Bollywood’s ‘Father of Romance’ Yash Chopra celebrated in new Netflix docuseries on Hindi cinema
- The Romantics pays homage to acclaimed Indian director Yash Chopra and charts his influence in shaping Bollywood’s classic epics
- Film fans hope it will trigger interest in learning more about the diversity of India’s linguistic cultures and film industries beyond Bollywood
More than 50 years have passed since the song Ae Meri Zohra Jabeen burst onto the scene as the part of the soundtrack of the 1965 film Waqt by acclaimed Indian director Yash Chopra, but its appeal has been enduring, notably the chorus “dil ko jitne ka faan, jo tujh meh hai kanhi nehi” (“no one knows how to win a heart, the way you do”) which became an earworm for many Indian film fans.
The song appears in The Romantics, a new four-part documentary series on Netflix which takes viewers into the glossy world of old Bollywood, where Chopra played a huge influence as the “Father of Romance”.
Smriti Mundhra, the Academy Award-nominated Indian-American director of The Romantics, said she hoped to showcase the legacy of the man whose works had been instrumental in shaping not only romantic films but Bollywood cinema through his deft use of storytelling, casting and lavish location settings.
Mundhra defined Chopra’s works as ahead of their time, highlighting his “nuanced” portrayal of relationships, marriage, female characters, and “sensitive, inclusive” depiction of Indian politics.
Debashree Mukherjee, a film and media scholar and faculty member at Columbia University, said the documentary, while focusing on Chopra’s romantic classics, also has helped to introduce a younger generation to the full complexity of his work.
“I think the series is triggering a lot of interest among younger diasporic [Indians], such as my students at Columbia, who … have not seen any films of Yash Chopra,” she said.
