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South Asian Popular Culture

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Allegories of Alienation and Politics of

Bargaining: Minority Subjectivities in
Mani Ratnam's Dil Se
a
Ananya Jahanara Kabir
a
School of English , University of Leeds , Woodhouse Lane, Leeds
LS2 9JT, UK
Published online: 17 May 2010.

To cite this article: Ananya Jahanara Kabir (2003) Allegories of Alienation and Politics of Bargaining:
Minority Subjectivities in Mani Ratnam's Dil Se , South Asian Popular Culture, 1:2, 141-159, DOI:
10.1080/1474668032000132724

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 South Asian Popular Culture Vol. 1(2) 141–159 Ananya Jahanara Kabir 141

Allegories of Alienation and Politics of Bargaining:

Minority Subjectivities in Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se

Ananya Jahanara Kabir

Abstract This article examines Mani Ratnam’s film Dil Se (India, 1998, Tamil and Hindi),
as an allegory of the relationship between dominant and dominated groups within the Indian
nation-state. By reading its narrative of doomed love against its counter-narratives of
cinematography and soundtrack, I argue that Dil Se exposes the libidinal economy of the
federal democratic framework, urging groups currently alienated within that framework to
work towards a successful politics of bargaining in order to claim their rightful place within
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the nation, and initiates processes of mourning for cultural losses sustained through
homogenising majoritarian discourses, including those of Bollywood itself. By invoking Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theory of ‘minor literatures’, I reveal the minority subjectivities
of those involved in the film’s making as the key unlocking the therapeutic, even redemptive
potential of its radical political messages, that, despite the film’s commercial failure, circulate
subliminally through its popular soundtrack.

This article analyses the film Dil Se (India, 1998), directed by Mani Ratnam and
released simultaneously in Tamil and Hindi. Unlike Mani Ratnam’s earlier
films, Roja (1992) and Bombay (1995), that won critical and popular acclaim across
India and attracted considerable intellectual attention,1 Dil Se failed at the box
office, despite its accomplished soundtrack, choreography and cinematography,
and the star presence of Shahrukh Khan.2 Neither did it generate critical and
scholarly responses of the scale of Roja and Bombay. The present reading of the
film is doubly recuperative: I locate its box office failure within its radical
political message, and seek to uncover its therapeutic or redemptive potential.
Both aspects of the film are predicated on what I term the ‘minority subjectivities’
of those involved in its making.
Dil Se narrates the doomed love of Amar (Shahrukh Khan), employee of the
New Delhi office of All India Radio (AIR), for Meghna (Manisha Koirala),
secessionist militant from North-eastern India. By playing off this narrative against
the counter-narratives of song and cinematography, and through sophisticated
manipulation of the Bombay cinematic idiom, Mani Ratnam probes the current
‘sense of crisis of the Indian State’ (Kaviraj, 1997, p. 28) and offers the film as
allegory of alienation and prognosis for the future. The love story enacts the
problems of power sharing in a multicultural democracy where linguistic and
regional aspirations have regularly strained the federal centre-state framework,
religious tensions increasingly threaten the State’s secular credentials, and, as
exemplified by Kashmir, ethno-cultural movements are now articulated in religious
terms (Basu and Kohli, 1998, p. 4) While offering no glib solutions, the film situates
a successful ‘politics of bargaining’ (Manor, 2001, p. 81) between majoritarian
and minority interests within the empowering possibilities of imaginative
expression, especially that which operates in Indian popular cinema, the public

ISSN 1474-6689 print/ISSN 1474-6697 online/03/020141-19

2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI:10.1080/1474668032000132724
 142 Allegories of Alienation and Politics of Bargaining
cultural arena par excellence of ‘tensions and contradictions … contestation and
mutual cannibalisation’ (Appadurai and Breckenridge, 1995, p. 5).

Minority Subjectivities and Popular Indian Cinema

First, it will be necessary to elucidate the phrase ‘minority subjectivity.’ My use

of the term ‘minority’ combines, and extends beyond, the senses in which it is
used within both political theory and Indian parlance. Within the former
(Kymlicka, 1995 and 1996; Kymlicka and Norman, 2000), ‘minority’ denotes a group
that considers itself ethno-culturally different from, and socio-economically
disempowered than, the dominant group in a given polity. To the political
theorist, minorities pose the challenge of reconciling this difference with the
claims of liberalism, especially as manifested in the democratic process. Within
the Indian context, a narrower sense of ‘minority’ prevails, with the term connoting,
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above all, religious difference. Especially through political doublespeak, the

term has become equated with ‘Indian Muslim’ (Bajpai, 1999, pp. 220–241;
Weiner, 1997, p. 242), and freighted with the semantic and ideological baggage
attached to that particular identity.
There are historical and emotive reasons why this particular understanding of
the term ‘minority’ has been privileged in Indian discourse.3 Nevertheless, this
privileging can trap us in the binary between what Salman Rushdie disparagingly
calls ‘Majority, that mighty elephant, and her sidekick, Major-Minority’ (Rushdie,
1995, p. 87). Only by moving beyond the over-determined reading of ‘minority
equals Muslim’, suggests Rushdie, can we recuperate other principles of
belonging around which non-hegemonic identity can devolve in contemporary
India—that of regional and linguistic affiliation, for example, or of social class/
caste, or of religions other than Hinduism and Islam. My understanding of
‘minority’ returns the term to this wider base, but without forfeiting its fraught
Indian inflections. To acknowledge those inflections, and their impact on the
individual whose identity is formed by overlapping and often conflicting claims
of the public and the private, the State and the home, and the rational and the
emotional, that I yoke ‘minority’ with ‘subjectivity.’
By ‘minority subjectivity’ I indicate a state of self-awareness when the subject
finds her private allegiances at odds with the discourses of public culture. This
moment of estrangement is also one of solidarity, as she/he finds her/himself
part of a group that does not share ‘the symbols of authority, the values that are
propagated from the centre, and the culture that emanates from the centre’
(Weiner, 1994, p. 243). Elsewhere I have argued, using the example of Rushdie,
that the disjunction between the divergent collective memories of the nation and
the family generates a ‘shock of oddity’ that splits subjectivity into the public
and private domain (Kabir, 2001). This ‘shock of oddity’ is akin to what Deleuze
and Guattari, in their discussion of Kafka and the concept of ‘a minor literature’,
call ‘deterritorialisation’, or ‘the impossibility [for a Prague Jew] of not writing,
the impossibility of writing in German, the impossibility of writing otherwise’
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1986, p. 16). In the Indian context, this split, laminated
and deterritorialised minority subjectivity characteristically emerges when the
demands of the ‘supranational Indian State’ (Chadda, 1997, pp. 1–16), often
speaking the language of a majoritarian cultural nationalism, compete with the
demands of, say, religion, language, ethnicity or gender.
 Ananya Jahanara Kabir 143
Being predicated on various, potentially competitive axes of belonging,
minority subjectivity is necessarily multi-layered and complex. In the words of
Amin Maalouf, ‘anyone who claims a more complex identity is marginalized’
(Maalouf, 2000, p. 4). The ‘minor literature’ arising from that complex identity
does not, therefore, designate ‘specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions
at the heart of every great (or established) literature’ (Deleuze and Guattari,
1986, p. 18). It typically speaks from within the dominant language itself,
signalling its esoteric status through either an excess of symbolism—as with
Rushdie writing in English, or a pared down, almost naive simplicity. The
revolutionary potential of literature and of cultural expression in general, is
thus best realised by the oblique perspectives and off-centre views offered by
the minority subjectivity working the dominant cultural lode. As minority identity is
in constant negotiation and adjustment with the ‘mainstream’ identity (Weiner,
1994, p. 243), minor culture can also be the province of a once marginalised, now
‘reterritorialized’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986, p. 20) subjectivity that allegorically
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mourns its new complicity with dominant culture and seeks to articulate, in
compensation, other marginalised positions that have not yet seized similar
agency.
It is the position of Janus-faced and reterritorialised go-between in which I
would place Mani Ratnam as director. Mani Ratnam’s minority subjectivity,
predicated on his South Indian affiliations, enables him to forge alliances with
the minority subjectivities of others in his creative team. After all, Dil Se is the
product of a particular realignment between the Bombay film industry and its
South Indian counterparts during the past decade. Although the annual
turnover of films produced in South Indian languages for South Indian markets
far exceeds that of Bombay, it is the latter that consistently set the national
trends and claim to command a pan-Indian audience. During the 1990s, however,
the South Indian filmmaker Mani Ratnam began impacting Hindi cinema in a
hitherto-unprecedented manner, with films that straddled the divide between
the realist art cinema of Satyajit Ray and his followers, and the song-and-dance
studded, populist idiom of Bombay cinema.4
In 1992, Mani Ratnam arrived on the national scene with Roja, which depicts
a young Tamil couple embroiled in Kashmiri militancy and its transactions with
the Indian Government. In his Bombay, Mani Ratnam presented a young couple
from Kerala, a state in South India, whose ‘love marriage’ defies religious
boundaries and who are subsequently thrown into the communal violence that
followed the destruction of the Babri Mosque in October 1997. Unlike Roja,
which was later dubbed in Hindi for its national audience, Bombay is a product
of planned bilingualism. Released simultaneously in Tamil and Hindi, it starred
Manisha Koirala, Hindi film star, and Arvind Swamy, star of the South Indian
film industry, and who played the male lead in Roja.
The commercial success of Roja and Bombay can be attributed to at least three
factors. Firstly—and this is a point virtually unacknowledged in the critical
discussion of those films—their soundtracks bear the stamp of Tamil music
director A. R. Rahman, whose impact on public culture has been accurately
noted by a political theorist:

If any observer of India doubts the role of music in contributing to the

centripetal process she should at least examine the impact of the versions of
‘Vande Mataram’, a nationalist song offered by a Tamil composer (Rahman)
 144 Allegories of Alienation and Politics of Bargaining
and a Maharashtrian singer (Lata Mangeshkar) to the Indian audience on the
occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of freedom, if not the wider spectrum of
cooperation across regions in Indian classical, popular and movie music
(Dasgupta, 2001, p. 75).5

This ‘centripetal cultural process’ is embodied in A. R. Rahman’s work, with its

innovative combinations of those standard Bombay music ingredients: classical and
folk elements of Indian music on the one hand, and Western string arrangements
on the other. It brings to pan-Indian audiences a variety of regional flavours,
from a distinctive ‘Tamil pop’ inflection to a modernised qawwali 6 that takes its
cue from the immensely popular Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan while
reviving for Indian audiences a strand of Punjabi Sufism lost to public culture
after Partition—an issue discussed in greater detail later in the article.
Secondly, while engaging ‘sensitive’ issues such as Kashmiri militancy and
intermarriage between Hindus and Muslims, Mani Ratnam’s narrative
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resolutions endorse the affirmative patterns of Bombay cinema (Uberoi, 2000;

Thomas, 1995; Prasad, 1998, pp. 217–237), thus sublimating politics through the
triumph of love and the couple’s reintegration into the family and the nation.7
Thirdly, gender relations in these films map on to relations between dominant
and dominated groups within India in ways that consolidate rather than
critique those relations. Although in both Roja and Bombay ‘an urban, secular,
upper caste hero can legitimately lay claim to the love of a rural girl or a woman
from a minority community, the possibility is never entertained that both the hero
and the heroine could be, say, Muslim or non-upper caste’ (John, 1998, p. 385).
The affectivity of certain actress ‘types’ augments this gendered construction of
minority subjectivities. The small-town woman caught in the maelstrom of
Kashmiri militancy becomes the innocent rose, ‘Roja’, while in Bombay, the
ethereal and fragile-looking Manish Koirala plays the delicate ‘Shaila Bano’, a
Muslim woman similarly trapped within communal politics.
The intellectual indignation at this disturbing collusion of gender and identity
politics in Roja and Bombay has, however, overlooked a significant political
point in their favour: the insertion of the South Indian subject, thanks to the efforts
of a Tamil filmmaker, into the national domain commanded by Bombay cinema.
It remains problematic that Mani Ratnam reclaims this space at the expense, in
Roja, of both small-town India and Kashmiri Islam, and, in Bombay, of Indian
Muslims. However, only by shifting our attention away from minority qua Muslim
can we acknowledge that, while maintaining the status quo on one front, Mani
Ratnam challenges the hegemony of Bombay cinema and North India on another,
even as A. R. Rahman successfully challenges the parallel hegemony of Bombay
film music.
In this task, Mani Ratnam, A. R. Rahman, and cinematographer Santosh Sivan
jointly reiterate the accommodation of Tamil ethnocultural aspirations within
the arena of national public culture, as reflected in the political domain as the
power and popularity of Tamil regional parties vis-à-vis the parties at the
centre.8 Yet their combined challenge to the Bombay cinematic hegemony
cannot be interpreted as an attempt to subvert the supranational demands of the
Indian State.9 Rather, Mani Ratnam’s cinematic agenda performs an alternative
nation building by joining
 Ananya Jahanara Kabir 145
the growing tradition, and a long one at that, of intertranslated literature,
theatre and popular music and lyrics ranging widely across languages and
regions. Through these processes, the experience and emotion of one region
consciously or imperceptibly move to others to intimate both surprising
similarities and interesting differences (Dasgupta, 2001: 73).

This comment, made in a discussion of the relationship between India’s

multicultural national construction and its federal design, points to the
importance of a nation-building project that incorporates regional diversities, as
well as the necessity therein of regional cultural capital generated by auteurs
such as Mani Ratnam.
Mani Ratnam’s oeuvre evolves, in fact, from the hegemonic slippages of Roja
and Bombay to Dil Se, in which he empathises with other minority subjectivities
by evoking multiple affiliations over and above the supranational. Superficially,
Dil Se invites similar criticism as the earlier films: for instance, Manisha Koirala
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again appears as a gendered minority subject. Nevertheless, the ethno-geographic

rather than religious basis of identity formation in Dil Se, where Manisha plays
the role of a northeastern woman, points to an alternative discourse on minority
subjectivities. Mani Ratnam further problematises this gendering through a
particular imbrication of identity politics and romance plot, that produces narrative
irresolution and compromised identification with the male protagonist. Ultimately,
it also explains the film’s commercial failure even while gesturing towards its
‘revolutionary’ potential.

An Alternative Teleology for Romance

From the perspective of plot, Dil Se seems a romance all dressed up with
nowhere to go. Its compulsive narrative stalling may be located in the final
conversation between Amar and Meghna in Ladakh, just before intermission:

Amar: ‘What do you dislike most of all?’

Meghna: ‘I dislike your coming close to me. Your laughter, your mischief, your
zest for life.’
Amar: ‘Actually, you are jealous of me.’
Meghna: ‘Yes. And what do you dislike most of all?’
Amar: ‘This distance between us; your eyes. Because I just can’t read what’s hidden
in them, however hard I try. Now let me tell you what I like most of all. Your eyes.
Because I can’t read what’s hidden in them. I really like that. And this distance
between us. Because if it wasn’t there I would have no excuse to get close to you.’10

Here, the phrases ‘your eyes’ and ‘this distance’ are respectively yoked to what
Amar likes and dislikes most. This opposition had already been conveyed by
Amar’s earlier declarations to Meghna: ‘I desire you with all my heart (dil se)’
and ‘I hate you with all my heart (dil se).’
The paradox of distance that beckons and keeps at bay is the complication
needed to propel the narrative forward, but it also prevents narrative resolution.
The montage for the song, ‘Dil Se’, reiterates this paradox. Meghna keeps
running away from various dangers, conveyed through images of the army and
 146 Allegories of Alienation and Politics of Bargaining
of arson, and Amar keeps coming to her rescue. But the fragile links he holds her
by—bangle, ribbon, necklace—repeatedly snap as she moves away. Such
elusiveness is appropriate, even necessary, in a song sequence, which functions
in popular Indian cinema as the lyric dilation of narrative time for the
containment, and reordering, of libidinal energies. On the level of narrative,
however, such elusiveness stalls progress towards an integrative denouement.
Meghna’s repeated disappearances in response to Amar’s overtures move the
narrative into increasingly acute states of crisis. The only closure possible for
such a pattern is implosion, as coded in the detonated bomb that brings both
narrative and lovers to a violent end.
This narrative spiral towards implosion maps on to another spiral: the moth
circling the flame. Deriving from Indo-Persian Sufi poetry and subsequently
celebrated in the genre of the ghazal, the moth has since spiralled into the toolkit
of Bombay cinema songwriters. As a lyric from an earlier film, Saajan (1991)
declared:
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I am no poet (shayar), I am no madman (deewana)

I am no lover (aashiq), I am no moth (parwana)

The poet, lover, madman and moth operate within an alternative teleology for
romance, one that moves from attraction to not ‘happily ever after’ but instead,
worship of the unattainable beloved, the ecstasy of unrequited love, and self-
annihilation. Precisely this teleology is traced by the ‘Seven Shades of Love’ that
circulate as a paratext to the film, appearing on its dedicated website11 as well as
its DVD and video covers:

Ancient Arabic literature classifies love into seven different shades:

Hub: their eyes meet, it is like a touch … a spark … Attraction.
Uns: the touch of the eyes was as if, it was Infatuation.
Ishq: the flame of her body is felt; his breath starts igniting … Love.
Aquidat: Reverence … she touches him like a whisper, as if silence is mixed in her
eyes … he prays, knelt down on the floor, a little consciously and a little
unconsciously …
Ibaadat: he is entangled on her path … entangled in her arms … Love turns to
Worship.
Junoon: his living is an Obsession … his dying is an Obsession … apart from this
there is no peace …
Maut: let him rest in the lap of Death … let him drown his body in her soul …
Dil Se: a journey through these seven shades …

However, even as the couplet from Saajan invokes the figures of unrequited,
self-consuming love only laughingly to dismiss them, so it might arguably be
claimed that popular Bombay cinema has found it increasingly difficult to
communicate a deeper sense of tragic fulfilment through this alternative
teleology. Part of the reason may well be that the supporting hinterland of Sufi
spiritualism has receded from mainstream Indian consciousness. Mani
Ratnam’s revival of this eclipsed teleology also dredges up that buried
hinterland, as indicated by the paratextual foregrounding of Urdu as the link
 Ananya Jahanara Kabir 147
between ‘ancient Arabic literature’ and contemporary South Asia. Indeed,
bringing back to audiences the romance of unrequited love seems to be a special
project of Shahrukh Khan’s, as suggested by his recent interpretation of the
quintessential tragic hero of Indian cinema, Devdas, in the eponymous film
released internationally in the summer of 2002; it is thus apt that Devdas
repeatedly evokes the relationship between Krishna, Meera and Radha that offers
a ‘Hinduised’ parallel to the ‘Islamicate’ accents of Sufism.12
Notwithstanding Dil Se’s reference to ‘ancient Arabic literature’, the seven
words flagged in the ‘Seven Shades’ are comprehensible to speakers of the
‘Hindi/Urdu lingua franca widely understood north of an imaginary line
between Bombay and Calcutta’ (Dwyer, 2000, p. 104). An Indian audience for Dil
Se comprised of such ‘speakers’ would recognise the ‘Seven Shades’ vocabulary
as belonging to the specific register of romantic love within Bollywood cinema.13
To those familiar with Urdu literary traditions, they would trigger off more
ambivalent associations: the ornate vocabulary of Urdu love poetry, epitomised
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by the ghazal; the beleaguered status of Urdu literary culture in contemporary

India; the ironic fact that this loss of cultural capital is reflected in Urdu’s
commodified ‘Bollywood’ afterlife. The ‘Seven Shades’ illustrate how a specific
linguistic register can function as a site of memory and mourning for specific
groups. The film invites other groups with parallel senses of dispossession to
participate in this process, which then becomes a larger project of cultural
compensation and revival. Two songs within Dil Se explicitly execute this
project: ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’ and, more strongly, ‘Satrangi Re’, and it is to these
that I shall now turn to explicate this point further.
‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’, the film’s first song, is a popularised version of a traditional
qawwali, ‘Thaiyya Thaiyya’ by Bulleh Shah, Punjabi sufi saint. In ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’,
the heterodoxy of qawwali is highlighted within the repeated description of the
beloved (yaar) as faith (eeman), and, perhaps more daringly, quranic verse (ayat,
kalma). While enunciating the word kalma, Amar slips down on his knees and
mimes fleetingly the Muslim rite of prayer, the namaz. This moment, inserted
within the admirably executed song and dance sequence undertaken on the top
of a moving train, is an unusual one, with the Muslim subjectivity of Shahrukh
Khan surreptitiously yet openly irrupting through the mimetic sheath of ‘Hindu
protagonist’ that normally conceals it. This subjectivity is shared by A. R. Rahman,
the music director and by Farah Khan, choreographer. Was the posture of namaz
planned by one or all of them, or was it the brainchild of Mani Ratnam in
recognition of these shared minority subjectivities? Or, was it Gulzar, Sikh
songwriter, who suggested this performance of a lyric that explicitly draws on
the culture of Punjabi and Sindhi Sufism and the Punjabi ethnicity of playback
singer Sukhwinder Singh?
Whatever the source, the moment emerges as one of mourning for an
‘Islamicate’ (Kesavan, 1994) strain that has been trivialized within the realm of
Indian public culture. This ‘Islamicate’ culture now either lurks in the
underbelly of urban society—as conveyed through the labyrinth of Old Delhi
that confounds Amar—or is relegated to the background of affluent urban life—
as in the ruins that provide the scenic backdrop for Amar and Preeti’s courtship.
The visual content and narrative context of these shots reminds audiences of
Shahrukh Khan’s Muslim identity (Mishra, Jeffrey and Shoesmith, 1989) and
foregrounds the absence of non-Hindu protagonists in popular cinema. A
flamboyant and extended engagement with these issues also appears in the
 148 Allegories of Alienation and Politics of Bargaining
song ‘Satrangi Re’, which offers a mise-en-abîme of the larger endeavour of Dil Se’s
makers.14
The title ‘Satrangi Re’ (O, seven-hued one) connects to the seven shades of
love, and the English explications of the latter offered on the websites match its
lyrics. Thus, ‘Junoon: his living is an obsession, his dying an obsession: without
this, there is no peace’ is a near-identical rendering of the lyric’s ‘my life is an
obsession, my dying is an obsession, without this [obsession] I find no peace.’
Similarly, the final statement in ‘Satrangi Re’, ‘let me rest in the lap of death, let
me drown my body in your soul’ corresponds to the explication of the seventh
shade, maut (death): ‘let him rest in the lap of death, let him drown his body in
her soul.’ The backdrop of desert and Amar’s monochrome salwars create an
intertext with the love story and spiritual allegory of Laila and Majnun (Majnun
[the possessed one], derived, like junoon, from the Arabic root jnn), originally by
the Persian poet Nizami but now a pan-Islamic cultural possession.
These connotations are emphasised through the penultimate ‘whirling dervish’
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sequence in ‘Satrangi Re’, which mimes the mourning gestures of Shi’ite

Muslims during Muharram, the annual commemoration of the martyrdom of
the prophet Muhammad’s grandsons. These associations resonate with the lyrics
and augment Amar’s self-abnegation. This posture is balanced by the transfer of
power to Meghna, who wears throughout the sequence an expression of obduracy
and, in one sequence, a sari in saffron, the colour of Hindu revivalism (Fig. 1).
Shahrukh Khan-as-Amar is thus abjected as the salwar-clad Muslim lover,
Majnun, worshipper of Manisha Koirala-as-Meghna, who is exalted as Bharat
Mata (Mother India) as Hindu. This concatenation of off-screen, on-screen and
inversely fantasised subjectivities reminds us of the contrasting ‘Islamicate’
accents of Meghna’s clothes in the montage of the song ‘Dil Se.’ We face a
realisation instantly recognisable and yet too private to be articulated: in the
Indian context, religious difference remains the primary index whereby the
mutual fascination of ‘self’ and ‘other’ is measured.
Visual allusions to religion as the marker of identity are thus superimposed
on geography as a similar marker, the latter issue being more explicitly
addressed through the alignment of the teleology of unrequited love, distance

Figure 1 Amar and Meghna in ‘Satrangi Re’

 Ananya Jahanara Kabir 149
and difference. This three-fold alignment is evident in the slippage between ‘your
eyes’ and ‘this distance’ cited above. Meghna’s inscrutable eyes are also physical
signs of her otherness. As Amar describes her in the narrative of their first
encounter, which he broadcasts over the local AIR station: ‘Tiny eyes, high
cheekbones, a nose so flat that it seems somebody pasted it on in a hurry.’ In
Ladakh, he asks her, ‘Has anyone commented on your small eyes and your flat
nose?’ The distance necessary for stimulating attraction is measurable in terms
of Meghna’s physiognomic difference.
By registering Meghna’s ‘difference’, moreover, Amar asserts himself as normative.
The co-ordinates of this ‘norm’—North Indian, urban professional, government
official—are fixed from the opening scene itself, when Amar introduces himself
to the police and to Meghna as ‘Amarkant Verma, programme executive, AIR.’
Also significant is the knee-jerk gesture that accompanies his self-introduction:
thrusting forwards his AIR identity card, a talisman around which crystallises
his normativity.15 The ‘in-your-face’ identity card—as phallic as the thrust-
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forward microphone, as the radio which disseminates Amar’s voice to Meghna,

and as the train penetrating the margins of the nation, visually counterpoints
the prankster-like innocence with which Amar, coinciding here with the star image
of Shahrukh Khan, approaches the distant/different object of his attractions.

The Northeast as Margin

The distance between Amar and Meghna is also the difference between Amar
and the northeastern states of the Indian nation. The northeast (as these states
are collectively termed in India) lies beyond the liminal zone of the railway
station. Here, the Bengali-speaking Station Master and the Hindi-speaking
Amar are just about mutually intelligible. With the train that pulls away from
the audience, and carries Meghna away from Amar, the narrative, too, moves
out of this liminal zone. The ‘real train’ mutates into a ‘fantasy train’ as the first
song, ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’, begins. This sequence maps out the distance between
the railway station and the northeast, which subsequently reveals itself to Amar
as a site of strangeness and difference. Various details in the striking
choreography suggest further semiotic possibilities.
Two departures from convention indicate that we are in a realm different
from the usual Bollywood song. Amar wears the same clothes as in the previous
frame; and the woman in the sequence is not Meghna (and does not reappear in
the film) (Fig. 2).
These departures explicitly mark ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’ as Amar’s fantasy of the
northeast. Intertextuality with the genre of ‘the train song’ establishes this
fantasy as a pastoral vision, where the train chugging past mountains and
across bridges represents, as trains always do in Indian cinema, modernity. This
modernity radially delineates the space of the nation, connecting while
differentiating margin and centre. The train literally supports the fantasy of
difference and normativity—as enacted by Amar and his troupe—as well as
carries it to the peripheries. The song spills into a long shot of the ‘real North-
East’, in which hazy mountains are framed by army soldiers in the foreground.
The fading notes of the song set up a counter-narrative dissonance between
what we still hear—the pastoral fantasy—and what we now see—the political
reality of the northeast, a region periodically racked by insurgency and
 150 Allegories of Alienation and Politics of Bargaining

Figure 2 Amar in everyday clothes in ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’

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separatist movements (Dasgupta, 1988 and 1998). This ‘real northeast’ emerges
more clearly as Amar canvasses local responses to India’s fiftieth year of
independence, 1997.
The mutual incomprehensibility—or linguistic difference—between Amar
and his first interviewee, a not-so-happy peasant, reiterates the latter’s distance
from both Amar and his imagined northeast. A representative of the middle
class articulates this distance/difference in political terms: ‘the central
government bullies us and oppresses our innocent people.’ In Amar’s interview
with a militant leader, the nation’s point of origin is itself deconstructed in a
devastating critique of the federal democratic system:

Militant leader: ‘Fifty years ago promises were made to us but they’ve not been
kept. Instead we have been oppressed …’
Amar: ‘But India is your country, isn’t it?’
Militant leader: ‘No. It only seems like that to you. Delhi is India. Do you know
why? Because small states like us, languishing in a corner, have no meaning for
you; because we are not important vote banks. Delhi only notices those places
that are vote banks.’

These assertions of alienation pressurise the spectator to reconsider ‘India’s bold

experiment of combining democratic responsiveness to cultural differences with
a federal conciliation of regional community, identity, and autonomy claims and
a nationally concerted promotion of regional capability’ (Dasgupta, 2001, p. 49)
and to ask instead:

First, why have relations between New Delhi and the various state governments
usually remained manageable? Second, why in some cases have things gone
spectacularly wrong, so that violent separatist movements have developed and
center-state relations have broken down? (Manor, 2001, p. 79)

The first question is addressed later in the film. Here, the second question is
answered through an unsentimental exposé of the democratic process itself as
 Ananya Jahanara Kabir 151
the means whereby the centre consolidates its hegemony and denies small states
agency.
While the audience is led, through camera movement, to share Amar’s
perspective, the militant leader’s exposure of Amar’s double standards interrupts
and compromises that process of identification. As the interview begins, Amar
assumes that the militant leader will not mind speaking in Hindi, while noting,
‘After all, you look just like us.’ As we have noted, ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’ enacts the
circulation of homogenising and fetishising discourses through the infrastructural
arteries, as it were, of the nation. Amar’s interview further illustrates how the
national space is homogenised through the erasure of crucial differences, such as
the linguistic, on the one hand, even while fetishising, on the other, less crucial
points of divergence, such as the physiognomic.
More problematically, these insights encourage the audience to reassess
Amar’s behaviour towards Meghna. Amar’s interview with the militant leader
is followed by his radio broadcast of the story of their first encounter at the
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railway station. His emphasis here on her physiognomic otherness, discussed

above, places Meghna within a ready-made subject position of exoticism and
victimhood: ‘I immediately wanted to rescue her from the villains.’ This fantasy
is soon thereafter enacted through the song ‘Dil Se.’ However, two later sequences
in Ladakh grant Meghna a visual, counter-narrative agency to refuse this
subject position. First, Amar forcibly kisses her but she struggles to free herself;
second, in a formulaic voyeuristic moment, Amar espies her bathing, but she
breaks the voyeuristic pact (Kasbekar, 2000) by returning his gaze (Fig. 3).
Meghna’s refusal to bridge this distance/difference parallels the militant
leader’s joint invocation of linguistic difference and political inequality between
centre and margin. This parallel is affirmed in the second half of the film, which
explores Meghna’s own involvement with militancy. In a memorable climax,
Meghna responds to Amar in words that recall those of the militant leader:
‘Have you any idea what we have suffered in the past fifty years? For fifty years
we have been fooled continuously; we ask questions, but are suppressed.’
Amar’s reaction, albeit sympathetic, is neither pragmatic nor satisfactory: ‘I’ll

Figure 3 Meghna returning Amar’s gaze

 152 Allegories of Alienation and Politics of Bargaining
leave all this—the government, my job. Forget all this happened to you. The two of
us will run away somewhere together, far away.’ When she refuses to comply, his
naïve fantasy turns aggressive: ‘what will you do now? How many will you kill?
Come, I’ll go along with you as well.’
Amar reads Meghna’s rejection of the possibilities of romance as her rejection
of patriotism and ethical behaviour, but, unlike the audience, he has not been
party to the visual flashback that retraces what led the young Meghna into
militancy. This flashback represents a singularly radical intertwining of politics,
plot and point-of-view. Through its content—the death of the father, the rape of
the sister by Indian army soldiers, and the implied rape of the young Meghna
herself, all framed by long shots of the pillage and arson of the village—Mani
Ratnam makes a blatant, melodramatic appeal to the audience. He complicates
this appeal, however, by squarely assigning blame on the Indian army. The
images of military brutality contribute to the visual critique of the army that
operates at key structural moments: the silhouetted soldiers who frame our first
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glimpse of the northeast, the army’s disruption of the Buddhist festival in

Ladakh, the fantasy army in the ‘Dil Se’ montage, and the aestheticised military
bands during the Republic Day parade in New Delhi.
This sustained counter-narrative suggests that Indian military and paramilitary
forces frame, contain, and brutalize the margins while feeding the fantasies of
nationhood, selfhood and phallic authority at the centre. The narrative, however,
continues to elicit audience loyalty towards the army by reminding us that Amar’s
father was a ‘martyred’ army officer—a duality that has been seen operating in
Roja itself, where ‘the military is ennobled by the sacrifices of its members, but
is ultimately the agent of a state that has lost its capacity to control the political
agenda’ (Dirks, 2000, pp. 164–165). This maximal compromising of audience
sympathies is registered in the splitting of the visual field into two superimposed
narratives, corresponding to seeing-with-Amar and seeing-against-Amar. If the
flashback helps us understand Meghna’s castigation of ‘your army’, it also
brings us to an issue that is non-negotiable for Amar: ‘Stop, stop: the army is the
country; if it were not for the army we would be in fragments.’ Yet, as his song,
floating across the airwaves of AIR, declares: ‘I am living a fragmented life here,
while somewhere out there, you too live, fragmented.’
This song, ‘Ai ajnabi’ [O Stranger], itself fragmented across the two halves of
the film, represents, unlike the other songs in Dil Se, the reality of a fragmented,
differentiated nation rather than the dominant self’s need to incorporate the
othered margin in a fantasy of homogeneity. The detonation of the bomb
strapped to Meghna’s body warns against the dangers of such a homogenising
vision. That the marginalised do not crave such incorporation is reiterated through
a couplet from the nineteenth-century Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib, which offers a
coda to ‘Satrangi Re’, and is one of the two sets of lyrics assigned to Meghna:

Ishq par zor nahin, yeh to hain aatish Ghalib

Jo jalaye na jale, jo bujhaye na bujhe
[Love cannot be forced, Ghalib; after all, it is a fire; it ignites spontaneously, and
it spontaneously dies out.]

The only other line, ‘O bird from an alien land’, nevertheless nuances these
obdurate sentiments that Meghna sings in the film, addressing Amar in ‘Ai
 Ananya Jahanara Kabir 153
Ajnabi.’ This plaintive and melancholy gloss on a song about separateness
complicates the assertions of cultural difference made by citing Ghalib.
Meghna’s sparse lyrics suggest that the very language of cultural alienation and
dispossession can simultaneously embody the desire for acceptance on one’s
own terms by the dominant culture. They suggest that even the most
dispossessed and overtly separatist of minorities can be seen as ultimately
demanding only their legitimate place within a pluralist nation.

An Allegory of Centre-State Relations

‘Love cannot be forced’ is, furthermore, an apt comment on the relationship

between India and Kashmir. I gesture here towards not only the centre’s policies
vis-à-vis the state of Kashmir, but also to the territorially possessive attitude to
Kashmiri insurgency that is typically displayed by urban, middle-class India.
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Dil Se asks its spectators to confront those discursive mechanisms whereby

Kashmir has been othered and fetishised even while the democratic and cultural
claims of Kashmiris have been erased.16 It is not only the precedents of Roja and
Bombay that suggest these ultimate points of reference, or the obvious equation
of the northeast and Kashmir as ‘troubled states’ (Manor, 2001, pp. 91–102).
Through self-referential means, Dil Se’s own counter-narratives of cinematography
and song enact the connections between the libidinal economy of self and other,
between identity politics and the democratic process, and between these
connections themselves and the Kashmir imbroglio.
Since India’s independence, Bombay cinema has provided both a crucible for
the forging of a sense of ‘common thicker we-ness’ (Kaviraj, 1991, pp.90–91) and
a mirror in which its audience has seen its hopes, aspirations and fantasies
reflected (Chakravarty, 1993). In that cinematic imaginary, however, some kinds
of India never found representation. Other kinds were represented, but at
insidious cost. Thus, the Kashmir valley was the formulaic backdrop for song-
and-dance sequences that represented pastoral escapism, the means whereby
the audience vicariously sated its libidinal and consumerist desires. The Kashmir
landscape sometimes metamorphosed into the heroine, the paradigmatic
Kashmir ki Kali (‘The Rosebud of Kashmir’, a popular Bombay film of the 1950s)
deflowered, as it were, by the hero, himself always ‘unmarked Indian:’ North
Indian and Hindu (Kabir, 2001)—precisely Amar’s co-ordinates in Dil Se.
For nearly two decades, the insurgency in Kashmir has made it impossible to
shoot such sequences. In Roja, Mani Ratnam camouflages this impossibility by
reconstituting ‘Kashmir’ from location shots in topographically similar regions
of North India. In Dil Se, in contrast, Mani Ratnam highlights the absence of the
Kashmir valley by circling, through Amar’s pursuit of Meghna, the barren
landscape of Ladakh, a region that, although geographically and culturally
distinct from the Valley, comprises, like it, a part of the Indian state of Jammu
and Kashmir. Mani Ratnam thereby gestures towards the current absence of
an entire mode of representing romance, while interrogating the performance of
the Kashmir valley within that mode. Through layered allegories, he urges us to
confront the reasons for the non-availability of that background for the playing
out of the erotic desires of an audience that identifies with the protagonists as
representing ‘normative India.’
 154 Allegories of Alienation and Politics of Bargaining
At the same time, we are asked to consider the relative success of some
negotiations between that India, whose centrality has been ensured by the
democratic process, and the multitudinous ‘other Indias’, ethnic and regional
‘total societies … with a shared cultural heritage’ (Kohli, 1998, p. 12) whose
cultural and socio-economic rights are often under threat through the same
process. It has been noted that the potential for such success lies in the ‘federal
distribution of authority and power’ that, while ‘allowing for a decisive
advantage on the part of the central government … needs to be read in the
context of the actual exercise of the relative powers of the units and the dynamic
struggles and collaborations in a multicultural country like India (Dasgupta,
2001, p. 57). If the breakdown of relations between Amar and Meghna allegorises
the impasse between the Centre and ‘troubled states’, most egregiously manifested
today in Kashmir, the cooperative negotiations between Amar and Preeti as
they navigate the complexities of the arranged marriage system offer a parable
for more successful ‘struggles and collaborations’ exemplified, for instance, by
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the resolution of the Tamil issue.

Having lost track of Meghna in Ladakh, Amar returns to Delhi, and to his
parents’ suggestion that he marry Preeti Nair (Preity Zinta), the daughter of an
Army officer known to the family. In a film that engages so keenly with difference,
and where linguistic difference between the Northeast and Amar is highlighted,
it is of paramount importance that Preeti is from the South Indian state of Kerala.
It is not merely their similar family and class backgrounds that render possible
the alliance between Amar and Preeti, but the bargaining power that Preeti brings
to the table through her regional identity. Completely comfortable in the North
Indian milieu of the Verma household and of Delhi at large, Preeti’s ‘South
Indianness’ emerges only as a bargaining tool. She uses her mother tongue,
Malayalam, to assert her status as bride-to-be among the younger generation of
Amar’s extended family, and she teaches Amar phrases from Malayalam, thereby
encouraging him to speak her tongue. This effortless movement between North
and South gives her the power of the go-between or reterritoralised minority
subject, a power that crystallises in the song ‘Jiya Jale’ [My soul burns].
The lyrics of ‘Jiya Jale’ alternate Malayalam and Hindi words, while the montage
similarly alternates between the pre-wedding henna ceremony of North Indians,17
and a fantasy of rural South India set amidst Kerala backwaters replete with snake
boats and virile male dancers. As Preeti moves between these alternative settings
she transforms herself from virginal and demure North Indian bride, with covered
head and hennaed palms, to erotically empowered ‘Kerala woman’, dressed in
the tight half-sari and blouse typical of Kerala fisherwomen (Fig. 4). The
semiotic power of this fluctuation is heightened by the ‘wet sari look’ that
signals erotic plenitude in Bombay cinema, and that Preeti appropriates for
herself in the song. Moreover, in presenting Amar within the song in terms of
the same, highly sexual, ‘wet-look’ semiotics, Preeti asserts her ability to fantasise
about her future, and Amar, on her own terms.
Preeti’s trump card is not merely her cultural bilingualism, but this very
power to fantasise. This power, enacted through ‘Jiya Jale’, contrasts with the
only lyrics allowed Meghna. Meghna’s inability to bargain for a happy ending,
while contrasted with Preeti’s superior bargaining powers, nevertheless impact
via the bomb explosion the latter’s own plans for a ‘happily ever after’ with
Amar. An allegorical reading extrapolates from that explosion a particular
message for centre-state relations in India. If some groups are not allowed
 Ananya Jahanara Kabir 155
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Figure 4 Preeti as North Indian Bride/Kerala Woman

self-expression on their own terms, other groups who have ostensibly succeeded in
their negotiations with the centre, and indeed the centre itself, will suffer.

Creating a ‘Becoming-minor’

In the overlap between Preeti’s regional identity and those of Mani Ratnam,
A. R. Rahman and the cinematographer Santosh Sivan, resides, moreover, the
therapeutic potential of the film. The power to fantasise on one’s own terms is
not only Preeti’s: it is also theirs. The bilingual Bollywood idiom they have
pioneered has allowed other minority subject positions within Bombay cinema,
 156 Allegories of Alienation and Politics of Bargaining
such as that of actor Shahrukh Khan, to express their difference and mourn their
own complicities within a homogenising fantasy machine. From this perspective,
Dil Se brings together the conundrum at the heart of every democracy—the thin
line separating majority rule from majoritarianism—and the conundrum at the
heart of every artwork—that, paraphrasing Adorno, we may call its ‘innocent
guilt’ (Adorno, 1984, p. 229). The makers of Dil Se use the cinematic apparatus
itself to expose the collusion of cinema, including their own, with majoritarian
hegemonies ascendant in contemporary India, and to offer a range of marginalised
and hegemonised spectatorial subjectivities a sense that here is ‘a film of their
own.’ While a mainstream audience may not be prepared or willing to accept
these radical responses, the success of the soundtrack ensures that, on a
subliminal level, its embedded messages circulate among the very audience that
rejected the film (Manuel, 1993).
Dil Se thus embodies the task, ‘mostly invisible to eyes that lack empathy, of
pre-empting and preventing conflict by creating in advance ways of inducting
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people into processes of identification with national, developmental, civic or

other co-operative norms or values’, even while demonstrating how the public
cultural arena works in tandem with the ‘successful processing of ethnic
demands [that] can encourage new demands from those who were not able to
speak out before’ (Dasgupta, 1998, p. 213). This film pleads, through the protagonist
Amar, ‘I am living a fragmented life here’ even while answering back, albeit
through various levels of allegory, ‘love cannot be forced.’ In opening out to the
public gaze this private articulation of the culturally cornered minority
subjectivity, by reminding its spectators how both to mourn and oppose cultural
subsidence into majoritarian master-narratives and master-imaginaries, Dil Se’s
cultural project moves the recuperative possibilities of accommodating difference
into a more audacious realm altogether:

‘How many styles or genres or literary movements, even very small ones, have
only one single dream: to assume a major function in language, to offer
themselves as a sort of state language, an official language. Create the opposite
dream: know how to create a becoming-minor’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986,
p. 27).

Notes

1 I would like to thank the following for encouragement and help with this article: Sunil Amrith,
Kaushik Bhaumik, Sugata Bose, Huna Dar, Ayesha Jalal, Shomikho Raha, Montu Saxena, and
all at The Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge, especially Inga Huld Markan and
Jo Maybin for administrative support, and Emma Rothschild for inspiration and much else.
2 See the reviews at http://www.planetbollywood.com/film/dilse.html; http://www.pugmarks.
com/movies/dilse.htm; and http://www.rage-india.com/dilse; sites accessed 28 May 2003.
3 The historical reasons can be summarised as colonial classificatory practices, for which see Van
der Veer, ‘Religious Nationalism’ 1994, pp. 19–26, and constitutional debates, for which see
Gupta, ‘Secularization and Minoritization’ 1999, pp. 47 and 56, and Mahajan, ‘Contextualizing
Minority Rights’ 1999, p. 61. For the emotive issues, see above all the work of Hasan, e.g. Legacy
of A Divided Nation 1997.
4 The ‘South Indian takeover’ is discussed by Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film 1998, pp. 217–237
and Dwyer, All You Want is Money 2000, pp. 109–111. For South Indian cinema, see, for instance,
Dickey, Cinema and The Urban Poor 1993, and for different genres of Indian cinema, Nandy, ‘An
Intelligent Critic’s Guide to the Indian Cinema’ 1995.
 Ananya Jahanara Kabir 157
5 In summer 2002, Rahman entered the international musical scene with his soundtrack for
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s London West End musical ‘Bombay Dreams’; it is due to appear on
Broadway in summer 2003.
6 The South Asian musical development of the reiterative methods such as chanting and whirling
through which Sufism advocates spiritual ecstasy; see Qureshi, ‘Sufi Music’, 1986.
7 See Dirks, ‘Home and the Nation’ 2000, pp. 173–178, where he summarises the Roja debate;
for a summary of the Bombay debate, see Vasudevan, ‘Bombay and Its Public’ 2000, pp. 192–198.
8 Sivan’s film, The Terrorist 1998, on a Sri Lankan Tamil suicide bomber’s assassination of the
Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, may be seen as an act of both expiation and of recuperation
(of a pan-Tamil identity). I discuss The Terrorist in Kabir, ‘Artist’ 2002. For the cultural and
political dimensions of Tamil ethnonationalism, see Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue 1997,
and Chadda, Ethnicity, pp. 71–76.
9 The connections between spectatorship and citizenship in India are theorised by Nandy, ‘Indian
Popular Cinema’ 2002, Vasudevan, ‘An Imperfect Public’ 2002, Rajadhyaksha, ‘Viewership and
Democracy’ 2000; for the historical background, see Freitag, ‘Visions of the Nation’ 2000.
10 Translations of the film’s screenplay are mine.
11 http://www.dilse.com (accessed 14 October 2001; site no longer active). The ‘seven shades’ are
cited also in several ‘unofficial’ Dil Se websites, such as http://www.members.tripod.com/
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~dilse46/ (accessed 28 May 2003) and http://www.members.tripod.com/~shruti_a/dilse.htm

(accessed 30 October 2002; this site has now moved). Images used in this article are taken from
the latter two websites.
12 See http://devdas.indiatimes.com/story.htm (accessed 28 May 2003), the new home for the
material in the film’s official website http://www.devdasfilm.com (accessed 30 October 2002;
site no longer active).
13 For the connection between popular song, romance and Urdu love poetry, see Dwyer, All You
Want is Money 2000, p. 113, Kesavan, ‘Urdu, Awadh and the Tawaif’ 1994, p. 245, Manuel,
‘Ghazal-Song,’ 1991. For the relationship between Hindi and Urdu, see Shackle and Snell (eds),
Hindi and Urdu since 1800 1990, pp. 1–20. The beleaguered status of Urdu is discussed, among
others, by Dwyer, All You Want is Money 2000, p. 109, Kesavan, ‘Islamicate Roots’, 1994, p. 247,
and Manuel (1991), whose comments in ‘Ghazal-Song’, p. 358, sum up the situation: ‘it is
paradoxical that the Ghazal, in however Hindified a form, should achieve such unprecedented
popularity at a time when the Urdu language is all but dying in India’.
14 By ‘mise-en-abîme’ I indicate an internal formal structure that reduplicates, or mirrors, the form
of the work itself; this formal reduplication is rarely ornamental but serves to draw attention to
an important thematic or symbolic moment.
15 Note, in this connection, AIR’s role in State-sponsored, homogenising and centralised nation
building, as discussed by Lelyveld, ‘Upon the Subdominant’ 1995.
16 As Manor notes, ‘Centre-State Relations’ 2001, p. 95: ‘It pains a friend of India to say it, but New
Delhi’s approach to Kashmir has—by India’s own democratic standards—been excessively
manipulative and destructive’. For further exploration of these issues, see Chadda, 1997; Kohli,
1998; and Bose, 1997.
17 For the national spread of North Indian, specifically Punjabi wedding festivities via their
cinematic depictions, see Dwyer, All You Want is Money 2000, p. 156.

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Correspondence to: Ananya Jahanara Kabir, School of English, University of

Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK.