Between Love and a Hard Place - DIL SE (1998)

CW: Sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.

For every happy wanderer and stranger, there remains a distance. In Mani Ratnam’s 1998 romance/political thriller, Bollywood tropes and the mythology of its star are flipped on their head in service of a harrowing national allegory, questioning how the idealized unions of Indian cinema could lead to reconciliation. In a film that evokes a postmodernist idea of multiple Indias, pan-Indian identity and Arabic poetry, as well as the relationship between colonizer and colonized, this packed episode marks Dolly Back’s first foray into Bollywood cinema, and we couldn’t be more excited to take this train to one of the industry’s prescient classics, especially as Shah Rukh Khan’s star continues to shine.

Nandini Balial's Feature - Visual Jazz: Celebrating the Sights and Sounds of Dil Se