Anglo-Indian/Christian Middle-Class and Consumerist Modernity in the 1970s Hindi Cinema

Abstract

The paper analyses class negotiations in Hindi films of the 1970s, which conflate Anglo-Indian identity, Christianity, and middle-class subjectivity in three distinct social forms, viz., middle-class cinema, mainstream cinema, and art-house cinema. Films of the 1970s employ the Anglo-Indian identity to map the negotiations taking place along the class boundaries of a feudal order and an emergent bourgeois order, rather than limited to being the “other.” The community’s mediations with consumerist modernity, which is a marker of the bourgeois lifestyle, and how it gets articulated in the public narratives about them become crucial as Anglo-Indians are identified with the values of the capitalist West and therefore also for being “icons of commodity culture” in the Hindi filmic world right from the 1920s and 30s. The paper examines how the cultural representation of the Anglo-Indian/Christian community in films of these three categories responded to the consumerist modernity of the times while negotiating class boundaries. The first section on middle-class cinema discusses Basu Chatterjee’s Baton Baton Mein (1979); the second section deals with K. S. Sethumadhavan’s mainstream film Julie (1975); and the third section on art-house cinema analyses Saeed Akhtar Mirza’s Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hai (1980).