THR India's 25 in 25: 'Monsoon Wedding' and The Season of Truths
The Hollywood Reporter India picks the 25 best Indian films of the 21st century. On the list is Mira Nair's 'Monsoon Wedding', where an on-screen celebration exposed the undercurrents of class, patriarchy, and fragile forgiveness in modern India.
In Monsoon Wedding, director Mira Nair turns a bustling upper-middle-class Delhi wedding into a microcosm of contemporary India, where tradition, secrecy, and modern aspiration marry beneath a canopy of marigolds and monsoon skies.
The Verma family prepares for the arranged marriage of Aditi (Vasundhara Das) to Hemant (Parvin Dabas), a computer engineer based in Houston, even as Aditi wrestles with her affair with her married boss Vikram (Sameer Arya) and the guilt that shadows her compliance with convention. Around her, Lalit Verma (Naseeruddin Shah), the jittery patriarch, struggles with financial strain and the impossible task of holding together a family that threatens to come apart with every ritual rehearsal, while his wife Pimmi (Lillete Dubey) tries to keep up the façade of domestic harmony.
The film weaves in a tender subplot between the boisterous, middle-class wedding planner P. K. Dubey (Vijay Raaz) and Alice (Tillotama Shome), the Verma’s house help — an unlikely love story that cuts across class and language barriers and, in its simplicity, mirrors the emotional chaos of those it quietly serves. Yet beneath the laughter, the dancing, and the incessant rain lies a darker undercurrent: Ria (Shefali Shah), Aditi’s cousin, exposes long-suppressed childhood abuse by the family’s wealthy relative Tej (Rajat Kapoor), forcing Lalit to confront a moral reckoning that challenges his loyalty, privilege, and patriarchal conditioning.
Nair’s handheld camerawork, combined with Declan Quinn’s naturalistic cinematography and composer Mychael Danna’s lilting score, amplifies the sense of a city alive with contradictions — where the sacred and the profane, the joyous and the traumatic, coexist within the same courtyard.
By the time the monsoon finally arrives, flooding the wedding canopy in a symbolic deluge, the rain becomes not merely a narrative device but a purifying act, washing away illusion, shame, and the burden of silence. Monsoon Wedding thus transcends its festive premise, becoming a film about catharsis and confrontation, where family love endures not through denial but through the courage to speak and the grace to forgive. With it, Nair also proves how humour is always a potent tool for delivering punch-in-the-gut truths that continue to haunt society, thereby making it a cult classic like no other.
Tillotama Shome on Acting in Monsoon Wedding
It was actor Shome’s debut outing on the big screen as the gentle, quiet Alice, who glides through the pandemonium like a fly on the wall. Her character of the Verma family’s house help was more than just an onlooker — she was the spiritual foil for the boisterous others who refused to turn inward, caught up in their performances of life.
She moves through the crowded Delhi home like a shadow, cleaning, arranging, serving, and yet she is more than just a witness; she sees everything: the secrets, the hypocrisies, the tenderness that hides beneath the noise. When she slips into Aditi’s room and drapes herself in a bright sari, trying on the bride’s jewellery and smiling faintly at her reflection, the scene crystallises her longing — not merely for love or luxury, but for visibility, dignity, and the brief illusion of belonging to the world she serves.
It put the actor on a journey like no other. “Alice placed me on a road paved with a certain passion for telling stories that are deeply local and global at the same time,” she says. “That’s a thrill. It was an invitation to be porous and yet allow my identity to not be fixed.”
The role, however, came with its unique challenges in the days ahead. “It’s been 25 years since the film, and because of how iconic it became, I kept getting cast to represent a certain class. And that was tiring,” Shome explains. However, in the last four years she has had the chance to break out of Alice’s shadows, but even then, the actor “wouldn’t have it any other way, if [she] could choose”.
She quotes verses from the British band Smokie’s song to sum up her relationship with the character: “Oh, I don't know why she's leaving, or where she's gonna go / I guess she's got her reasons, but I just don't want to know / 'Cause for 24 years I've been living next door to Alice...”
Through Alice, Nair makes visible the women who polish other people’s dreams while their own remain half-imagined, and in doing so, transforms a seemingly peripheral character into one of the film’s most quietly radical presences.