Working Notes

Released in 2001, director Farhan Akhtar’s debut feature film, Dil Chahta Hai (The Heart Desires) was a runaway commercial triumph. As its very title suggests, the film’s conceptual investments are located in the question of desire – what does the heart desire? What is the name of the thing the heart desires? This meditation on desire is placed at the crossroads of two important issues. First, it looks back into the history of commercial Hindi cinema to locate patterns of desiring identifications – for example, one romantic song sequence is made up exclusively of montages from Hindi movies of the 1960s and 1970s. Second, it expands this investment in quotation expands to other cultures as well – another love sequence is filmed in the vein of Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 film, Moulin Rouge, which is in turn indebted to Bollywood conventions. Dil Chahta Hai then brings together these quotations to bear on the question of desire. How does artistic debt impact sexual desire? What relationships – artistic and sexual – get named, and what happens to those that do not have a name? In response to these questions, the film sustains at its core an interrogation of two unusual erotic relationships. The first involves an unconsummated affair between a younger man, Siddharth (played by Akshaye Khanna) and an older woman, Tara (played by Dimple Kapadia), while the second involves the tightly knit relationship between Siddharth and Akash (played by Aamir Khan). These affective relationships form the centre of the film, and in dealing with them, Dil Chahta Hai comments also on the traditions that make up Bollywood cinema – not only the conventions of dosti (male friendship) that mark the early films of Amitabh Bachan, Shashi Kapoor, and Rajesh Khanna, but also more generally the relationship between acceptable and reprehensible, artistic and sexual mores.