7 Bollywood Rom-Coms That Deserve Your Attention

I was raised on Bollywood rom-coms from the late ’90s and early ’00s. They’re the first kinds of films I remember watching, in the pitch-black, cavernous theaters inside the sprawling multiplexes of south Kolkata, where I was born. Then, at the age of seven, I moved to London with my mum, and somehow, these joyous, overblown technicolor musicals took on even more importance: Like the Bengali food we cooked and the Indian classical music that was played in our living room on slow Sunday mornings, they formed a bridge to a distant home. 

More than that, though—and like all good rom-coms, regardless of their country of origin—they were infinitely comforting. In the depths of our first British winter, my mum and I would retreat to local cinemas to watch three-hour-long epics like Aditya Chopra’s Shah Rukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan vehicle Mohabbatein. When I got chicken pox at my new school, I spent a week curled up in a blanket watching a VCD of the dance world drama Dil To Pagal Hai on repeat. I still associate its high-octane opening number with the sickly smell of Calamine lotion.

Rewatching them now, I’m struck by how formulaic they feel in comparison to contemporary Indian fare, stuffed full of predictable marriage plots, stern elders, and the same bevy of actors from Mumbai’s A-list. But the music is sweeping, the costuming lavish, and the performances masterful in how they balance broad comedy and overwhelming emotion. It’s also difficult to overstate the impact they had on me as a child, allowing me to watch actors who, though paler and airbrushed, looked more like me than those in British rom-coms of the early 2000s, and play the leads in their own lives.   

Below, browse a shortlist of seven ’90s and ’00s Bollywood rom-coms that offer an introduction to the genre—and are well worth streaming again if you’re already an aficionado.

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995)