A Bollywood favorite is remade for the stage, elevating eyebrows

It is without doubt one of the most profitable Bollywood films of all time. Though launched in 1995, it nonetheless performs each day at a movie show in Mumbai, India. Its songs are a mainstay at weddings. Its lead actors grew to become Bollywood superstars. And now Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, or DDLJ, has hit the stage.

Come Fall in Love — The DDLJ Musical is in previews on the Old Globe right here earlier than a deliberate Broadway run. Fans of the movie had been abuzz after producers introduced the stage adaptation final fall, however when the present’s solid was revealed this summer season, social media lit up with criticism. The information {that a} white actor, Austin Colby, would play the function of Rog — referred to as Raj within the movie and performed by Indian star Shah Rukh Khan — led many followers of the film to accuse the present of whitewashing.

The present’s creators say they wish to inform the story of two cultures coming collectively. But these vital of the casting resolution see a missed alternative. Amid growing calls for for extra inclusive hiring and storytelling within the leisure trade, South Asians are nonetheless underrepresented onstage and on display screen.

“Just when you think we are moving on wards & upwards we are right back to square one,” Andy Kumar, an India-based performer referred to as VJ Andy, wrote in a tweet. “Why can’t our stories be told as they are? Without a white wash??”

On Instagram, unfavourable feedback had been sprinkled among the many responses to Colby’s excited publish about his casting. “Haven’t y’all colonized enough,” one consumer wrote. Another commented: “It is embarrassing that as a white man you are willingly stealing opportunities from men of color. This isn’t something to be proud of.”

Chef and restaurateur Vikas Khanna, who was born in India and lives in New York, has additionally expressed his disapproval on social media. “They took away a star from us,” Khanna stated throughout a video name. “All these guys would have gone in for auditions and the parents would have been: ‘My God, my boy is going to be Raj!’”

“Doing this, you’re making our kids feel less-than,” he added. “Let’s not move back. We’ve worked really hard to be on the stage.”

DDLJ was one of many first Indian movies to heart on a love story between nonresident Indians (referred to as NRIs), a mirrored image of the big numbers who had been emigrating. It focuses on two younger NRIs dwelling in London. The occasion boy Raj (Khan) is wealthy, entitled and Western, fairly the other of the old style Simran (Kajol) and her hardworking conventional father, who says to Raj within the movie: “You call yourself an Indian? You give India a bad name.” But when Simran returns to India for her organized marriage, Raj and Simran attempt to persuade her father to let their love conquer all.

Beyond the central love story, the film additionally resonates due to its give attention to love of nation and household.

The movie “touched a nerve” with NRIs who had been “navigating between two or three cultures,” Rajinder Dudrah, a professor on the Birmingham Institute of Media and English, defined in an interview. Individuals had been having to grapple with the strain between Indian custom and Western concepts simply as this film was highlighting them. “The idea of ‘dil hai Hindustani,’ the heart is Indian,” was additionally conveyed within the movie, Dudrah added, “meaning that no matter where in the world you were, if you were of Indian descent, you had an attachment to India.”

Although the present contains nods to the movie — pigeons, fields of mustard flowers, a mandolin cameo — and the movie’s narrative arc stays, this DDLJ is decidedly American. Raj has been remodeled into Roger (or Rog), and the leads now dwell in Massachusetts, assembly as Harvard college students in Cambridge. Aditya Chopra, who directed the film, can be directing the stage present; the ebook and lyrics are by Nell Benjamin, who wrote the screen-to-stage variations of Legally Blonde and Mean Girls.

In August, Chopra posted an announcement on Instagram saying that his unique imaginative and prescient for the movie concerned a white male lead. (His first alternative on the time was Tom Cruise.) “The most powerful way to depict a country’s culture and values is to see it from the perspective of someone who does not belong to the same culture,” Chopra wrote, saying his aim was to showcase Indian tradition for a world viewers. “That is the starting point of ‘Come Fall in Love,’ the story of Indian Simran, her culture and heritage through the eyes of American Roger.”

This month, Benjamin stated she was not shocked by the response, “given the lack of representation” within the theater, however the uproar was nonetheless unsettling. “I was distressed that people thought that Adi or me or anyone would want to whitewash this movie,” she stated, referring to Chopra. “That would suggest that, ‘Oh, well, when we do it, she’s going to fall in love with this guy because he’s better than the options.’ That’s not the story. I believe people who come to see the show will get that.”

The present’s writers careworn that the manufacturing nonetheless featured a predominantly South Asian solid, together with Shoba Narayan, who performs Simran, and a manufacturing spokesperson stated South Asians represented greater than 50% of solid members.

Benjamin stated the creators had thought-about writing the male lead as an Indian American or a half-Indian man however believed it will have been an “easy choice” that wouldn’t have labored as properly. “If you don’t excavate it, you don’t add value to it,” she stated, including that Chopra “is perfectly capable of doing the exact movie as a musical, developing it in Mumbai and then renting a theater in New York, but that’s not what we wanted to do together.”

Not everybody was vital of the path the stage musical has taken. Bollywood screenwriter Shibani Bathija (My Name Is Khan, Fanaa) noticed the benefits in altering the lead’s ethnicity to make the story work for a normal viewers. “I think having him be South Asian would be more problematic, because where is all this objection coming from,” she stated, referring to the household’s disapproval of the central couple’s relationship. The United States focuses much less on caste and sophistication variations than India or Britain, she stated, so the attainable variations between two South Asians wouldn’t be as obvious to an American viewers.

“If you hadn’t watched the film, you wouldn’t get it,” she stated. “There would need to be another level of explanation that maybe wouldn’t serve the creative.”

The present’s composers, Vishal Dadlani and Shekhar Ravjiani, referred to as Vishal & Shekhar, additionally disagreed with the criticism. Ravjiani stated they had been proud to signify India by means of the musical, for which they created an 18-song rating. (The two didn’t write the movie’s unique songs, which have turn out to be classics, and only some melodies from the film are heard within the musical.) Dadlani stated that Chopra wished to inform this particular story and that it was “ridiculous” to say that “just because you’re an Indian filmmaker, you should write the story differently.”

“It’s not about color, it’s not about white or brown,” Dadlani added. “It’s about a boy who’s in love with a girl and whose family is different than the girl’s family.”

However, Benjamin, interviewed individually, considered coloration as a storytelling instrument. She defined that in her view, “with the change to Rog, you’re talking about color” and mentioned how Roger’s “whiteness” gave him privilege, making issues simple for him, till he confronted Simran’s father.

Despite the criticism of the present, among the many three dozen or so viewers members interviewed in San Diego, the response was principally constructive — from these acquainted with the movie and people who weren’t.

One of the few dissenting voices was Shebani Patel, who flew in from San Francisco to see the present: “I was not pleased with the casting. I don’t hate the show, but it’s not our show.”