Bauji is touchy about India and his first impression of Raj is that this guy’s probably giving the honest and hardworking NRI a bad name. Baldev Singh (Amrish Puri), or Bauji as he is called, is a moderately successful NRI living in London with his family, including daughter Simran (Kajol) and wife Lajjo (Farida Jalal) but his heart still pines for India. On the other hand, the film also “ruined” romance for many. Their glamorous and whirlwind romance as Raj-Simran helped redefine the idea of love and courtship for young and West-worshipping audiences.
Despite a landmark debut, writes Anupama Chopra, “Aditya Chopra became a name, but not a face.” Sensationally popular, the screen pairing of Kajol and Shah Rukh Khan had previously struck gold in Baazigar (1993) and Karan Arjun (1995), but it is their turn in DDLJ that made an outsized cultural imprint. Aditya, who’s married to Rani Mukerji, is a Bollywood enigma. The film was an expensive launchpad for Yash Chopra’s son and heir to his growing celluloid empire, Aditya Chopra, and was shot in exotic locales of London, Switzerland and Punjab by YRF veteran Manmohan Singh - not to be confused with the father of economic liberalisation.
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(Express archive photo)įirst things first. Raj-Simran’s happy ending The screen pairing of Kajol and Shah Rukh Khan had previously struck gold in Baazigar (1993) and Karan Arjun (1995), but it is their turn in DDLJ that made an outsized cultural imprint. So, DDLJ provided the blueprint for much of the slick Dharma fluff you saw through the late 1990s onwards. Another quiet cultural shift was brewing in here: Karan Johar, who has a blink-and-miss cameo as SRK’s friend in the movie, learnt one end of his filmmaking rope from DDLJ (the other came from Yash Chopra’s earlier romances). For the middle-class viewers whose idea for a vacation was Kullu Manali family package, DDLJ’s European landmarks served as a vicarious pleasure and wish fulfilment.
Multiplexes were still some years away, but the dress circles, balconies and stalls of single screens (it still plays to a rapt audience in Mumbai’s fabled Maratha Mandir) were teeming with couples and families angling to get a dekko at this aspirational love story. Soon, this would drive the country towards a new, more consumerist and globalised social reality. Its release coinciding with the heady days prompted by economic reforms. Starring Shah Rukh Khan as the outrageous flirt Raj, Kajol as family girl Simran, the late Amrish Puri as the strict patriarch Baldev Singh, Farida Jalal as Simran’s supportive mother and Anupam Kher as Raj’s equally flamboyant single dad, DDLJ was a game-changer when it first opened to packed houses in 1995, in a newly liberalised India.
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