On Hum Aapke Hain Kaun

In 1994, Rajshri Productions released a film called Hum Aapke Hain Kaun! (Sooraj Barjatya), which turned out to be one of the biggest blockbusters of its time. This film was a remake of another Barjatya production called Nadiya Ke Paar, which released in 1982. The latter had the same storyline, but all resemblences ended here. Apart from the story, both films are widely different from each other in terms of treatment and structure. It is this change and its implications that I would like to concentrate on in this blog.

Hum Aapke... released at a time in Hindi commercial cinema when cinegoers were being fed on a constant dose of rewokings of the "angry young man" films of the 70s, rich-boy-poor-girl romances and other dregs of the formula film. Barring a few films, nothing very innovative was happening on the commercial film scene in Hindi cinema. The whole-hearted acceptance that Hum Aapke... got made it possible for a different kind of formula film to emerge - the wholesome family entertainer, complete with popular songs, candyfloss situations and stars who also brought home a conformist moral message of family bonding. This film has not influenced its successors in terms of innovation in storyline or charactertisation, but in terms of the social and inter-personal milieu that it depicts.

Most films of the 1980s and early '90s concentrated on the rich-poor class divide. The rich class consisted of the oppressors - powerful because they had money and were willing to do anything to protect it and make more of it. In terms of morals, they were ready to stretch their limits. The poor class on the other hand, was deprived, but morally upright. Any mingling of the two classes by marriage was strongly opposed by both sides. And here stepped in the main conflict in the film - a clash of the classes.

Hum Aapke... pretty much altered the kind of visibility that the poor class had in films, reducing them to unimportant minor characters or making them vanish altogether. It represented a homogeneous world - inhabited only by the well-off, who were no more shown as morally lacking in comparison to the poor. They, in fact, became the keepers of morality, reinforcing the theme of an ideal and complete family.

This kind of homogeneity still exists in most films of today, for example, in films of Karan Johar and Farhan Akhtar, where the poor have very less representation or are not visible at all. When such a change takes place in terms of the world that such films depict, it also changes the element of conflict in the film. There are no villians - evil is not personified in a single person or a group of people (putting actors like Gulshan Grover and Amrish Puri out of work!) - the villian here is simply circumstance. There is no "clash" between two dissimilar worlds, and only the presence of money makes this possible. And now that we don't have to worry about where the next meal comes from, we can freely (and guiltlessly) pay more attention to our love lives and our relationships with our parents. So now the conflict has become interpersonal and introspective, rather than social.

Of course, the film left behind many obvious remnants - like the mandolin/violin totting hero of future Aditya Chopra films or the fascination for showing North Indian wedding rituals in great detail. Most Karan Johar films pay explicit tributes to Barjatya (the dumb-charades scene in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai or Hrithik Roshan singing "Wah wah Ramji..." in Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham).

It is interesting to note here that the Hum Aapke's orginal version was set in a village, not in a palatial bungalow. Would the same have worked in 1994?