Shifting Patterns in Bollywood

Those who know me well would never accuse me of being a fan of Bollywood. In fact, the accusation has often been the other way round. I've been deemed an aantel (Bengali adjective that ridicules intellectuals) because of my conspicuous disinterest regrading the popular entertainment presented by the likes of Karan Johar and Shahrukh Khan. Nonetheless, there have been occasional moments in my life, too, when I have watched a Sholay or a Kuch Kuch Hota Hai with considerable attentiveness; or when I have glanced, albeit casually, to whatever was shown on the television. I continue at present too, to keep myself abreast of the headlines in the world's largest film industry; and the musings reflected in this particular piece are conclusions drawn from such observations; from the past and from the present.

Whoever has seen Bollywood movies of the eighties and early nineties would probably agree that a majority of the movies tended to relate to a certain socio-economic stratum. The good guys overwhelmingly came from a poor or lower middle class background; their economic condition varying from a state of absolute destitution to that of moderate scarcity; but never of abundance. The bad guy almost inevitably was the obscenely rich and devilishly crooked businessman; who would device the dirtiest of means to harass the poor.

The hero would often take the role of a Messiah of the poor; someone who stands up against smuggling trades of the villain; someone who resists bulldozers that the promoter sends to destroy slums; someone who grows up through hardship and deprivation and one day goes on to avenge the misdeeds perpetrated against his family and his people. We have seen Amitabh doing that role a million times. We have seen Mithun there. We have even seen how wealth corrupts character; through the experiences of one Raju in Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman, portrayed by a young Shahrukh Khan.

Since the economic liberalization of India in the nineties; there seems to have been a paradigm shift in that regard. The hero and his friends are no longer poor; seldom are they from the middle class. In contemporary Bollywood movies, the main characters are filthy rich! They are either sons and daughters of industrialists preparing to take over family businesses; or MBAs living in the US; or Engineers working in London. They are dressed in designer clothes; they have well-groomed bodies and perfectly gelled hair and they drink champagne. They visit Switzerland and Australia during vacations and they go to Spain for Bachelor Parties. The modern day hero, too, has his own problems; but unlike his counterpart from the past, unemployment or feeding a family is not one of them.

There certainly is a correlation between the shifting pattern in Bollywood movies and the pro-market economic policies; but there is more to it. It would simply be wrong, for instance, to assert that Indians have gotten significantly richer in the last twenty years; for they clearly haven't. The rich and poor divide, on the contrary has widened; inflation rates have soared; and it is a matter of controversy whether there has been any significant reduction in the percentage of people living below the poverty line.

There is data, that shows that the middle class has become somewhat wealthier. This has been accompanied by a high degree of increase in their aspirations and more importantly, in the attitude towards the rich. The rich are no longer a class of oppressive minority that amassed wealth through deception; rather, they are what the middle-class wants to be. The values that traditionally defined the Indian urban middle-class for a large part of the last century are vanishing; giving way to those that are more suited to a consumer-based economy. Outlooks are changing fast, and socialistic ideals of the past are withering away rapidly from the minds of people; to be replaced by a strong desire for materialistic pursuits: a desire to make more money, a desire to buy more things.

My contention is that it is this aspiration among the middle and upper middle class; this ambition to be rich; this desire of emulating the lives of the rich; that more than anything else, has brought about the shift in the socio-economic ambience of the Bollywood movie. For after all, Bollywood caters by and large to the taste of the middle class.

There could certainly be a host of other reasons and factors that are directly or indirectly responsible for this change. It would indeed be an interesting topic in sociological studies to investigate these effects.