Ranbir’s urban bourgeoise characters also harked back to the concerns of our classical heroes – but this time around, in the face of rising concerns of cultural violence being faced by millions of global, yet largely rootless immigrants. These films, which incidentally come in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis, pointed to the making of yet another generation of movers and shakers who were not scared of the travails of emotional displacement. Especially one that came at the cost of a dissonating physical displacement across the borders of cities and countries. The West was only a contingent location, a promise of sorts. The final point of arrival however almost becomes secondary to the process of the arrival itself. Moreover, it is the need for this arrival – only made possible through a literal and metaphoric displacement – that brings about an eventual realisation of the true self. This meant creating and destroying relationships constantly with the spaces that we come to inhabit around us. In Wake Up Sid, the home that Bombay offered Sid was a bubble that he must break himself to enter the larger urban isolation that the city offers to its outsiders. It is through seeing the city as the peering force of cruelty and loneliness, that it is possible for Sid to finally reintegrate himself within the fabric of the city, and find a home in it. Similarly for Bunny, the realisation of his true self comes not only through his interaction with Naina but also through his recalibration of the relationship he shares with the spaces around him. The mountains bring him heartbreak (the implausibility of a future with Naina and the news of a parent’s passing), the urban metropolis of Paris brings him isolation and even more loneliness, while the streets of Jaipur, away from his hometown yet in closer proximity to his roots makes him realise the need to anchor himself even at the cost of chasing his dreams.
The geographic mobility of his self is given new heights in the third film Ranbir proceeded to do with Dharma Productions in 2015. This time directed by Karan Johar in Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, Kapoor essayed the role of Ayaan, an NRI in London. His fatal love for Alizeh brings him to Lucknow, a space where his violently aggressive claims to an unrequited love results in yet another exit from the country. But this time round, he finds himself not in London, but in Vienna where he comes to pursue the mysterious Urdu poetess Saba. It is here finally, a good half-decade after the release of Wake Up Sid that Dharma with its leading man Ranbir not only made an older-woman-younger-man romance a plot point, but also fully explored the deeply sexual nature of their shared relationship. Ayaan and Saba’s relationship was one that was sparked by an instant, unexplainable desire. While the two did find comfort of completely different natures in each other’s arms, the sexual passion was something that was made to stay in the foregrounding principles of their relationship.
When Ayaan’s pursuit of Saba doesn’t lead to any fruition, he comes back to London as he emerges as a bruised singer. In this context, London becomes a negotiating space for conflicting desires. His desire for Alizeh and the much older Saba leads to a crossfire that is almost reminiscent of a singular tussle between two cultural extremes. In the end, he is grappling with a personality that embodies the contradictions of his desires which eventually comes to mirror the immigrant experience itself. It is most definitely an obsessive, overpowering passion – the kind which has caused the fall of our greatest literary heroes from Heathcliff in the moors to Gatsby in Upper East Egg. It is also a desirous passion we have seen on our screens – ardently portrayed by Shah Rukh himself in Devdas (2002) – where his unconsumate erotic desire triggers an immediate chain of self-destruction. Interestingly, in the climax of that film too, Devdas’s death is deferred till his travel and arrival at Paro’s mansion. But here, the desire mutates into an artistic output of sorts. The death drive doesn’t overpower the eros and there is no grand narrative of self-destruction. It is a settlement that he must come to terms with on his own and one that he will be able to make sense of through the aid of the art he produces.
In many ways, the three films, therefore, under the banner of Dharma Productions form nothing short of a spiritual trilogy. With Ranbir Kapoor, the scion of the Kapoor dynasty and the son of the formidable Rishi Kapoor himself, these films offered a new way of looking at the leading man in our movies. The motivations driving the man weren’t necessarily for purposes of exacting familial revenge. Cities, which had for the longest time been the keeper of desires, private and public, made us question the role they played in our stories, and Kapoor helped us arrive at the answers.