Band, Baaja, Business

Glitzy, opulent weddings popularised by Bollywood inspire real-life marriage ceremonies, making them all look the same, drowning out local customs, cuisines, and contexts

- Tanul Thakur

THE 1994 family drama Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (HAHK) opens to a cricket match. The camera glides up to frame a mansion facing a ground.

It’s decked with a pitch, wickets, and bails, rimmed by a white picket fence, spectators, and streetlights. Without a line of dialogue, director Sooraj Barjatya establishes three key facts about the family: that it is rich, chic, and serious—or, well, ‘professional’—about having fun. A family that functions as a corporation. Everyone serves a fixed function in this scene (much like a job designation): the players wear golf caps that say “Boy” and “Girl”. The spectators move and cheer in unison, like coordinated robots. When a woman, a peripheral character, wants to bat, the hero, Prem (Salman Khan), mocks her and sends her away. Even though it’s a small, silly scene, it underscores the family’s ethos in precise details (confirmed by the rest of the film): that it prizes segregation and homogenisation, hierarchy and tradition.

For the next 214 minutes, the movie unfolds, in essence, as a “wedding video” (as it was lampooned in its initial weeks), where Barjatya inverts all the rules of a Bollywood blockbuster: no bloodshed, no conflict, no villains. Like a cola-dispensing machine, HAHK never runs out of sugar. Or affluence: its business-owning family is so rich that it has a swimming pool inside the house. Or consumption: gustatory pleasure is so ubiquitous that food appears across multiple scenes and songs (remember Chocolate, lime juice, ice cream, toffeeya?).