Much of modern society isn’t wired to acknowledge the plurality of grief. This often reflects in cinema and its penchant for fetishising or defining it. It’s an unfilmable emotion, perhaps, but there are some stories that explore the interiority and get that it’s not just a language of longing. There’s a curiosity to understand it beyond the montages and melancholy, beyond the silences and tears. Here are five contemporary Hindi movies that best capture the social diversity of grief.
Over the years, Reema Kagti’s brooding and atmospheric psychological thriller has become the definitive text for grief in the mainstream Bollywood lexicon. Not many movies tackle the emotion so directly, and even fewer understand the “genre” fluidity of it: it’s essentially a supernatural process, where a griever is left with the ghost of their unfinished love. So, the story of a bereaved Mumbai cop (Aamir Khan) investigating a high-profile accident and finding a “witness” seamlessly melds into his personal struggle to cope with the death of his child and a burdened marriage. Being haunted has never been so literal.
Turning the film into a paranormal drama of sorts — with a famous Kareena Kapoor-driven twist — remains a big swing in a culture that often treats grief as an invisible entity.
A middle-aged widower misses companionship when a twist of fate puts him in touch with a faceless soulmate. The late Irrfan Khan’s Saajan Fernandes remains one of his most iconic characters. He embodies the permanence of grief so well that it takes a glitch in Mumbai’s matrix — a happy accident in the city’s iconic dabba service — to puncture his loneliness. He seems to be in a state of perpetual grief: Always mourning the loss of previous versions of himself. It’s like the film itself tries to heal him by littering his path with friendship and love.
The remarkable thing about Saajan is that, unlike most characters, he finds solace in the mundanity of grieving. He allows himself — and us — to see the world differently, and with more thought, through the lens of his gentle melancholy.
Aligarh (2015)
Hansal Mehta’s moving film about a professor who is ‘accused’ of homosexuality and alienated by society marked the return of Manoj Bajpayee to the very front rank of Indian acting. He plays the man with so much gravitas that you can almost see the toll of the trauma happening in real time. Even when a young reporter befriends him, there’s a sense that the ageing man is already grieving the loss of humanity in an India he doesn’t recognise anymore.
Every moment he spends with himself — privately, away from the trials and tribulations of public scrutiny — becomes a milestone in a grief that soon engulfs him. It’s a profoundly performed portrait of an unfilmable emotion. Movies are often made on the perseverance to battle on; here’s one about the courage to be broken.
A romcom with an unlikely ending, Meri Pyaari Bindu runs with the “One that got away” trope until there’s no turning back. A Bengali boy falls for his manic-pixie neighbour, goes through the friends-turned-lovers arc, breaks up, but never really gets over her. He romanticises her in his head. And naturally, he becomes a pulp-fiction author who writes his first serious book about them. The bittersweet film is haunted with all five stages of grief — until the couple reaches the stage of acceptance, with the lovely ballad “Maana Ki Hum Yaar Nahin” sealing the journey. It’s a brave film in the context of our times, not least because of the Happily Never After and the maturity to acknowledge that heartbreak is simply the most public language of grief. This is Khurrana’s most intuitive performance, in my opinion.
Grief is usually a consequence in most stories (and life). It’s a procedural and raw reaction to loss. Shoojit Sircar’s October is a meditation on many things: Love, masculinity, urban isolation, adulthood. But it’s also a unique film about grief as a crutch — a subconscious device used by a young drifter to find direction and purpose. Varun Dhawan’s Danish is a wayward hotel management intern who suddenly finds solace in his connection with a comatose colleague; he barely knew her before, but he convinces himself that they had a moment before she fell. It’s a remarkable take on how any emotion can be a coming-of-age one. The protagonist develops feelings for a virtual stranger, going through every stage of grief in a one-sided relationship for the ages.