Hindi movies used to treat travelling as a musical aesthetic: an unreal luxury that only people with unused passports could fantasise about. But over time, the idea of travelling has gone through a human makeover. It is now a language of finding love, finding oneself, finding peace and solitude, finding spirituality, and just finding in general. It’s also a premise rather than a song. Here are five Hindi films that explore the theme of exploration in both orthodox and unorthodox ways.
Would teenaged NRIs Raj and Simran have immortalised the post-liberalisation Bollywood romance if they hadn’t gallivanted together on trains and trams through Europe? Probably not. It’s fashionable to criticise the traditional family-first patterns or the girl-needing-a-boy-to-liberate-herself trope today. But it’s hard to understate just how progressive and limitless the movie felt back in the mid-1990s. From London to Punjab, here were two youngsters who found themselves by finding each other — a concept that was alien to an entire generation in the pre-internet era. Hundreds of movies have upgraded and downgraded the formula since, but there’s nothing like DDLJ to humanise the freedom of travelling and dreaming on your own terms.
Farhan Akhtar’s pathbreaking debut was always about travelling through time, not space. The iconic buddy movie about three college friends navigating the choppy transition into adulthood is situated in that awkward storytelling phase between “the good old days” and “happily ever after”; the emotional dynamics between “once upon a time” and “all’s well that ends well”.
There is Aamir Khan’s Akash relocating to Sydney as part of his upscale growing-up package, and his brain opening up to the possibilities of loneliness. His portion captures the trend of how lost South Asians gravitate towards each other and form their own communities and languages away from home. But it’s the interiority of the film that’s defined by travelling as an act of life itself.
Dev Benegal’s sparkling, under-appreciated indie remains one of modern Hindi cinema’s definitive films about films — through exploration. It stars the peak alt-star of that era, Abhay Deol, as a man whose rickety old truck becomes a ‘touring cinema’ vehicle in a wild adventure across the desert. The late Satish Kaushik and Tannishtha Chatterjee join him, turning the outcasts-unite drama into a wistful snapshot of the relationship between travelling and storytelling. The all-those-who-wander-are-not-lost spirit is exuded by Benegal’s craft, not least because the plot reframes cinema as a primal necessity rather than a sensory pleasure. The landscape, so often romanticised by foreign movies shot in India, is photographed with an eye for both authenticity and mysticism. The result is a beguiling hybrid of Road and Movie.
Given director Imtiaz Ali’s penchant for lost protagonists finding themselves through both internal and external wandering, any of his distinctly sufi-coded movies could’ve made this list. But I’m going for the unconventional depiction of travelling setting a character free: Highway. Alia Bhatt’s breakout turn as a sheltered city girl whose abduction becomes her unlikely coming-of-age journey flips Stockholm Syndrome on its head across the Himalayas. Her deadly Jatt captor (Randeep Hooda) warms up to her against the odds; it takes an on-the-run ‘road trip’ for her to realise that home was her performative prison all along. Ali’s film conveys these complicated themes without the crutch of exoticisation, rooting the hilly trenches of Himachal Pradesh in the flailing heart of a young woman who chooses the deep sea over the devil.
It’s almost implausible that Alia Bhatt, Deepika Padukone, Vidya Balan and Rani Mukerji were at the peak of their powers together in this brief phase of curious Hindi storytelling. At the forefront was Kangana Ranaut, bristling with quivering brilliance as Rani, the meek West Delhi newlywed whose solo honeymoon across Amsterdam and Paris empowers her with Amit-Trivedi-esque fervour. Queen really gets the social anxieties of Indian travelling in a First World that’s too often romanticised by song-and-dance Bollywood. Rani grows in confidence as an outsider finding fellow outsiders in foreign lands. It makes for a feminist retelling of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge too: one where Simran might have found her own agency had she not bumped into a rich floppy-haired hero on her adventurous Euro trip. Ranaut’s triumph is that Rani’s transformation remains self-contained; it’s the beginning of change as a form of evolution, not revolution.