises, the balance of power subtly shifts here. Fascinatingly, Amar’s subconscious seems to latch on to this, as we see in the hypnotic choreography of Satrangi Re, where his hapless lover is in thrall of a seductive and deadly Meghna.

Yet, Dil Se isn’t a straight line. Like Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca (1942), Amar has something Meghna needs, but this doesn’t mean the feeling isn’t genuine. To reduce their relationship to stalker/manipulator or any other simple binary is unworthy of a film this alive, this beautiful and this conflicted. On their last night in Ladakh, with Amar teasing but respectful, Meghna struggles to hold back her attraction to him. And though she leaves the next morning without a word, we see her wan and distracted back home, turning on the radio to try and catch Amar’s voice.

From its opening scene, Dil Se unfolds with a kind of dream logic, the rain and dark of the railway platform replaced by the bright expanse of the train-top on which is enacted the greatest of all song choreographies, Chaiyya Chaiyya. Dil Se Re follows soon after, and we have to make sense of Amar and Meghna—practically strangers at this stage—running through an apocalyptic battlefield like lovers in the final reel of a film. Then we’re in Ladakh… but why? Satrangi Re amps up the madness, Pina Bausch-like choreography at 12,000ft. And there’s a detour to Kerala, with an oiled-up, shirtless Khan dancing in Jiya Jale (fittingly, the sole female fantasy). No wonder the film retreats to the relative calm of Delhi and a terrorist plot to blow up the Republic Day parade.

Dil Se is least convincing as a portrait of insurgency. Meghna’s fellow soldiers hardly sound like they're from the north-eastern states, and the suicide bomb plan is more characteristic of the LTTE (coincidentally, The Terrorist, a film about a Tamil suicide bomber directed by Santosh Sivan, Dil Se’s cinematographer, released that same year). But Ratnam, who also wrote the film, paints their struggle in a sympathetic light, a contrast to his Kashmir-set, more conservative Roja (1992). The Indian intelligence agents (a young Gajraj Rao and Piyush Mishra), on the other hand, are officious and ineffective, the military top brass myopic, and soldiers perpetrators of rape and genocide.

The centre doesn’t hold—which is indicative of Ratnam’s mood when he conceived the film, in India’s 50th year of independence. As he told critic Baradwaj Rangan in their book-length conversation: “The papers were full of articles about what we’ve done in fifty years, all our achievements, and I felt that there were… some problem areas which had not been tackled." When Amar asks locals in Meghna's town about India’s progress since independence, they say they’ve seen none of it. One man flatly replies: “The Central government terrorises us."

If Dil Se were to be made today, it would be a flatter, easier film, probably from the perspective of intelligence agents racing against time to catch separatists. But then it wouldn’t be Dil Se. Watching it last week for the first time ever in a theatre, I felt my breath catch from time to time with the sheer intensity of Sivan’s images (Dil Se Re alone has a dozen of the most stunning shots you’ll ever see). Who’s shooting like that today? Is it even possible on digital? Who’s willing to fund a thorny film with limited commercial prospects? Who’s going to get it past the censors? What audience will embrace it?

“Ishq par zor nahi, hai yeh woh aatish"—love is beyond coercion, it is a fire. This is the hissed warning issued in Satrangi Re. It seems to describe the film itself, which is always on the verge of unravelling, and is aflame from start to finish. The first shot is barbed wire. The last is burning wreckage. In between is love and beauty, duty and death, all indistinguishable from each other.

‘Dil Se’ is in select theatres.

Stream the film on Netflix.