Retro Express | When Love Arrived Enclosed In Envelopes

There was a time before WhatsApp when movies had letters, post boxes, stamps, waiting and longing. It was a time when handwritten letters drove romance and drama—there were misplaced letters, intercepted letters, lost and found letters, poetic voiceovers, letters with flowers in them, sometimes even a photograph. You couldn’t slide into each other’s DMs, but you could send your lover a perfumed letter. In the 60s and 70s, love did not arrive instantly. It travelled, often creased, weather-beaten, sometimes entirely blotted out by rain, across cities and villages. It arrived in envelopes, tucked into books, slipped under doors. It was read secretly under a tree, in a nook or in bed, in the half-light of longing. The handwritten letter was not just a prop. It was plot.

Take Kamal Amrohi’s Pakeezah (1972), where one of Hindi cinema’s most famous romantic gestures is not a meeting but a note. In it, a stranger writes to a sleeping woman: “Aapke paon dekhe, bahut haseen hain. Inhein zameen par mat utariyega, maile ho jayenge.” This line transformed anonymity into intimacy and is pure cinematic foreplay. In an era of social boundaries and restrained interaction, the handwritten word made such an emotional risk possible.

Sometimes, the letters were not even seen, they were sung. In Prem Pujari (1970), the song “Phoolon Ke Rang Se” is structured as a love letter being written, unfolding like a lyrical dispatch from a foreign land—each line a metaphor standing in for physical absence. The lover writes because he cannot arrive, and his beloved receives it, or at least he imagines so.

In the films of yore, love needed distance to exist—letters created waiting, longing, projection; they carried more than words; they carried imagination. Lovers often fell in love, not with each other, but with the written word that allowed them to become each other’s fantasies.

In some films, a letter was an emotional negotiation, albeit in keeping with social protocol. Like Saraswatichandra (1968), which is steeped in literary tradition, where letters function almost as emotional negotiations. Here, writing is restrained and feelings are confessed carefully, shaped by social norms. Love is not declared—it is carefully drafted and sent with a flower by Nutan to her beloved.

Sometimes, even when the lovers are with each other, the song is about a letter. “Likhe jo khat tujhe” in Kanyadaan (1968) is literally an ode to ‘All the letters I wrote before’ from Shashi Kapoor to Asha Parekh.

Letters, however, were not always gentle. In Sangam (1964), written communication becomes emotional evidence—of intimacy and ultimately, of guilt. Letters expose what polite conversation conceals, turning private feeling into moral complication and providing a motif for betrayal.

But every letter also needed a dakiya, the postman, who came on a cycle, bearing letters and postcards and sometimes a money order. The dakiya, although from another world, was worth waiting for; he was more than a harbinger of joy (or sometimes, sorrow)—a window to the world, a connection to the people who were far away but beloved. In Palkon Ki Chhaon Mein (1977), the dakiya (Rajesh Khanna) in “Dakiya daak laya” represented hope, change and good tidings and was much beloved.

In Babul (1950), Dilip Kumar played the role of Ashok, a postmaster with a passion for song writing and music. In this love triangle, Bela (Sultana), the daughter of a poor postmaster is in love with Ashok, who in turn is attracted to rich girl Usha (Nargis). The film helped in creating Dilip Kumar’s doomed lover image, which made him the perfect king of tragedies in Bollywood.

Nazir Hussein as Postmaster Nivaran was pivotal in the storytelling for the social satire, Parakh (1960), set in a village with an ensemble cast of Sadhana, Jayant, Motilal, Leela Chitnis and others. The story unfolds when Nivaran gets a cheque of Rs 5 lakh, which he is supposed to give to the most honest person in the village.

In Sholay (1975), the postman (Mansaram) reads a letter to the blind Imam (A K Hangal) and in Swades (2004), the village postmaster (Rajesh Vivek) is one of the first persons Mohan Bhargava (Shah Rukh Khan) encounters while travelling to Charanpur to meet his nanny Kaveri Amma (Kishori Ballal).

What these films understood instinctively is something our present moment resists: romance often needs delay. The time, between writing and receiving, allowed imagination to flourish. A letter could be reread and a new meaning could emerge each time. It was for posterity, something to come back to. The pause between dispatch and delivery created narrative tension—not only for the audience, but for the lovers themselves.

Unsurprisingly, the man who delivered hopes, dreams, joys and sorrows in an inland letter, postcard or the ominous telegram has also adapted to times—offering Aadhar services, postal insurance and postal savings schemes, but still collecting and delivering money orders in many places.

The slow-moving letters have given way to emails, messages, DMs and what not, and with that, patience and longing have gone out the window and instead been replaced by anxiety, FOMO and instant gratification. The physical distance between lovers once created the narrative tension that instant messaging has erased.

Today, communication is in one continuous loop; there are no pauses or waiting or pining. Messages arrive before emotion has time to form. The blinking cursor has replaced the lingering sentence; the typing indicator has replaced anticipation. We no longer wait long enough to wonder.

Perhaps that is what the handwritten letter once gave Hindi cinema—wonder. Not certainty, not immediacy, but the fragile possibility that love, like the post, might still be on its way. That the dakiya will arrive, and although he may or may not have a letter for me, his arrival still means something.