Bollywood's Tryst With Suicides

Barring a few films made recently, Indian cinema hasn't quite probed the deeper, more fundamental meaning of suicide

- Tanul Thakur

TWENTY-SEVEN minutes into 3 Idiots (2009), the voiceover takes a break from deifying Rancho (Aamir Khan) and introduces a college student, Joy Lobo (Ali Fazal), as “someone just like him”. Close to building an inventive helicopter, Lobo requests the college dean, Virus (Boman Irani), for an extension. Virus denies it, calling his project nonsense. Six minutes (and two songs) later, Rancho makes the helicopter work. As it flies and settles outside Lobo’s room window, its camera records his body hanging from the ceiling. Two words wail from the wall: “I quit.”

Rancho calls it a “murder”, implying Virus, representing the educational “system”, is responsible. He cites figures—a student dies by suicide every 90 minutes in the country. (That number has nosedived to 41, according to a 2021 report by the National Crime Records Bureau.) Even before 3 Idiots, another Bollywood film, Chal Chalein (2009), had a similar scene where, fearing his father’s rebuke, a student kills himself. Here, his friends literally accuse the father of murder, suing him with the help of a lawyer (Mithun Chakraborty).

Much like our society, Hindi cinema has shied away from challenging people upholding tradition, such as parents or teachers. Suicides allowed these stories to open a channel of long-shut inquiry, as it’s inconceivable to think of those as villains who have always been considered heroes. Or, quite simply, it eased the filmmakers into asking a disconcerting question: What kind of a society gets away with murdering its own children?