Ila (Nimrat Kaur) bites her lower lip in excitement as she sits at a table, with a piping hot glass of chai♍ in one hand and a letter in the other. The letter is from the same stranger who has, mistakenly, been receiving her husband’s lunchbox everyday for some time now. “Yesterday, I found something from many years ago,” it reads. “...Old TV shows that my wife used to record,” Saajan (Irrfan Khan) writes. As Ila continues to read, Saajan tells her that his late wife loved these shows. “I don’t know why I wanted to see them. I watched them for hours,” he says. Finally, the realisation behind his desire to revisit these shows hit him. “Every Sunday when she watched the shows, I was outside repairing my bicycle or just smoking. I would glance through the window, every now and then, just for a second. And I would see her reflection on the TV screen, laughing—laughing at the same jokes, over and over, each time as if she was hearing it for the very first time. I wish I had kept on looking, back then.”
This scene from The Lunchbox (2013) succinctly depicts the longing of its two protagonists—Ila and Saajan—who pour their solitary musings out to each other in letters that are exchanged in a dabba (lunchbox). While Ila overtly yearns for the love and attention of her distanced husband, Saajan rediscovers his hidden desire for companionship through their correspondence. Films like The Lunchbox𓂃—though uncommon—have captivated viewers for their poignant contemplation on loneliness, love, and loneliness in love.
More often than not, earlier decades of Indian cinema, especially Hindi films, have been preoccupied with the anguish of lovers separated due to their social circumstances. The denouement of these narratives finally arrives with the uniting of these lovers, followed by a fairytale “happily ever after” ending. It is only with the turn of the millennium that Indian audiences have become more accustomed to seeing what really happens when the fairytale ends and life begins in cinema. With changing audience tastes, however, such films, too, have been warmly received and appreciated for their realism—which emerges through the reflections of human flaws. Against the backdrop of the multiplex boom in early 2000s, this aesthetic shift is also governed by a move away from the traditional family or war dramas of the 1990s, which left little room for emotional nuance within their melodramatic framework. While earlier films were engrossed in the poetics of viraha🍒 or separation, loneliness became a somewhat lingering sentiment in films from the 2010s onwards. Somewhere, the faltering dreams promised by liberalisation were to blame for this turning emotional register. And as it often happens with cinema, the medium began to mirror what the audiences were feeling.
Masaan꧃ (2015), directed by Neeraj Ghaywan, is one example. In it, youth’s changing ideas of family and kinship are caught in the crossfires of a stagnant social order. The film, in essence, is about loneliness—except that here, the loneliness of the characters is imbricated within the perils of socially oppressive structures like caste and patriarchy. Devi (Richa Chadha) is perpetually stuck in a quest to find her way out of the narrow-mindedness of Kashi, which has cost her her lover. Her isolation stems from being deeply misunderstood and judged by society’s moral policing. Deepak (Vicky Kaushal) on the other hand, is shattered by the death of Shaalu (Shweta Tripathi), who was willing to transcend their caste barriers to be with him. In a bid to redeem his family from their financial and social plight, Deepak struggles with the pressure to overcome his sense of loss quickly. But these two aren’t alone in coping with their fears of being left alone. Vidyadhar Pathak (Sanjay Mishra), Devi’s father, too, finds it hard to reconcile with his daughter’s independence—he is overcome with the fear of having to live in an empty house with his dead wife’s painful last memories. Even as the film ends on a somewhat positive note, the negotiations of these characters with their emotional predicaments and relentless aspirations remain inconclusive.
The time needed in the upkeep of relationships—which came easy in the earlier decades—also becomes a luxury in the cinema of this period. Asha Jaoar Majhe/Labour of Love✨ (2014) by Aditya Vikram Sengupta follows a young couple, stuck in the cycle of work shifts, due to which they hardly ever see each other. In painstaking detail, the film draws on the ways in which their love manifests in the daily chores that they do for one another. However, what seems like a household from the outside is hollow from within, as each waits to catch a glimpse of the other through their demanding timelines. Here, Sengupta embeds the loneliness of the couple within the monotony of their labour. Through extreme close-ups, the director weaves in the various mundane daily tasks that swallow the time they could have otherwise stolen for themselves. The film doesn’t have any dialogue and is only punctuated by ambient sounds—symbolic of the silence within their marriage. In between, the only time they can afford to spend together is in a magic realist dreamlike space, until the clock ticks again and one of them has to leave.
This endless cycle of work and sustenance is oppressively isolating in its own right. In a bid to remain human, unique relationships with inanimate objects have been explored in some Hindi films about the working class. Ankahi Kahaniyaꦆ (2021), an anthology of three short films, features a segment where a garment shop worker falls in love with a mannequin at the shop. Eventually, he is thrown out by the shop owner for his ‘unnatural’ behaviour with the mannequin. However, behind his ‘unnatural’ impulse of courting an inanimate object, lies the very natural human need for socialisation, which the cycle of labour doesn’t allow him. In a sensitive, funny and heartrending performance, Abhishek Banerjee’s Pradeep Loharia manages to speak for large sections of migrant workers who are uprooted from their villages and families when they move to cities in search of a living. At the altar of bread and butter, they are compelled to sacrifice human intimacy.
Such pursuits of love beyond human existence in Indian cinema have found inspiration in global cinematic trends. Post-2010, in the wake of rapidly changing technological paradigms, Hollywood has led the way in imagining the transformation in human interactions. Films like Her𓃲 (2013), directed by Spike Jonze, have changed the face of science fiction and the course of global cinema through the love story between a man and an Artificial Intelligence (AI) operating system. Set in a futuristic world, the film traces the relationship between Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) and Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), an AI operating system that develops through human interaction. The film is remarkable in its imagination because even as the impossibility of this relationship ultimately manifests in the end, some pertinent questions continue to linger—will humans eventually lose the capacity to feel understood amongst themselves? Is a fulfilling intimate relationship with technology only a substitute for lost human connection? Can technology be humanised to a point that it will begin to encounter human experiences such as love? Can a technological object feel lonely? In the rapidly altering techno-space of social media and artificial intelligence, we may not have to wait too long to find the answers. Even so, the pursuit of meaningful human bonds, perhaps, will continue.
