Valentine's Day: How Hindi cinema gave us a wrong blueprint of love for decades

Growing up in a small town in north India, love was never something you spoke of openly. It was something you inferred, something you caught glimpses of in the way an older cousin held on to a letter too long before burning it, or in the way the son of a shopkeeper or a neighbouring school teacher hovered around the girls’ college a little more than necessary. Love belonged — or that’s what we thought — to Hindi movies, to men who shouted their feelings into the air, sometimes in song, sometimes in impassioned monologues. It belonged to declarations at railway stations, to heroes who stood in mustard fields with outstretched arms, waiting for destiny (read the love of their lives) to come running into their embrace. Love belonged to women who responded with soft, poetic defiance — who looked away but meant yes, who fought back but longed to surrender.

On-screen, love was a fever dream of urgency, of rapturous background scores, of stolen glances that led to marriages, abductions, or heartbreak in three hours flat. It seemed inevitable, as if everyone’s fate hinged on finding that one perfect person. But in the real world, love was nothing like this. It was something far more fragile, easily lost, and rarely declared with the certainty that films insisted upon. The truth is cinema engineered, manipulated, and sold the idea of love in rhapsodic loops. As the grand architect of our romantic imagination, it showed us a vision of love so exaggerated, so unattainable, that reality itself paled in comparison. It chronicled love as a preordained spectacle — delirious in its highs, ruinous in its lows, and wholly indifferent to the nuances of real relationships.

One of the most persistent lies cinema tells us is that love arrives as a singular, predestined event. That there is one person and that we will know them when he/she arrives. This belief makes for a great film — there is nothing more intoxicating than watching two people crash into each other with the certainty of a cosmic script, perhaps approved by the gods we worship. But in real life, love does not always announce itself with such clarity. There is no background score, no divine sign, no clairvoyance that tells us this, here, is it. Instead, there is choice. There is patience. There is the work of recognising someone not as a missing piece, but as a person with their own jagged edges, their own untold stories.

Cinema has primed us for an all-or-nothing kind of love that burns bright or not at all. But love, in its truest form, is often quieter, less cinematic. It is built in the mundane, in the way someone remembers your tea order, in the kindnesses exchanged over years. The small, steady gestures that never make it to the screen because they lack the spectacle of grand romantic acts.

For decades, Hindi cinema taught us that love had to be hard-won, that suffering was the price of romance, and that perseverance — no matter how irrational — was proof of its worth. If you loved someone, you had to fight for them, chase after them, break rules for them. This blueprint shaped not just how we consumed love stories but how we wrote them into our own lives. Yash Chopra, the godfather of Bollywood romance, gave us an entirely different language of love — of rain-soaked silks and slow-burning glances, of longing that stretched across time (Kabhi Kabhie, 1976). His love stories were built on yearning, on separation as proof of devotion. The lovers in his films rarely came together without suffering first — because real love, in his universe, was measured by the depths of sacrifice. And in that suffering, we were taught to romanticise waiting, to believe that love was meant to be endured as much as enjoyed.

In the 1990s, films like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (Yash Chopra, 1995), Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Karan, Johar, 1998), and Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 1999) all adhered to this doctrine. Love was dramatic, grandiloquent, worth every heartbreak, every separation, every familial opposition. It was a pursuit, a test of devotion where one had to prove, through pain and patience, that they deserved their beloved. It was never a quiet, mutual discovery — it was always an obstacle course. Take DDLJ, for example. Raj (Shah Rukh Khan) spends a significant portion of the film trying to earn Simran’s (Kajol) hand by enduring her father’s disapproval rather than treating her as someone with full agency over her choices.

The film’s core message — that love, no matter how passionate, must be legitimised through parental approval — is presented as a radical act of romantic sincerity. In reality, it simply reinforces the idea that love is incomplete without external validation. Kuch Kuch Hota Hai fared no better. It suggested that love was something that could be earned over time, that a woman had to change to be worthy of a man’s love. Anjali (Kajol) only becomes Rahul’s (Shah Rukh Khan) romantic ideal once she trades her tomboyishness for sarees and long hair. The transformation isn’t just physical — it is an erasure of identity. The underlying message? You are not loved for who you are, but for who you become in the process of earning love.

Kuch Kuch Hota Hai suggested that love was something that could be earned over time, that a woman had to change to be worthy of a man’s love. 

The 2000s continued to romanticise struggle and sacrifice. In Mohabbatein (Aditya Chopra, 2000), love was rebellion. In Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (Johar, 2001), love was a test of endurance, where years of separation from family were mere milestones on the road to an eventual reunion. Even in Imtiaz Ali’s Jab We Met (2007), which was refreshingly modern in its treatment of romance, Aditya (Shahid Kapoor) still needed to suffer before he could be worthy of love. The inherent idea remained unchanged: love isn’t about compatibility or communication; it is about proving oneself.

In Imtiaz Ali’s Jab We Met, which was refreshingly modern in its treatment of romance, Aditya (Shahid Kapoor) still needed to suffer before he could be worthy of love. 

But then, something began to shift by the end of the aughts (2000s). Bollywood, as Hindi cinema is widely known, started questioning its own mythology. One of the earliest Hindi films that did it very well was Ayan Mukerji’s Wake Up Sid (2009) that dismantled Bollywood’s grandiose notions of love by showing it as something that grows in companionship rather than being declared in dramatic gestures.

Wake Up Sid dismantled Bollywood’s grandiose notions of love. 

The relationship between Sid (Ranbir Kapoor) and Aisha (Konkona Sen Sharma) develops organically, shaped by shared moments and mutual respect. Aisha isn’t a manic pixie dream girl designed to change Sid — she has her own ambitions, her own journey, and she refuses to be his caretaker. Unlike the love stories of the ’90s and early 2000s, where women had to mould themselves to be ‘worthy’ of love, Wake Up Sid lets Aisha remain independent, and Sid’s love is tied not to changing her but to changing himself.

Similarly, Imtiaz Ali’s Tamasha (2015) deconstructed the romantic hero, presenting a protagonist who was trapped in a narrative of love he no longer understood. Johar’s Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (2016) subverted the idea of unreciprocated love as noble, showing instead how it could be suffocating and self-destructive. Love was no longer just about longing and pursuit — it was about recognition, acceptance, and sometimes, heartbreak without resolution. However, even as some films in recent years moved towards realism, others continue to stick to more dangerous ideals. Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Kabir Singh (2019) turned toxic possessiveness into passion. The film glorified a protagonist who exerted control over the woman he loved, mistaking aggression for intensity. Vanga’s next outing, Animal (2023), took this further, presenting a hyper-violent hero whose love was defined by dominance.

Animal presented a hyper-violent hero whose love was defined by dominance.

In the operatic descent into a fractured father-son relationship, Ranbir Kapoor sheds his romantic hero skin for something more feral, more unhinged. His character, Vijay, is both a lover and a monster, who swings between tenderness and carnage, his devotion to his father (Anil Kapoor) mutating into a pathological need for approval. What Animal captures, with all the rawness of Vanga’s signature storytelling, is the way love — especially male love — is so often articulated through violence. In its chaotic, testosterone-drenched world, care is not spoken but demonstrated through bloodshed, and vulnerability is a weakness that must be drowned in rage.

It seems that in Hindi films, the message has shifted from love is struggle to love is possession, a dangerous evolution of an already problematic template. But even here, Bollywood’s love stories are slowly evolving. Scores of films like Gully Boy (2019) and Gehraiyaan (2022) have begun exploring love that is rooted in mutual respect, vulnerability, and the unglamorous aspects of intimacy. The grandiosity is fading, replaced by stories that acknowledge that love is not a conquest, nor a battle to be won. Love, for once, is being allowed to breathe.

Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy gives Murad Ahmed (Ranveer Singh) and Safeena Firdausi (Alia Bhatt) the space to be their own people. Their love lies in understanding and shared struggles. Safeena is fiercely independent, unapologetically ambitious, and Murad never tries to shrink her fire — he admires it. Their relationship is all about standing beside each other while pursuing individual dreams. Even in moments of jealousy or tension, Gully Boy resists the urge to make love a battlefield. Safeena asserts her boundaries, Murad makes mistakes, but there is no manipulation, no possessiveness masquerading as passion. Instead, love is a source of strength, a space where both can be vulnerable without losing themselves.

Shakun Batra’s Gehraiyaan, on the other hand, exposes love’s messiness, its unspoken resentments, and the burden of emotional baggage. It acknowledges the uncomfortable truth that love is often shaped by circumstance, past trauma, and moral ambiguity. The affair between Alisha (Deepika Padukone) and Zain (Siddhant Chaturvedi) is complex, flawed, and deeply human.

Shakun Batra’s Gehraiyaan exposes love’s messiness, its unspoken resentments, and the burden of emotional baggage.

Alisha isn’t looking to ‘complete’ someone or be ‘completed.’ She wants escape, agency, a way out of the cycles she feels trapped in. The film offers a rare, unfiltered look at love as something that can be liberating, destructive, or both at once.

The love stories we grew up with shaped us. They taught us to long for drama and to believe that love without struggle or sacrifice was not love at all. But as Hindi cinema evolves, so does our understanding of love. Perhaps we are finally learning that love does not need to be fought for. Sometimes, love is simply a hand held, a conversation without subtext, an affection that does not need to be shouted into the sky. Or spouted at a railway station. Or crooned in a mustard field.