Bollywood's 'Father of Romance' Yash Chopra celebrated in new Netflix docuseries on Hindi cinema

A foot-tapping Bollywood retro tune that emerges from a compact stereo at a tiny spice store in Queens, New York City, evokes memories of the grand old days of Hindi cinema.

More than 50 years have passed since the song Ae Meri Zohra Jabeen burst onto the scene as the part of the soundtrack of the 1965 film Waqt by acclaimed Indian director Yash Chopra, but its appeal has been enduring, notably the chorus "dil ko jitne ka faan, jo tujh meh hai kanhi nehi" ("no one knows how to win a heart, the way you do") which became an earworm for many Indian film fans.

The song appears in The Romantics, a new four-part documentary series on Netflix which takes viewers into the glossy world of old Bollywood, where Chopra played a huge influence as the "Father of Romance".

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Smriti Mundhra, the Academy Award-nominated Indian-American director of The Romantics, said she hoped to showcase the legacy of the man whose works had been instrumental in shaping not only romantic films but Bollywood cinema through his deft use of storytelling, casting and lavish location settings.

Mundhra defined Chopra's works as ahead of their time, highlighting his "nuanced" portrayal of relationships, marriage, female characters, and "sensitive, inclusive" depiction of Indian politics.

Debashree Mukherjee, a film and media scholar and faculty member at Columbia University, said the documentary, while focusing on Chopra's romantic classics, also has helped to introduce a younger generation to the full complexity of his work.

"I think the series is triggering a lot of interest among younger diasporic [Indians], such as my students at Columbia, who ... have not seen any films of Yash Chopra," she said.

"We watched Deewar in class last week and they were surprised to see such a dark film with social justice and sexually progressive messaging coming from a filmmaker they had associated with the chiffon-saris-in-Switzerland stereotype," she said, referring to the cult 1975 action film of a pair of brothers who end up on opposite sides of the law.

Young people in the South Asian diaspora tend to associate Chopra with his later films embodying romantic storylines, melodious music and heroines dressed in chiffon saris, including Silsila, Chandni and Lamhe. Many of these movies were shot in scenic European locations, especially Switzerland.

While The Romantics evokes nostalgia for the late director, it "missed an opportunity to take a long, hard look" at his life and work and "critically examine" both his output and the wider dynamics of Hindi cinema, said Nirupama Kotru, who is authoring a book on Bollywood in the 1970's. "Yashji deserves a documentary on his life and work," said the film aficionado and civil servant, referring to Chopra using an honorific. "[But] I was hoping to see interviews or old footage of his screenwriters, photographers, choreographers, music directors, lyricists and sound recordists."

Lalit Choudhary, co-founder of the BollywoodDirect website which celebrates Hindi cinema, said The Romantics offered international viewers an understanding of "the legacy of Yash Chopra, whose films' popularity in countries like the US, UK, Europe, and the Middle East reflected his ability to create films that transcended cultural barriers, and led to the perception that his cinema represents Hindi-Indian cinema outside of India".

Prominent film critic Nandini Ramnath of Scroll.in said Hindi cinema was understood to be representative of Indian cinema because it had "the widest possible reach", given the scale of the Bollywood industry.

"The so-called pan-Indian film, or the crossover film as I like to call it, is also a function of being made available in Hindi," she said, referring to movies with commercial appeal that are released in Hindi to help them travel further.

While the Hindi film industry has played an "outsize role" in defining Indian cinema overseas, other film sectors have enjoyed their own share of the limelight for decades, according to Debashree Mukherjee.

"Though the Hindi film industry has always only been a larger part of ... Indian cinema, music cassettes and videotapes of Tamil films have circulated in the Tamil diaspora at least since the 1990s."

RRR, a Telugu-language film depicting two fictional Indian revolutionaries and their fight against the British Raj, became a breakout global hit last year after its massively successful run back home.

Tamil-language adventure film Ponniyin Selvan and the Kannada-language action thriller Kantara also did well in the North American market. Pathaan, an action-packed Hindi film starring superstar Shah Rukh Khan and produced by YRF, broke all box-office records in India and was a hit around the globe in its opening weekend in January.

But this diversity is missed by Western audiences, who usually assume all Indian films are made in Bollywood, academic Mukherjee observed.

"Most Westerners I speak to about RRR in New York ... don't know the difference between Hindi and Tamil or Telugu and Bengali," she said. "RRR is being referred to as 'Bollywood', even though that's a term that [director] S.S. Rajamouli has disavowed, and that Mumbai filmmakers dislike."

Despite this, Mundhra is optimistic that more exposure can only benefit Indian cinema as a whole. "At the end of the day, the success of [these different sectors of Indian cinema] still bolsters the cultural capital of India around the world," she emphasised.

Mundhra, who was nominated for an Academy Award in 2019 for her work on another documentary, also hoped her new docuseries would expand the reach of India's vibrant film culture.

"I don't think you can ever predict how an audience will respond to something, but one thing I am really pleased by is how much the series is striking that emotional chord with people, reminding them how magical Yash Chopra's cinema was," she said.

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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