Column | How Bollywood has depicted the festival of Diwali over the years

Jaya Bachchan in a still from Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham

Symbolically speaking, Diwali has always stood for homecoming. For Hindus, this is the night of Lord Ram’s homecoming to Ayodhya. Bollywood has used Diwali festivities as an opportunity for song-and-dance routines, or for comic relief in the ‘family cinema’ of the 80s and the 90s. But more importantly, some of the most successful and talked-about Bollywood films of the past few decades have interpreted Diwali’s ‘homecoming’ theme in several different ways.

Karan Johar, Bollywood’s reigning overlord of bling, chose to shoot Shah Rukh Khan’s literal homecoming scene in the 2001 blockbuster Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham against the backdrop of Diwali. Khan’s character is a ‘prince’ in the sense that he is the elder son of billionaire Yashwardhan Raichand (Amitabh Bachchan) and his wife Nandini (Jaya Bachchan).

This scene is one of the most-replayed ones from the Johar stable. Khan landing in a chopper, Jaya welcoming him with the aarti thali… it played to the gallery in the way that audiences have come to expect from Johar. Over two decades later, this scene is meme gold on social media and the image of a beaming, doting Jaya has become shorthand for indulgent parents in whose eyes the chosen son can do no wrong.

Golden moments

A neat inversion of this scene takes place in Mahesh Manjrekar’s Vaastav (1999) where Sanjay Dutt returns home to his parents’ chawl for Diwali. This is the first time he is seeing them after becoming a full-fledged gangster. He is physically transformed, heavily armed and wears a heavy gold chain. He then brags about the chain in front of his family (especially his visibly disgusted mother), saying it is “pachaas tola” (literally, 50 tolas, 1 tola = approx. 12g).

The braggadocio around gold is also one of the formal features of Diwali — gold sales go through the roof in the lead-up to the festival, considered an auspicious time to buy the precious metal. This can be seen as Hinduism’s version of the ‘prosperity doctrine’ (the idea that god wants you to expand your wealth) that certain American churches have made fashionable in the 21st century.

In one of the many heartbreaking scenes from Aamir Khan’s Taare Zameen Par (2007), we see the protagonist, a dyslexic young boy called Ishaan Awasthi, alone and morose in a corner on Diwali night, even as his friends and family are laughing and eating sweets and bursting firecrackers. Ishaan is upset because his parents have decided to send him away to a boarding school. This is also an inversion of the homecoming theme, albeit a far crueller one because here it’s the parents themselves who are willingly uprooting a vulnerable child.

A still from Taare Zameen Par.

In October 2005, a couple of days before Diwali, there was a terrorist attack in a crowded New Delhi market, the bomb eventually killing over 60 people and injuring about 100. Since then, a number of Bollywood films have featured terrorism plots centred around Hindu festivals, usually either Diwali or Dussehra. Vidyut Jammwal’s Commando 3 (2019), for instance, climaxes with Muslim good Samaritans foiling a terrorist plot before joining their Hindu neighbours in the festivities. Communal harmony, therefore, is the usual takeaway from these plots. Ashutosh Gowariker’s Swades telegraphed this way back in 2004. Here, the Diwali ‘homecoming’ acquires a nation-state angle as the extremely American NASA scientist Mohan Bhargava (Shah Rukh Khan) returns to his village not long before Diwali.

Shah Rukh Khan in Swades

Expel Ravan

The eventual Diwali song in the film, ‘Pal Pal Hai Bhaari’, includes the brilliant line ‘Man se Raavan jo nikaale Ram uske man mein hai (Ram resides within the heart of those who expel their inner Ravan). It is often cited as an example of Bollywood’s ‘let’s-get-along’ communal harmony ethos, since this song which offers Ramayana commentary has been written by Javed Akhtar and picturised on Shah Rukh Khan, both Muslim artists.

However, Bollywood has historically also used Diwali night as a site of terrible things unfolding before the audience’s eyes. In potboilers like Zanjeer (1973) and Badle Ki Aag (1982), Diwali is the night the film’s defining massacre takes place, in both cases leading to an enduring family feud.

More recently, a pair of films featuring Kalki Koechlin have depicted Diwali in interesting ways. In Shaitan (2011), the central characters’ merrymaking on Diwali night becomes a grim prelude to the spiral of bloodshed and backstabbing they will soon be engulfed by. And in Kadakh (2019), a Diwali cards party becomes a kind of converging point for the macabre side of Delhi’s elite: adultery, fraud and murder will be revealed by the end of the night.

Kalki Koechlin in Shaitan

These representations are every bit as Diwali as Johar’s helicoptered homecomings. After all, in the good vs. evil battle playing out inside these characters’ heads, evil sometimes wins, no?

The writer and journalist is working on his first book of non-fiction.