Love And Labour

October’s experiments with the Bollywood romance genre / Film

- Kamayani Sharma

In a scene mid-way through the movie October, the lead character, Dan, played by Varun Dhawan, is chided by his friends for wasting his time looking after a dying girl he barely knows. 

What’s the point, they argue. 

“Do you guys only do something if there’s a point?” he asks. 

The point, historically, of the love-story plot in Hindi cinema has been about the hero initiating romance, often in regressive ways, with a goal towards establishing a heterosexual upper-caste couple that either lives happily ever after or sometimes dies together when unable to do so. Bollywood movies abound with declarations of love, but the emotional labour and financial stresses that may burden a couple are usually invisible. In October, a film about a hotel-management student who falls in love with a woman in a coma, some of this is made visible. It is the long, laborious act of undertaking care that brings about romantic love, one that remains unrequited but the development of which is an end unto itself. The female lead, named Shiuli, suffers such severe brain damage that there is little possibility of marriage or sex, the end goals of most Bollywood love stories.