Taj Mahal 1989: Finding meaning of love in the 80s

What is love? You have to sit through the four hours of wistful visual treat that is Taj Mahal 1989 to get an inkling of the answer to this all-important question philosophers and scholars of all hues and ages have asked since time immemorial. I, as well, started watching this new Netflix India offering to find the one answer that all my real-life experiences have failed to give.

Did I? Yes! But not just in the lanes of Lucknow that the seven episodes of this Pushpendra Nath Misra-directed romcom took me to, but in the memory of every romantic story I have ever lived. There have been stories that I liked, novels I munched, movies I watched that transcend dimensions of medium but all along, the answer was hidden in 2020’s journey to 1989.  

This thing, this crowdy series, four love stories sewed together, triggers something in you. The urge to write poetry, not the one with a torn heart, but one with a sparkling cheer in your eyes. The urge to fall in love again, with a college sweetheart, with a young idealist revolutionary, with a wife of 15 years, and with the former sex-worker you never married. These are the love stories you want to live, as a university professor throwing tukbandi in every sentence, a gold-medalist philosophy student who lived philosophy, a young juggling soul who juggles between friendships and finally finds ground in the lap of a waiting ‘Marx without the beard’.

Taj Mahal 1989 is not without its flaws. Big ones, I must assert. But the biggest? It doesn’t make you nostalgic. Maybe because I lived so much in the story that the background seemed irrelevant or maybe because there is not much of the background, except a throw-in of the 80s hit Doordarshan series Karamchand. A train shown in the film doesn’t look like it belonged in the 80s. Other details are not enough to take you in the era of love letters, secret relationships and a Tinder-less slow romance.

Forget taking you back to the 80s, it doesn’t even take you to the 'Nawabo Ka Shahar', except for a few long shots of the Lucknow University. I, for one, kept waiting to see Lucknow, a city with all its glories and tehzeeb in 1989. Whatever the director’s compulsion to confine us to the rooms was, it only made me want to see Lucknow more.

I was left disappointed.

But that is a criticism I would’ve regaled you with if Misra did not have this gem of a story accompanying the less-than-authentic 80s Lucknow. The story, the dialogues, and the actors delivering them, I have no complaints against. I did, for all its flaws, live the story, switching between the characters who were looking to find the answer to the all-important question.

And in the end, I did.

Love is, when you can live your life for someone else.