Make Your Town a Character: What Dum Laga Ke Haisha Does With Haridwar
Setting as a character means the place in your story does work. It pushes your people around and gives them something to fight over.
Haridwar, 1995. Prem runs a cassette shop just as CDs are taking over. That one line already tells you what he is about to lose.
Your town is not a backdrop
Most first scripts I read from small-town writers are set in a city that doesn't exist. A coffee shop, a flat with a balcony. It could be anywhere, so it feels like nowhere.
The Oscar-winning screenwriter Michael Arndt once talked about the scripts he used to read, in a conversation on David Perell's How I Write. He said the good ones felt grounded in the real world: specific places, specific people. The weak ones felt like imitation movies, as if the writer had copied a genre they'd seen instead of a life they'd lived.
That is the trap. When you write "a city", you are writing other films. When you write your street, you are writing something only you can write.
What does setting as a character mean?
It means the place has a will of its own. It shapes the plot instead of sitting behind it.
A simple test: take your story and move it to another city. If nothing changes, your setting is wallpaper. If the story falls apart, your setting is a character.
Try that with Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015), written and directed by Sharat Katariya and produced by Maneesh Sharma for Yash Raj Films. Move it to Mumbai in 2015 and the film collapses.
What Dum Laga Ke Haisha does with Haridwar
Prem (Ayushmann Khurrana) is a school dropout who runs a cassette shop in the local market. His father pushes him into an arranged marriage with Sandhya (Bhumi Pednekar), who, in Prem's eyes, is too heavy. He is ashamed of her. She is not ashamed of herself.
Now look at what the place adds.
The time is the plot. Katariya has said the story first had a contemporary setting. It was Maneesh Sharma who argued that Prem's love for tapes and Kumar Sanu songs needed a time before CDs and streaming. So the film moved to the '90s. Prem's shop is dying in the same years his marriage is being tested. He is a man holding on to the old thing while the new thing walks into his house.
The town is the pressure. In a temple town where everyone knows everyone, a marriage is never private. The neighbours and his own father both have an opinion. Prem's embarrassment works only because there is an audience for it on every street.
The objects are the fights. The couple's best quarrel is fought through cassettes, each one answering the other with songs. Katariya has said that tape fight wasn't in the first script, and that much of the script grew out of it once they found it. A cassette shop gave him a weapon no generic setting could.
And near the end there is a local race where Prem has to run with Sandhya on his back. The thing he was ashamed of carrying, he now has to carry in front of the whole town. The place sets up the payoff.
The film was shot in Haridwar and Rishikesh, released on 27 February 2015, and won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi. Varun Grover's lyrics also won a National Award.
How do you write a setting that feels real?
Not with description. With friction.
New writers think setting means a paragraph about the weather and the buildings. Readers skip that paragraph. What they remember is the thing in the place that gets in a character's way, or gives them a chance.
A real setting doesn't need long scenes either. One true detail per scene, and the audience fills in the rest.
In advertising we had a word for this: the insight. Not "people like tea", but the specific thing only your customer would say. A good setting is an insight about a place. Mere shehar mein sab jaante hain ki kis ghar mein kya pak raha hai: if that is true where you live, it belongs in your script.
If your pages feel flat even when the plot is fine, the missing piece is often place. I've written more on that in why your writing feels dry.
Why setting matters more for writers outside Mumbai
If you live in Indore, Patna, Vidisha or Haridwar, you are not at a disadvantage. You are holding material that Mumbai writers have to research.
You know which shop closes on Tuesday. You know what people say at the bus stand, which wedding band is famous, and what the chaiwala does when it rains. A writer in Andheri cannot fake that. Sharat Katariya didn't fake it either: he built the story out of a real town and a real decade.
This is the same advice I gave in Likhne Ka Shauk Hai, Par Kya Likhun? Find Your First Story in Your Own Gully. The gali is the people. The town is the stage they can't leave.
Try this
List five things that only happen in your town. Put one in your next scene.
Not five places. Five things that happen. The temple bell that sets everyone's clock. The power cut at exactly eight. The uncle who stands outside the bank to fill forms for a fee. Then pick one and ask: who in my scene is helped by this, and who is hurt by it? Write the scene so that the answer changes what someone does.
Quick answers
What does setting as a character mean? It means the place shapes what your characters want and what stands in their way. If you can move the story to another city without changing anything, the setting isn't a character yet.
How do you write a setting that feels real? Use one specific detail that creates friction in the scene, not a paragraph of description. The detail should come from a place you actually know.
Why is setting important in film? Because it gives the audience something no other film has. Dum Laga Ke Haisha works because its cassette shop and its '90s Haridwar are tied to Prem's fear of change.
Building a story world from the place you know is part of The Foundation of Storytelling, my live online course in Hindi and English.
Send me your five things on WhatsApp. I'll tell you which one has a film in it.
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