15 Years of 'Band Baaja Baaraat': Bollywood’s Bijness-Class Romance

You say Band Baaja Baaraat (BBB) and I hear “bijness”, “bread pakore ki kasam (swear on bread fritters)” and the lovely piano tune during modern Hindi cinema’s most heartfelt kiss. I hear the bustle of Janakpuri, smell the privilege of Sainik Farms, and sense the chemistry between two newcomers (one newer than the other) on the brink of fame.

That’s the currency of a trendsetting entertainer. It becomes its own cultural lexicon or, as the kids today call it: a vibe.

And the more formal markers become a quiet resident of this package — Maneesh Sharma’s directorial debut, Ranveer Singh’s acting debut, Anushka Sharma’s breakout role, Salim-Sulaiman’s criminally catchy soundtrack, and editor Namrata Rao’s pre-Kahaani mastery of montages.

What Came First

It’s tempting to treat Band Baaja Baaraat as an era-shifting hit, a Yash Raj Films (YRF) gamechanger, or the spiritual ancestor of the wedding-planner template of Made in Heaven. The story of Bittoo Sharma and Shruti Kakkar remains remarkable for its gender balance, the subversion of the slacker-saved-by-selfless-woman trope, the musicality of its energy, and the fluid staging of West Delhi as a character trait. But just as it takes a village to raise a child, it took a genre of community to craft the success of this film. Back then, the cinema of middle-class mobility was at its peak in Bollywood.

Band Baaja Baaraat felt like the culmination of a genre that reflected the ambitions of a young India no longer shackled by conventional aspiration and blueprint careers.

Early on, a posh wedding planner calls out for an employee named ‘Dibakar’, a nod to the director that triggered this movement with gems like Khosla Ka Ghosla! and Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!. Mostly, though, BBB felt like the lovechild of two particular YRF productions: the cultural lineage of writer Habib Faisal’s directorial debut Do Dooni Chaar combined with the self-employed grit of Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year. While many of these movies had found critical acclaim and a cult following over time, they were far from box-office ringers in the late 2000s. You can tell that Band Baaja Baaraat is a producer-calibrated version of the titles. That’s not to say it’s compromised in any capacity; it’s just designed to be more commercially accessible. It’s a rare mainstream update that retains the soul of its lesser-watched predecessors.

For instance, the sharp entrepreneurial drama of Rocket Singh is custom-fitted with a rom-com angle. Everything is a little more glamorous. An underdog’s coming-of-age conflict is replaced by the more orthodox complications of business partners who grow feelings for each other. There’s a bit of Wake Up Sid in their friends-with-emotional-benefits dynamic: a go-getter girl and drifter boy course-correcting one another. A Mumbai-based computer company is replaced by a visually diverse profession that offers a license for colour, song-and-dance gigs and multiple class settings. Some of the memorable Rocket Singh characters reappear in not-so-different avatars: Neeraj Sood as a veteran vendor, Manish Choudhary as a pompous client. Shruti’s declaration to an ex-boss — “We will meet in the market” — is a direct shoutout to the universe they share.

The biggest sign of this formula expansion emerges right off the bat. One of Bittoo’s first scenes features him crashing a wedding for a freebie dinner with two hostel friends — a moment that immediately invokes 3 Idiots-sized adjustments. It becomes clear that this film is searching for a larger lens to project the smaller stories that YRF was already telling. The love story is turned into the foreground, not the backdrop it usually tends to be in social commentary-driven vehicles and entrepreneurial dramas. For a change, it’s the right kind of evolution. The tense relationship between the two young leads seamlessly informs the challenges of starting and running a scale-driven business. (Their ‘Shaadi Mubarak’ office, at least on the outside, looks like the cyber cafe that Shah Rukh Khan’s Gaurav Chandna runs in Maneesh Sharma’s Fan years later.) Even the entitlement of the cute and guileless boy panicking at first — only to want her when he realises she’s planning a future with someone else — is the narrative ancestor of many of the Ranbir Kapoor heroes that followed.

Budget and Intent

The decision to base the whole conflict around one night of passion is fascinating. Shruti refuses to be a crossed-connection tragic story after that, instead unleashing her North-flavoured ego to destroy him rather than silently pining for them. (The roles were reversed in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil where the hero’s tantrum defined the story). The gap between a man’s denial and a woman’s acceptance is cleverly used in a film that finds the sweet spot between two genres. The fate of their company is inextricably linked to their juvenile exploration of love. Neither of them is equipped to deal with the consequences of their personalities beyond the work it inspires.

The reason Band Baaja Baaraat doesn’t feel like one of those homage-filled, meta-Bollywood odes is because its riffs are internal. It’s not for show. It learns from its elders and still manages to be its own person. If anything, it legitimised their heritage and played a role in the slow-burning popularity of the Dibakar Banerjee movies, the niche Rocket Singhs and Do Dooni Chaars. So many of the city’s establishment shots — where we see two lives on a collision course in a Raj-and-Simran-styled template — feature the Delhi metro and other modes of transport, literalising the mobility that the story goes on to excavate. In these portions, Bittoo seems to be the guy who’s idolised flimsy campus movies, while Shruti is the one creating her own narrative. That he hitches a ride on her wagon before she begins to respect — and therefore love — him is one of the film’s many little touches that do not get drowned out by the noisy exterior. It resists the temptation of exotic destination weddings, staying rooted in the brackets of a region that equates the spectacle of a wedding with the illusion of prosperity and societal value. It’s no coincidence that Sharma’s Fan (2016), his most ambitious film, lost steam the second it left local shores in its second half.

Band Baaja Baaraat is also immensely rewatchable, because it introduced the restless stardom of Ranveer Singh at a time when the Bombay industry was more welcoming of outside talent. Most new voices arrived with the hope of being launched by a legacy production house, yet there were directors like Anurag Kashyap, Sriram Raghavan and Vishal Bhardwaj who challenged celebrityhood with the clinicality of craft. As Bittoo, Singh looked shapeless in the best way possible. Before entering the race of next-gen superstars, both Sharma and him manufactured a snappy-Delhi-romcom oeuvre so effective that it sprung several pretenders and lesser imitations over the coming decade. It was as if Band Baaja Baaraat was both Frankenstein and the evocative creature brought to life from the debris of previous aspirants.

Fifteen years later, today, I’m certain that a movie like this would be oblivious to its own derived originality. We live in a vastly changed India, one where marriage stories have acquired the artifice of lavish wedding celebrations. Films like these, then, become more than a flashback. They’re a reminder that budget and intent are strong-minded lovers whose compatibility is to be earned. That the mixing of business and pleasure is not a toxic cocktail: a first-time ‘event’ is not possible without florists, caterers and musicians working together to prove a point. Would Bittoo and Shruti have lasted as a couple? Probably not. But their legacy — and work ethic — lives on every time a seemingly formulaic sleeper-hit captures the chaotic heart of a nation.

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