On History & Movies
How Hindi cinema reflects India’s development
Another year is coming to an end. Not much appears to change day-to-day. The days add up and become years. You watch a movie you think is ‘recent’ and it turns out to be a couple of decades old!
Take the movie ‘Dil Chahta Hai’ (DCH) for instance. The now 35–45 years olds who grew up in India would consider it a modern film. Here’s the kicker — it came out 22 years ago! Walk back the same distance on the movie timeline and you arrive at the classic ‘Golmaal’, which the same population would consider to solidly fall in ancient history.
DCH was a point of phase transition in Indian cinema. It came out at the start of the new millennium, providing a natural reason to categorize it as new. As fate would have it, this coincided with the economy showing signs of growth for the first time since the creation of the country in 1947 (Fig 1) — a phenomenon directly attributed to the economic liberalization¹ that happened earlier in the last decade of the 20th century.
The characters in the movie were Mumbai elites - India’s 1%-ers. For the first time in Indian cinema, the rich were unapologetically rich. When these rich kids danced to, ‘Hum hain naye, andaz kyon ho purana?’ (Literal translation: ‘We are new, why should our styles be old?’), a befitting ode to the spirit of this new era, the 99%-ers danced with them. They were not viewed as capitalist villains but comrades of the new India.
Golmaal, too was a movie about a phase transition. Here too, the screenplay urges the then-older generation to accept the ways of the new. The older generation in the film was brought up with the burden of building a newly formed nation that was leeched out by its imperialist overlords and had a stiff-upper-lip approach to life. The generation the movie catered to was seeking a more relaxed demeanor to fight their problems, captured well by the oversized printed shirts worn by actors.
Movies reveal a lot about the mood and ambitions of society at the time. They become the tree rings of culture and development.
This post aims to track such trends by juxtaposing popular³ Hindi-language⁴ movies (Table 1) to various development metrics.
The pursuit of roti, kapda, and makaan!
A trend that jumps out in the movies from the 1950s is the presence of agriculture as a core theme ( ‘Mother India’, ‘Do Bheega Zameen’, ‘Do Ankhen…’). This phenomenon hardly reoccurs in the following decades (excluding the period movie, ‘Lagaan’), following the decline of agriculture and the drop in the share of the labor force in agriculture (Fig 2).
A prevalent occupation of characters in the 60s was armed services (‘Aradhana’, ‘Sangam’) or general do-gooder for the country (‘Jewel Thief’) perhaps coinciding with the mood around the Sino-Indian war in 1962.
Six of the top ten (and nine if you include cameo/voice) movies of the 70s had Amitabh Bachan starring. He gained popularity as the face of the angry young man. Young men seemed angry since there weren’t any jobs around to meet their qualifications. There is no unemployment data available for this period, but given that the growth of GDP per capita (Fig 1) was as flat as the Rann of Kutch for three straight decades, the anger seems justified. It worsened with the perception of corruption (Fig 3).
This anti-corruption sentiment seems to peak in the 80s, with the top movies giving an outlet to release the anger through satire (‘Jane Bhi Do…’) or even science fiction (‘Mr. India’)!
In this period, it appears like smuggling was the way to get rich (‘Deewar’, ‘Amar …’, ‘Don’). The socialist ‘Permit Raj’⁴ kept the procurement and distribution of goods under tight control. There weren’t enough goods within the country, and the import tariffs were high, creating an opportunity for sleazy entrepreneurs to smuggle — from liquor to gold.
By the 90s, the protagonist becomes a generic businessman (DDLJ, HAHK, K2H2, DTPH, etc.) By this period, the Indian diaspora in the UK and US became a big market, and NRIs became key characters in movies (DDLJ). While the protagonists in DDLJ were not old enough to do anything sensible, their respective parents were given professions that marked the range of the NRI population, (1) a convenience store owner and (2) a business magnate with nausea-inducing wealth and exuberance in the image of the Mittals or Hindujas.
The 2000s see a sharp shift in the protagonist’s profession, taking a more serious role in the script — engineer (‘Swades’, ‘3 Idiots’), teacher/coach (‘Taare ...’, ‘Chak De’), doctor (‘Munnabhai’).
The rocket fuel for growth = Education
In ‘Do Bhiga Zameen’ (50s), the protagonist loses his only means of livelihood - his two bighas⁵ of land —when drought strikes. Subsequently, the village money-lender dupes him for lacking simple reading/math proficiency. In ‘Swades’ (2000s), the protagonist is a project manager at NASA building satellites to counter droughts.
This unintended poetic justice, while told through accounts of fiction, does represent the country’s journey from Malthus’s nightmare to the world’s largest talent exporter.
This was made possible through a concentrated effort to increase enrolment in schools and broader education coverage (Fig 4).
There is a sharp spike in movies about education in the 2000s, with at least four of the top ten movies of the decade (‘3 Idiots’, TZP, RDB, ‘Munnabhai’) focusing on changing the education system making it more than a means to do a job. This is a steep change compared to the uninspired accountant shown as the protagonist of ‘Chotti Si Baat’ (70s).
Treatment of Women
Indian cinema’s first Academy Award entry was a movie with a female protagonist (‘Mother India’). Then for the next four decades, women characters played second fiddle to the male protagonist, sans a few exceptions like ‘Aradhana’, ‘Guide’, etc. sprinkled around.
In ‘Awara’ (50s), when a female character is kidnapped and released, her faithfulness is questioned and she is abandoned (a la Ramayan). In 2022, there is a higher chance of a movie being canceled for using the word ‘Ram’ than the audience relating to this outlandish storyline.
Through the 70–90s, the key role of the female character was to either mother or romance the male lead. There was a slow change in this phenomenon starting 2000s with the top ten hosting female leads as doctors (‘3 Idiots’, ‘Munnabhai’), teachers (‘Swades’), and an entire hockey team (‘Chak De’). By the 2010s, the power dynamics were more balanced with strong female characters central to the plot (‘Dangal’, ‘Barfi’, ‘Andhadhun’, ‘Drishyam’). Some more women directors and producers emerge in the 2010s (ZNMD). This checks out with the slow but certain development in education and fertility rate metrics that can be used as a proxy for women’s empowerment (Fig 5).
Sadly, when the movie is female-centric, it’s about their struggles in India as a woman (‘Chak De’, ‘Dangal’, ‘Pink’, etc.).
Lifespan — keeping it under the same karmic cycle!
The mother in ‘Mother India’ loses 3 of her 4 children — to poverty, illness, and violence. While people die in gay abandon in Hindi movies at the whim of the male lead, this depiction seems to be on point with the times (Fig 6).
Amitabh Bachan got the title of the ‘angry young man’ through the 70s movie ‘Anand’⁶ where he plays a helpless doctor. One of his early dialogues from the movie goes, ‘Ek mara nahi, aur doosra marne ke liye paida ho gaya’ (loosely translated: people here are born in abundance to die), which seems apt given the life expectancy when the movie came out was less than 50 years, and child mortality was at a shocking 20%.
It is commendable that under these poor circumstances, the movies sold hope — the good guy always won, and eventually, things ended well. And when they did not in one lifetime, there was always the reincarnation hack started by ‘Madhumati’ and followed by many other movies until the 90s.
As the population got a relatively better grip on their lives (Fig 6), these trends also waned and disappeared.
Side note: It’s somewhat surprising, but in support of the thesis of this post, that the life expectancy when DCH came out was only 62 years, almost ten years short of the peak before COVID!
Getting off the poverty trap
The improvement in life expectancy can be directly attributed to the decline in poverty. This trend can also be seen in the movies.
Over half of the top ten in the 1950s had extreme poverty and hunger as their central theme. This condition is singularly blamed on mercenary and merciless capitalism or its derivative, colonialism. This checks out, given the (alarmingly high) share of the population in extreme poverty (Fig 7) after the colonialists left the country for the dead after sucking it hollow.
The depiction of the rich as the categorical villain is a trend that continued until the 90s. There is also the depiction of class division — economic and social — in an obvious way (‘Deewar’, ‘Mr. India’), but also in subtle and seemingly innocuous ways (‘Angoor’, QSQT, ‘Maine Pyaar Kiya’, ‘Jo Jeeta …’).
Post-90s, there is less of ‘Us vs Them’ in depicting the rich. There was no improvement in equality (see Fig 7), but as the mean income improved (see Fig 1), there was perhaps less anger for the rich and a newfound respect for capitalism which the country was deprived of for five decades.
National Pride — Mera desh mahaan?
With the newly gained confidence, there is also a surge in movies showing that the country was worth fighting for. Half of the top ten movies in the 2000s show this sentiment (‘Swades’, RDB, ‘Lagaan’, ‘Chak De’, ‘A Wednesday’).
This trend is a comeback. ‘Mother India’ was a prescriptive movie with the backdrop of death, deluge, and despair — urging the new country's population to stick around, work hard, and do the right thing. A new nation needed this character-building exercise. This exercise lost steam in the coming decades. By the 70s, it had taken the form of complaining about the status quo even if under the guise of nationalism (‘Anand’, ‘Mr. India’, ‘Jane Bhi Do …’, ‘Dil Se’, etc.).
***
A nation, like any living being, has its life story. For India, it was a childhood of strict disciplining, undernourished teenage years of caged existence resulting in rebellion, and a youth of liberation followed by unprecedented thriving and confidence building.
When you (re)watch one of these movies or any movie, think of the socioeconomic dynamics of the times, and appreciate the role movies play in telling history. Amid the misinformation epidemic, reading what’s between the lines of fiction is more insightful than the news we are fed.
***
Notes:
- This refers to opening the country’s economy to the world to make the economy more market and service-oriented, thus expanding the role of private and foreign investment. You can learn more at ‘the1991project’.
- Popular is defined as the product of IMDB ratings and IMDB Votes. The data for this was found on Kaggle (link), and worked on using Pandas. The data has survival and recency bias in ratings and votes (Fig. 9, 10). This shouldn’t impact the analysis since the data is used to get a rough set of top movies. The ones that survived were probably liked by the last generations and then referred to the generation that voted. This checks out with anecdotal evidence.
3. Hindi was chosen vs another Indian language because of the volume of movies.
4. The Permit Raj or Licence Raj was the system of licenses, regulations, and accompanying red tape that hindered the setup and running of businesses in India between 1947 and 1990.
5. Bhiga is a traditional unit of measurement of land area, equivalent to roughly 1500 sq feet. Fun fact: In the movie, the valuation of two-bhigas was Rs. 350, which is Rs 4000 after adjusting for inflation. Today (2022), buying land of that size would cost Rs 750K+ in most places.
6. Amitabh Bachan started being called the ‘angry young man’ post ‘Zanjeer,’ which was often associated with his action movies. But it was his portrayal of a quiet, peaceful, helpless, and hence angry doctor in ‘Anand’ where the real angry man was born. He was angry at the state of the country.
