So much of art and literature is from what Laura Mulvey calls the “male gaze”. Arts, especially visual art, is narrated predominantly from the male perspective, for other men. Bollywood is guilty of this too, which is why the hunt for a well-written, believable female character coping with heartbreak is proving to be an impossible quest. I am reduced to subtext and reading between the lines, but I remind myself that nearly all feminist reading of canonical literature was done much like how I am doing now, and I plow on.
Rab ne bana di jodi is a very typical example of a “male gaze” film. The female protagonist undergoes horrific trauma—the loss of her fiance and her father within a span of a few days and being left completely alone in the world. But as viewers, we see next to nothing of the impact this has on her, because the film is overwhelmingly about the hero’s quest.
Plot summary
Surinder Sahni, a shy, unglamorous middle-aged man who works a desk job for the state electricity board, is invited to attend the wedding of his college professor’s daughter, and when he goes there, he meets the extroverted livewire Taani. It is love at first sight for him, but unfortunately, Taani is the bride whose wedding he has been invited to attend. Immediately after Taani’s introduction, we are told that the groom, along with his entire wedding party, has passed away in a road accident. The professor is so shocked that he has a heart attack, and passes away soon too. On his deathbed, however, he extracts a promise from Suri that he will marry his daughter Taani, because he is worried she will be all alone in the world after his passing. Suri and Taani marry, and he brings her back to his ancestral home in Amritsar, where he lives by himself.
Suri tries his best to make Taani happy in her new surroundings, but is unable to be very expressive or comforting, given his awkward persona. Taani tells him that she is indebted to him for giving her a home, and that she will do everything she can to be a good housewife and make a comfortable home for him, but she can never love him. She tells him that her fiance was the love of her life, and with his passing, she has no more love left to give. Accordingly, she cooks and cleans every day, packing lunches for Suri and and playing hostess when his friends come over. But the couple has next to nothing to say to one another, and they never bond.
One day, while out grocery shopping, Taani sees a billboard advertising a dance class. She asks Suri if she can attend it, telling him she used to be a passionate dancer once. Suri agrees and gives her money for fees. Noticing Taani’s continued unhappiness and craving for his love to be returned, Suri decides to remold his personality to resemble a “cool guy”, akin to the Bollywood heroes Taani likes. He enlists his hairdresser friend Bobby’s help, and gets a new haircut and wardrobe. He then secretly joins Taani’s dance class, under the alias “Raj”. Raj and Taani are paired up for a competition due to take place at the end of the class.
Taani is initially irritated by Raj’s loud, cocky personality, but gradually begins to warm up to him as they spend more time together. Raj makes no effort to hide that he is in love with Taani, but she demurs, telling him she is married. Raj claims he loves without expectation, even the expectation that his love be returned. One evening, Taani confesses how emotionally alone she feels, and Raj asks her to elope with him, abandoning her loveless marriage. Taani agrees, despite not being completely sure of her feelings towards Raj.
Suri is devastated, but refuses to tell Taani he is Raj, believing that Taani deserves a chance to find herself a love and a lover like Raj—bold, colourful and exciting. He prepares to leave Amritsar so Taani can be free of the marriage. Before he leaves, the day of the dance competition, he takes Taani to a gurudwara, on the pretext of praying for her success in the competition, but really to pray for her happiness in her new life. While they are at the gurudwara, Taani has an epiphany about Suri’s quiet, solid love for her, and that she has started to love him back too. She goes to the dance competition, and tells Raj just before their performance that she cannot elope with him because she is in love with her husband. Raj is in tears, and Taani fully expects that he will not join her on stage. She is just about to walk off, when Suri joins her, back in his usual appearance. They win the competition, and begin a new, happy life together.
Taani’s heartbreak
How did I even find any material to write about in a movie so hyperfocused on Suri and his dilemmas? It was a task, but to its credit, this movie does not refuse to show us how affected Taani is by her great loss. It is just brushed aside as soon as the plot, more correctly Suri’s plot, picks up pace.
We cannot separate Taani’s grief at losing her fiance from her grief over losing her father. They both happen in the span of a few days, as does her sudden new role as a wife to a man she barely knows, and a move to a new city. It is little wonder Taani seems to dissociate completely for most of the movie. In her first few days at Suri’s house, she stays locked up in her room, catatonic with grief. It is not established how long she stays this way, but she eventually snaps. Her emotions are so overwhelming that she cannot deal with them. She thus tries her best to suppress them as best as she can, and tries to lose herself in what she believes to be her “role”. 
In a very telling montage, she frantically dusts, cleans, cooks, frowning with the effort of simply concentrating on the task at hand and not allowing her mind to drift into dark places. She forces herself to perform as a “good wife”, but she is not lying to Suri when she says she can do no more—Taani is dead inside.
The movie portrays Taani’s gradual revival of self begin when she joins the dance class, but there is reason to doubt this narrative. This is from Suri’s perspective, and he would think a reverting to former hobbies, along with being in the company of Raj, was what was conducive to the emergence of Taani’s real self. Recovery is so much more jagged and complicated than this, however. Beginning to show interest in formerly beloved activities does not indicate that one has healed fully. This is painfully evident in Taani’s continued apathy—she does feel pleasure and annoyance with Raj, but he is still unable to touch her on a deeper level; she tells him as much in response to his heartfelt proposal—”mujhe kis mein rab nahi dikhta” [I see the divine in no one].
Her inner core is still a tightly coiled bundle of unresolved grief, rage and abandonment. This comes to the fore every time Taani is required to plumb greater depths of emotion than the shallow pools she maintains all her relationships at. Her response every time a raw nerve is touched, no matter what the event, is not exhilaration or joy or fear—she breaks down in furious, hysterical tears. For Taani, all deeply felt emotion is intense grief and rage, because there is so much of it suppressed within her. There is no room for anything else until she first deals with this.
Until the climax, however, Taani cannot muster the strength to do so. Her need to simply skate over emotional states causes a dissociative apathy in her. Raj and his manic energy help her to bury her emotions better, so she favours his company. When he tells her to run away with him, she agrees, despite having known and felt deep love once and recognising that she did not feel the same way now. Being with Raj is constant flurry, noise and movement, and it is what helps her shut out the demons in her head. She is apathetic to any real consequences, other than this.
Taani’s abrupt snapping out of it to recognise Suri as her true love, in this context, is inexplicable and bizarre. But then again, this is Suri’s story, narrated by him. Taani’s emotional journey must necessarily give way to Suri’s tale of winning requited love—the triumphant lover cannot allow detours and distractions to insinuate that anything other than him had a part to play in his lady love’s happiness.
The takeaway
Taani’s behaviour throughout the movie was so much in line with the symptoms of a depressive episode, coupled with dissociation, and the ending, which completely brushed aside everything that had happened for the past 3 hours, was frustrating. As I type this, I am already imagining MRA howls of how I didn’t get the movie, and that what changed Taani’s course was recognising Suri’s true love.
As someone who has been deeply in love (it was as true as it could be, too), and has coped with more than one Taani-like depressive episode, I find it hard to swallow the “true true love triumphs over everything, even depression and heartbreak” line fed to us in innumerable films. See, when we love somebody, we give it everything we’ve got; to us, it is true. Even if a real, Yashraj-certified lover were to come by now, I wouldn’t have the energy to give anything back, or even acknowledge this person. I am, like Taani said, spent. I feel like I have no love to give anymore, not even to myself. Coupled with depression, this is an especially hard one to take. Nothing makes depression just go away, not even the truest of loves.
But coming back to just the heartbreak angle of it—I was grateful that some aspects were portrayed very tellingly. The first few days of absolute catatonia. The throwing yourself into anything and everything, because the burden of grief is so great that you simply cannot cope. The way the grief leaks out of you anyway, in sudden unpredictable outbursts. The apathy and the recklessness which comes after many long days spent immersed in grief, which leads so many of us into rebounds. And the finding out that nothing, not even another relationship, has erased the ache.
I know that I will not look up in a gurudwara and suddenly have an epiphany. I am left instead, with this line from this movie’s most beautiful song, which captures the helplessness of love so well:
“Tujh mein rab dikhta hai.
Yaara, main kya karun?
Sajde sar jhukta hai.
Yaar, main kya karun?”
[I see the divine in you.
My love, what am I to do?
My head bows down in reverence, only to you.
My love, what am I to do?]
You were the only one for me— earthly and divine, my past, present and future, in this world and the next. And now that you are gone, what am I to do, my love?
This is where he meets Geet, his loud, talkative, oversharing co-passenger. He truly gets to know her, however, when he gets off at a station, again without knowing which one it is. The train has begun to pull out of the station, and Geet assumes he is being left behind. She gets off to alert him, but in the process, ends up missing the train herself. She forces Aditya to find a way to ensure she reaches her destination, considering she missed the train because she was trying to help him. Aditya finds her a taxi and drops her off at the next station, but Geet narrowly misses the train again. Aditya and Geet are forced to make the rest of the journey by road. Gradually, Geet’s vivacious personality grows on Aditya and he finds himself coming out of his shell. When they finally reach Bhatinda, where Geet was travelling to, she invites him to stay a few days at her family home, as a token of her thanks. Aditya complies, and spends a happy couple of days socialising with her family. But one night, he is abruptly woken up by Geet, who declares she is running away to be with her boyfriend Anshuman in Shimla.
She is considerably changed—her verve and zest for life has vanished. Anshuman’s rejection and her broken dreams have reduced her to a shell of her former self. Aditya is saddened, and resolves to restore her to her former self. He persuades her to return to her family, but just before they are scheduled to leave for Bhatinda, Anshuman turns up at the hotel where they are staying, and apologises for his behaviour over the past 9 months. Geet is confused over whether to accept his apology, but Aditya, realising she still has feelings for him, tells her to give him a second chance.
Our sadness deepens when we see the impact the loss of her dreams has left on Geet. Geet never describes Anshuman’s personality as such; her thoughts are completely on the future they will create together. When she is rejected, she is rudderless. She was so sure that her life would pan out a certain way, and had never even thought to account for what she would do if it did not. We do not see Geet mourn the loss of Anshuman as a person; what she has lost is herself. Or more accurately, what she envisioned as her future self. In a very telling line, she asks Aditya who the woman is he likes and is doing so much for. She no longer knows who she is, when she finds that she is no longer Anshuman’s girlfriend, his future wife, the owner and doer of the domesticity she was so sure of having.
The Bollywood Guide to a Broken Heart 