Readers Write In #816: Bread Pakoras in the City of Djinns – Bollywood’s Love Affair with Delhi

By Pranav Jain

Pranav Jain is an incoming civil servant and also a columnist.

“Yeh Dilli hai mere yaar, bas ishq, mohabbat, pyaar”. This is not merely a lyric from Rakeysh Mehra’s Delhi-6, but a declaration. Delhi does not ask to be loved, it assumes it will be. There is, simply, no city quite like Delhi. It dreams in Love Aaj Kal’s heritage conservation and curses in Delhi Heights’ traffic jams. That, perhaps, is why when Bollywood turns its gaze upon it, Delhi does not sit quietly in the background but spreads itself across the screen like Jagjit Singh’s Hoshwalon Ko Khabar Kya – innocently romantic, indelibly layered, and redolently fragrant with silent longing.

Consider the Delhi of Khosla Ka Ghosla and Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!. Dibakar Banerjee adroitly paints Delhi as a city bursting at the seams with working-class dreams and middle-class fears. 

In Khosla Ka Ghosla, Kamal Kishore Khosla (played by Anupam Kher), with his ill-fitting shirts and dad paunch, embodies the quintessential Punjabi middle-class Delhi-ite. The film captures the crumbling ethics of a Delhi in the throes of gentrification. In Banerjee’s Delhi, the real villain is not Boman Irani’s builder but Delhi itself, where land means legitimacy, and where your place in society is tied to the physical coordinates of your address. Oye Lucky!, on the other hand, is less a heist film than a sly commentary on how aspiration operates in Delhi. Abhay Deol’s Lucky does not rob people out of desperation. He robs them out of contempt, and sometimes, out of curiosity. Lucky is the byproduct of a city obsessed with class performance, where the boundary between ‘somebody’ and ‘also-ran’ is often just a leather jacket and a cool car. 

Perhaps, Delhi has always been like that. In Yash Chopra’s Trishul, many decades earlier, a similar struggle takes place, but on a grander scale. Amitabh Bachchan’s Vijay, born illegitimate and angry, arrives in Delhi to reclaim what was taken from him – the empire that his father (Sanjeev Kumar) built. Against the brooding silhouette of  Delhi’s brutalist skyline, a masculine battle between father and son unfolds. All over a piece of property, a vestige of power, a sliver of recognition, and countless dramas of paternal issues. In some scenes, you can almost sense the city’s post-emergency era anxieties being juxtaposed against boardroom battles.

Yet, Delhi is not all grit and testosterone. It is also lehengas and the sound of a shehnai which can cause tinnitus. Few films have captured this side of the city like Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding and Maneesh Sharma’s Band Baaja Baaraat. 

In the former, Delhi explodes with colour and contradiction, amidst a great Indian wedding set in a farmhouse in Chattarpur. Delhi here typifies the tension between opulence and unresolved trauma. Mira Nair’s Delhi is a city trying to be global while still clinging to the scent of marigolds and the sound of Mehdi Hassan’s ghazals. It is conflicted, but never cold. Band Baaja Baaraat introduces us to a new Delhi. One that is ambitious and swears by its Bread Pakoras. Shruti and Bittoo, from different parts of the city – one from Subhash Nagar and the other from a more genteel class – hustle a wedding planning enterprise that is pure Dilli jugaad. This is the Delhi of start-ups and breakups in DTC buses. A Delhi trying to grow up, but failing at adulting spectacularly. 

The use of Delhi University (DU) and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) as motifs has been a recurring trend in Bollywood movies. In Sai Paranjape’s Chashme Baddoor, the Delhi of the early ’80s was innocent enough for bunked classes and romance with Miss Chamko among the historic locales of Talkatora. The city had not yet grown cynical. You could still flirt over chai, and run a tab on the cigarettes with Lallan Miyan. 

But Delhi changes every decade. That is perhaps its tragedy and also its glory. In Fukrey, the city is younger and more alive than ever. The boys of Fukrey are not interested in studying or changing the world. They are just trying to earn a quick buck while working for Bholi Punjaban from Jamnapaar, in order to impress the girl next door. Delhi here is hormonal and cheeky. And all the more charming for that. In Rockstar, Ranbir Kapoor’s transformation into Jordan begins in the North Campus. His angst is amplified by the city’s indifference and his Devdas-like self-destruction finds a soundtrack in Rahman’s sufi rock. And when Kundan follows Zoya from Varanasi to Delhi in Raanjhanaa, Kundan’s obsession and idealism die a thousand deaths in the political cauldron of JNU. 

Sometimes, the most accurate portrayal of Delhi comes from the margins. Delhi-6 is set in the ancient lanes of Chandni Chowk, but it is not a period piece. It is an affectionate indictment of Delhi, one where communal amity and communal tensions exist in the same emotional arsenal. Titli presents the city not as a location but as a lineage. The protagonist wants to escape the car-jacking family business, but soon realises that escape from Delhi remains a bourgeois fantasy. And Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon is arguably the most radical and unsettling Delhi film. Through the dreams of pickpockets and street vendors, the film reconstructs an urban consciousness where modernity and sewage flow side by side. 

What binds these disparate films is their shared reverence for an irreverent Delhi. You can leave Delhi, love it, curse it, or romanticise it from far away, but you never really exit it. Bollywood, when it chooses to look beyond the sterile sets of Mumbai or the anachronistic charm of small-town milieus, finds in Delhi not just a location, but a canvas that is poetic, political, bruising, and forgiving, in equal measure.