The affable young man: Civility, desire and the making of a middle-class cinema in the 1970s

Abstract

A significant counterpoint to the subaltern impatience and revolt that characterized popular Hindi cinema of the 1970s was the staging of middle-class civility and desire, away from the generic conventions of the ‘masala-Social.’ This paper argues that this new desire for modernity was supplemented with a determination to secure it, and necessarily involved fresh forms of engagement and disengagement with the Symbolic pact that had instituted modernity in India during the Nehruvian conjuncture. I trace the emergence of a new cycle of middle-class cinema by focusing on the contrapuntal star personas of the ‘angry’ and the ‘affable’ young men (Amitabh Bachchan and Amol Palekar) during this decade. The focus is on selected films by Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterjee which put into play a newer narrative contract, and consolidated the rise of the desiring/consuming screen subjects of the post-liberalization Hindi film narratives.