From domestic guardian to the national militia: the familial, the national and the middle class in 1980s popular Hindi films

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes the theme of domestic anxiety of the Indian middle class in the 1980s through two specific genres of the contemporary popular Hindi films – the family drama and the action adventure. Poised right before the 1990s neoliberal drive in the Indian economy, the 80s middle class – hitherto staid and hermetic – was rattled by an ‘invasive’ global culture, permissiveness, politics of representation, rights and reform. This paper shows that the cinematic resolution of this crisis is a grudgingly lenient orthodoxy negotiating with the limits of cultural inclusion, represented through the questions of agency, gender, class, caste and ethnicity abounding in the middle class domestic sphere. The essay analyzes the middle class problematization of the familial as well as the national in films like Arth (Bhatt, 1982), Agar Tum Na Hote (Tandon, 1983), Souten (Tak, 1983), Shaan (Sippy, 1980) and Mr. India (Kapur, 1987).