It is the image of Paro’s white sari with the red border, [the laal-par saree of Bengalis] unfurling as she runs towards Devdas who is breathing his last,” Prathyush Parasuraman tells us when we ask him about the first image that impressed upon him the force of ineffable beauty he recognised in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s cinema. A cultural critic and journalist, with a BA in economics and South Asian studies from the University of California, Berkeley, Parasuraman is the author of On Beauty: The Cinema of Sanjay Leela Bhansali (Ebury Press), a new book that delves deep into the notions of beauty that brings Bhansali’s cinema equal amounts of praise and censure. “If you pause the frame—and I realise this is not how people watch or should watch movies—the sari looks sculpted by air itself. It is a beauty that is so forceful, I keep wondering if what I am drawn to is the easy beauty of that frame, or the emotional heat with which she is running. Do I care for her longing, or am I merely content with the performance of it?” 

Much of his writing in the book pivots on questions of “beauty”, reflecting on that which can move as opposed to that which exists in and of itself. “Can beauty be so pungent that it overwhelms the emotional core? Or, put differently, can beauty be the emotional core?” asks Parasuraman.