India’s Love Story With a Movie Still on the Big Screen After 27 Years

Well past the film’s intermission, the crowd keeps trickling in. Some pay at the ticketing window with a couple of taps on their phone; others dump fistfuls of coins. They are students and office clerks, prostitutes from the waning red-light district nearby, day laborers still chasing dreams in India’s “maximum city,” and the homeless with dreams long deferred.

India’s film industry puts about 1,500 stories on the screen annually. But the audience that files every morning into the Maratha Mandir cinema in Mumbai is here for a movie that premiered 27 years ago — and has resonated so intensely that this once-grand 1,100-seat theater has played it every day since, save for a pandemic hiatus.

The film, “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge” — which translates as “The Big-Hearted Will Take the Bride” and is known as “D.D.L.J.” — is a boy-meets-girl story set against the backdrop of a moment of immense change and unbridled possibility in India.

The Indian economy had just opened up, bringing new opportunities, new technologies and new exposure to a rising middle class. But it also brought new strains, as the choices afforded by economic opportunity — to decide your own love and your own life — ran up against the protective traditions of old.

In many ways, the India of today looks like the India reflected in the movie. The economy is still on the rise, and it is now about 10 times the size it was in the mid-1990s. A technological revolution, this one digital, has opened new worlds. Women are seeking more freedom in a male-dominated society. And the forces of modernity and conservatism remain in tension as an ascendant political right wing appoints itself the enforcer of conventional values.

The sense of unlimited possibility, however, has receded. As the early rewards of liberalization peaked and economic inequities deepened, aspirations of mobility have diminished. For those left behind, the world of “D.D.L.J.” — its story and stars, its music and dialogue — is an escape. For those still striving, it is an inspiration. And for those who have made it, it is a time capsule, the starting point of India’s transformation.