Twenty-five years ago, when Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (QSQT) was first released, I didn’t see it in the grandeur of a cinema hall. As an eight-year-old movie addict, marinating in a healthy mix of Jeetendra-Sridevi potboilers and Conan the Barbarian films, I was indifferent to the beguiling charms of a chocolate boy man romancing a somewhat dumpy girl.
But I had an older sister in her teens and she watched Chitrahaar on Doordarshan, every Wednesday. “Papa kehte hai…,” Aamir Khan crooned in our boxy Weston TV, and something happened to her. I could smell madness, the kind that’s only perceptive to younger brothers. I could have told my parents, but they seemed to have bitten the dust too. Eyes glazed with Aamir love. It was like a zombie attack.
Months later, when a pirated video cassette of the video was acquired at faraway Kohima where I lived (there were no cinema halls then) and my vote to watch Tohfa for the third time was vetoed out unanimously, I finally saw QSQT. The credits rolled and the prologue of the film was played out. The back story of the feuds between the families – somebody’s sister being betrayed by somebody’s brother. Yawn. Where were the dhinchaak songs? Where were the mousumbis for the lead pair to roll on?
But then things changed. Dalip Tahil picked up the gun to shoot the errant lover and the camera froze on him. Even an eight-year-old could predict that this is a very ominous start to a love story. I was hooked. By the time Aamir Khan was introduced in “Papa Kehte Hain”, we were transported to the polite (and obviously fictionalised) world of the Rajputs in which people referred to each other as aap and hum and maintained lihaaz and adab with military precision.
Khan was the quintessential reluctant rebel, steeped in culture but governed by his desires. Juhi Chawla, with her flouncy ghagra and passive but assertive demeanor was an early predecessor to the sexually liberated Bollywood heroines of today. She wore what she wanted (which Delhi girl of the late 1980s wore ghagras to college?) and initiated a relationship with the man she desired.
Their chemistry was established with carefully-written easy banter and an assortment of ‘awww’-inspiring situations that were so unlike the befuddled concept of romance in the 1980s (i.e.hero and heroine lock horns and then develop feelings for each other).
And the songs of QSQT (which gave birth to careers of the likes of Udit Narayan, Alka Yagnik and Anand Milind) were beautifully integrated with the film. So beautifully that it is difficult to tell the dialogues from the lyrics. “Ghazab ka hai din, socho zara,” rued Juhi. “Akele hai toh kya gum hai, chahe toh humare bas mein kya nahi, bas ek zara, saath ho tera,” said Aamir. No otherworldly allusions, no chaand, no taarein, just conversations between two young lovers. Lyricist Majrooh Sultanpuri did something very few song writers can achieve, he gave us insights to the minds of Raj and Rashmi (Khan and Chawla respectively). He told us about their motivations. The songs predicted the fateful moment when Raj will plunge the dagger in his own stomach, for you see, he had no choice. This is why, the tragedy of seeing these two beautifully fleshed out characters die in front of our eyes, was a perfect example of cinematic catharsis.
I have watched QSQT innumerable times ever since. I have literally grown up with it. As a grown-up, I realised how it surreptitiously changed the idiom of Hindi cinema. How post-QSQT, in an effort to replicate the Raj-Rashmi romance, filmmakers started actually fleshing out their lead characters (case in point being Madhuri Dixit and Aamir Khan’s Dil).
I realised that the Raj and Rashmi romance, the way they spoke and behaved, the way they were true to their times inspired generations of filmmakers to humanise their protagonists. I also obsessively followed the careers of many associated with the film. Khan’s meteoric rise is a part of film lore but Chawla’s emergence as one of the leading actresses of the 1990s is no less impressive.
Director Mansoor Khan made the brilliant Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikander after QSQT. In interviews, he later admitted that he never wanted to make QSQT. It was his father’s script and a training ground for him before he took the big leap with Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikander. An unwanted baby maybe, but QSQT was a change-maker.
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