Let’s assume we have no way to predict where Hindi cinema is going to end up in a century’s time. Alright, there will be better technology, perhaps a whole new sensory interface as-yet undreamed of, new sorts of characters, cooler stuff. So we can hope. In the interests of sentimentality we assure ourselves that romance movies are still around. Would the fan from 2110 believe that love stories sometimes took us three hours to tell? Would she feel the same way about Mughal-e-Azam, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge and Jab We Met as we do? It’s hard to see how the effect of Madhubala dancing in a hall of mirrors would diminish over time. Images endure, as we have learnt over history. It’s when it comes down to words that things might get shakier.

Several things about our cinematic beginnings will puzzle a time traveller (call her Future Fan). We ourselves have turned to our parents and wondered – was there something in the laws of the time that forbade your heroes in love to speak in simple sentences? Future Fan’s dilemma should be even more acute. (Well, unless maybe Future Fan’s own cinema has somehow involved a full-scale return to a screen culture of overenthusiastic eye contact and coy smiles. Maybe they’ve had a revolution or something.) At least we know what those doughty old screen lovers mean when they compare each other’s hair to rain clouds and bodies to sandalwood. Those things aren’t going to exist in 2110. Future Fan is going to be left wondering how Future-anything ever came about, if all they did back in the past was think up metaphors for sex involving natural phenomena, and batting the odd eyelash.

Wait. Back up. Who allows the shallow generations of today to assume such rank disrespect to the days when listening to Binaca Geetmala in the same room as your grandfather constituted an act of rebellion? Past Fans will disapprove strongly of this callow attitude to the days of love’s boldest days. They will remind us of the sigh of the doomed and the blessing of the accursed. They spoke with their eyes because language was inadequate; when they did speak, they could only veil their own desires with tremulous courtesy and ardent and poetic allusion – whatever those things are.

That’s not to say present generations are running around verbally committing to baby-making. Love for the Kuch Kuch Hota Hai generation – as the title of that landmark film suggests – may be less coherent, but they’re no less allusive to that grandest of emotions. As Himesh Reshammiya says of matters of the heart – ‘It’s complicated.’ No doubt a composer of Hindi film music would know, even if he did write the tune to something called Ek baar aaja aaja. Past Fan might have challenged that song in a court of law, but she at least can rest assured that Bollywood’s tradition of love songs, while mutating at least as much as its love dialogue, has retained robust links to its past. The rhythms may have changed, but the affections have not.

But Future Fan will definitely need a dictionary to interpret our romantic blasts from the past. Her ancestors in this generation already do. And where the words seem simple, the contexts puzzle us. When was the last time you heard an onscreen couple describe themselves using the old shama-parwana analogy? Don’t people get restraining orders these days for the whole tumhara saaya business? And stability is awesome, but pairing off with the same person for seven births? Creepy. Look, we want to say, we totally get it: it’s difficult to tell someone you love them. We know all about complicated relationships. We have Facebook.

And those people didn’t. Perhaps that is why a great deal of our love for the characters of our cinematic past derives from the fact that they almost never speak for themselves. Does a boy ever meet a girl in our beautiful, inspiring, now-alien cinema from decades back? It’s always the industrialist’s son who meets the schoolmaster’s daughter, or the village boy who meets the city belle (don’t try to hide from us, Shashi Kapoor, we saw what you did in Jab Jab Phool Khile), or the slave who meets the emperor. The words shape themselves in their mouths accordingly. To surmount obstacles, love must make promises (a saugandh for when a kasam won’t cut it) and speak fighting words (for back when the phrase zaalim duniya really diagnosed your personal lack of freedom as much the situation in the Middle East).

These are not non-issues, least of all in a country where Khap panchayats still murder eloping couples. We’re still coping with change. Perhaps, though, so is Bollywood: not only through the cultural upheavals in the lives of its writers and visionaries, but through the sea change in the business itself. When one multiplex chain can bring in more revenue than any number of little single-screens around the country – small surprise, given the fast-track change in the ratios of our urban and rural populations – the balance of power shifts. Our fights are a bit more personal, a bit more about shoe-gazing and uncertainty than rebellion.

Now, our protagonists talk about themselves, and in doing so bring up the subject of love – hesitantly, tangentially, off-handedly. From the seminal Farhan Akhtar mould come the Akash and Shalini of Dil Chahta Hai, who cannot afford to fall in love but do so while arguing about commitment, cynicism and opera. When Shammi Kapoor told Saira Banu he didn’t believe in love in Junglee, he was a caricature: a rude, snobbish aristocrat disdaining base human emotions. When Akash (also a rude snob) does it, he’s simply being himself. Jai and Aditi in 2007’s Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na have no real obstacles to fight, in spite of their obvious economic disparities. Perhaps 40 years ago, the lovers would have triumphed in spite of circumstances. Today, in the mode of the classic romantic comedy, they triumph in spite of themselves.

Plain speaking has been a stellar feature of a long tradition of middle-of-the-road cinema in Bollywood. But that writing, too, was directly concerned with social comedy (and near-tragedy) in a way that the defining romantic films of the Noughties just aren’t. Our romances, as in the cinema of Akhtar, and writer-directors like Imitiaz Ali, are stories about people made special not so much by their circumstances, as through contact with each other.

One way of looking at it is that a life without a grand passion is trivial. Consumed by our narcissism, we are always looking to love someone who will understand and accommodate our interests and goals, our hobbies and jobs, our coffee habits and tastes in music, to say nothing of the minutiae of our everyday life – in short, someone with whom to share objects, objectives: stuff. But as our film-makers seem to be telling us over the last decade (the post-Dil Chahta Hai decade) there’s also the other incontrovertible truth: it is love that makes our trivial lives valuable, that takes us out of the clutter of our incomplete expectations and puts us in a story. And stories can be sung and danced, mimed and whistled and yes, narrated solely through eye contact and copious sighing. They can analyse and dissect themselves like a Calvino novella. Sometimes, they can even not be told. But they always make sense; and we have come to learn that talking them through is often the only way we can get to their happy ending.

Future Fan, if you’re reading this: we hope you still have those in 2110.

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