From Silisila to Ram-Leela: How Bollywood is updating the Holi legend

According to Hindu legends, Holi is about vanquishing evil and spreading some love. In the modern era, legends in India are mostly created by popular cinema and Bollywood is doing its bit to continue the traditions of Holi and often with more nuance than you’d expect from masala entertainment.

The bonfires of Holi commemorate the vanquishing of evil, particularly the variety embodied in murderous aunts. Holika was the sister of the demon king Hiranyakashipu and one of the ways she tried to help her brother out when Hiranyakashipu’s young son Prahlad refused to toe his father’s line, was by trying to burn Prahlad to death. She tricked Prahlad into sitting on a pyre with her, feeling confident that she’d be protected by her fireproof cloak while the boy would burn to crisp. Since Prahlad had Vishnu’s blessings, it was Holika who was set ablaze and Prahlad remained unharmed. Holi bonfires are supposed to hark back to this gruesome incident.

The smearing of colours also has explanatory legends, of which one of the most popular is that little Krishna was feeling pouty about not being fair and handsome so Yashoda suggested he go and smear everyone with colour so that there’s no distinction between anyone.

With the colours of Holi both the fair-faced Radha and the dark-skinned Krishna are glorious Technicolor and there is no difference between them; only playful love.

The idea of gulal revealing someone’s true colours is one of the recurring ideas in the new legends of Holi in popular Hindi films. Bollywood has delighted in all the story possibilities that Holi offers. The play with gulal makes for beautiful visuals and offers a fabulous chance to play with ideas of revealing and obscuring a character’s true intentions and/or nature.

In the Bollywood scheme of things, Holi is a charmed setting that allows characters to see and do things they wouldn’t be able to otherwise. Lovers get a chance to get a little physical with one another, thus leading to emotionally-charged moments where smearing some coloured powder on a cheek becomes vaguely erotic even though it’s anything but intimate.

Holi also offers the opportunity for some of the most chaste wet sari/ kurta sequences ever. There are many examples of Holi’s romantic possibilities, but perhaps the most iconic is the scene from Silisila that had Amitabh Bachchan singing “Rang Barse”. The crackling chemistry between Bachchan and Rekha and the sense that the audience was in on their little secret, which was being revealed even as the festival of colours provided an effective disguise for the couple, makes this scene iconic.

Last year’s big hit Goliyon ki Raasleela — Ram-Leela saw Holi provide a similarly effective cover for the film’s lead pair, Deepika Padukone and Ranveer Singh. With gulal rendering people unrecognisable, Ram (Singh) is able to enter the enemy camp undetected. Not just that, because everyone is busy with their own Holi madness, no one notices him and Leela (Padukone) smooching.

In real life, being smothered in coloured powder and sprayed with water guns isn’t necessarily a pleasant experience. You try kissing someone who’s got as much colour and paint on them as Singh’s Ram does and all you’ll end up with is a mouthful of gritty powder and the taste of plasticky chemicals. It would take a lot of bhang to not notice all this and if you are so stoned that you don’t really register these details, one could argue that this may not be the best time to choose your life partner.

But Holi in Bollywood isn’t about being sensible or realistic. It taps into something far deeper — the belief that social convention and personal insecurities keep us from being able to see things for what they really are. Holi in Bollywood an eye-opener. Infused with a happy high and untethered to propriety, the hero and heroine aren’t incapacitated by Holi festivities, but empowered by it. This can mean something as innocent as Naina (Padukone) in Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani finding the confidence to don a pair of shorts and Ranbir Kapoor’s Bunny realising Naina is in fact one hella hot lady.

But Holi isn’t only an occasion for happiness and colourful fluff in Bollywood. In Damini, for instance, the festival provided the perfect setting for Meenakshi Sheshadri’s character to see past the facades that her brother in-law had put up and realise what he really is: a rapist. It’s a side of him that she struggles to prove for the rest of the film because once Holi is over, that side of him is no longer visible.

For all its celebratory spirit, the fact that Holi and its colours offer a disguise to those with unsavoury inclinations is an idea that’s surfaced repeatedly in Bollywood. Think of the scene in Sholay in which Amjad Khan’s Gabbar asks, “Holi kab hai, kab hai Holi?” (When is Holi?) It’s chilling not just because you realise Gabbar is planning something terrible, but because Holi, with its bonhomie, becomes more of a vulnerability than a celebration. So Veeru (Dharmendra), Basanti (Hema Malini) and the villagers dance around cheerfully, blissfully unaware that there’s a violent attack looming.

Years later, Yash Chopra used the idea of Holi being a strange space of freedom as well as danger to great effect in Darr. A Holi party offers Rahul (Shah Rukh Khan) the perfect setting to stutter “I love you K-k-k-kiran” without being outed, but it also scares the bejesus out of Kiran (Juhi Chawla) who realises how Holi has lowered her defences. This was followed by a superb chase sequence where Rahul isn’t caught by Kiran’s boyfriend Sunil (Sunny Deol).

Everything that makes Holi fun is also what makes it dangerous, and Bollywood realises this. To lose your inhibitions can be wonderful, but it can also mean horrible things because there’s no telling what will be unleashed when our inhibitions are removed. It’s rare to find an idea that Bollywood, with all its lighthearted frivolity, can handle without robbing it of ambivalence and nuance. If you think about it, Holi is one of them. So raise your glass of cannabis-laced thandai — this is the one day that the government of India approves of you getting high — say cheers to Bollywood and thank your lucky stars that in real life, your Holi doesn’t include dacoits, rapists and stuttering stalkers.