India’s founding documents defined the republic. But it was Bollywood that actually taught a billion people what it meant to be Indian — often with quite different, and sometimes contradictory, ideas about what that meant.

The 1950s — The Screen as Founding Document

When Jawaharlal Nehru stood at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, and spoke of India’s “tryst with destiny,” he was addressing a nation that was, by most measures, functionally illiterate. Fewer than 20 percent of Indians could read. The Constitution, ratified in 1950 — the longest in the world, a marvel of Ambedkarite legal imagination — was a document that most of its intended beneficiaries would never be able to access directly. The republic needed a different medium. It found one in cinema.

Hindi film in the 1950s was not escapism. It was nation-building by another name, and its practitioners understood this with varying degrees of self-consciousness. Raj Kapoor, the most popular filmmaker of the decade, was explicit about it. His production company RK Films operated almost as a shadow ministry of culture, and his great trilogy — Awaara (1951), Shree 420 (1955), and Jaagte Raho (1956) — constitutes perhaps the most sustained cinematic argument for Nehruvian socialism ever made.

The protagonist of Awaara, Ram, is the illegitimate son of a judge who has internalised the belief that criminality is inherited by birth. The film’s entire dramatic arc is a refutation of that belief. In a nation still organised around caste — which is, precisely, the inheritance of social position by birth — the ideological freight of this story was unmistakable.

Raj Kapoor’s visual vocabulary borrowed deliberately from Chaplin: the tramp, the outsider, the man of the streets who possesses a moral dignity that elites lack. This was the secular, socialist Indian hero — someone whose virtue was unconnected to birth, wealth, or religion, and whose antagonist was almost always a rich man who had confused prosperity with righteousness.

That this hero was also enormously appealing to Soviet audiences (Raj Kapoor was a superstar in the USSR, where Awaara was seen by an estimated 64 million viewers) was not incidental — the ideological alignment was deliberate.

Guru Dutt worked in a darker register. Where Kapoor offered the tramp as redemptive figure, Dutt’s films — Pyaasa (1957), Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959) — offered the artist as tragic victim: someone whose interiority the world would not accommodate. Pyaasa, in particular, is structured as a systematic critique of every institution the new republic was building — the literary establishment, the family, the commercial city, the police.

Its poet-hero, Vijay, is more comfortable among prostitutes and the destitute than among the respectable classes, and the film makes this a moral rather than a merely sentimental point. In the 1950s, when the state was constructing its own narrative of progressive modernity, Guru Dutt was already noting what the narrative was leaving out.

Nargis completed this trinity with a different kind of argument. Her towering performance in Mehboob Khan’s Mother India (1957) — a film that lost the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film by a single vote — presented womanhood as the site where the nation’s values were most severely tested and most heroically upheld. Radha, her character, is a woman who farms, suffers, sacrifices, and ultimately shoots her own son to defend community honour. The film has been read, with considerable justification, as a conservative text — the mother who internalises patriarchal values so completely that she becomes their enforcer.

But it was also the most successful Indian film of its era, seen by tens of millions who were not doing close textual readings. What they absorbed was the image of endurance as the definitional Indian virtue, and of the rural woman as its purest embodiment. That image has had a longer half-life than almost any policy document from the same decade.

Emergency, Sholay, and the Angry Young Man as Political Thesis: The Backbone of Bollywood

Between the idealism of the 1950s and the cynicism of the 1970s lies a geological fault line in Indian political history: the Emergency of 1975–77, when Indira Gandhi suspended democratic government, imprisoned opposition leaders, and censored the press. What she could not easily censor was cinema, which is perhaps why the cinema of that period is so legible as political commentary in retrospect.

Sholay was released in August 1975, three months after the Emergency was declared. Ramesh Sippy’s film has been analysed to the point of exhaustion as an entertainment object, but its political architecture rewards attention. The premise is precise: a retired policeman, Thakur, has had his entire family massacred by a dacoit, Gabbar Singh, and the formal institutions of law enforcement have proven useless against him. His solution is to hire two small-time criminals — Jai and Veeru — to do what the state cannot.

The Emergency government presented itself as a necessary instrument of order against chaos. Sholay proposed, to 200 million viewers in its initial run alone, that order would actually have to come from outside official channels, from men who lived by their own codes rather than the state’s law. This was not an argument the Emergency would have endorsed.

The angry young man arrived with Amitabh Bachchan, and specifically with the screenwriting partnership of Salim-Javed, whose work between 1973 and 1982 constitutes one of the most politically coherent bodies of popular writing in any medium. Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar gave Bachchan characters who were explicitly the products of systemic failure: illegitimate sons, orphans, men betrayed by the courts, by the police, by fathers, by the class system.

In Deewar (1975), the film that most directly encapsulates the thesis, two brothers take opposite sides of the law. Vijay (Bachchan) becomes a smuggler; Ravi becomes a policeman. The film’s sympathy is entirely with Vijay, not because he is right but because the system that produced Ravi’s moral clarity never extended that clarity to Vijay. The Indian state, Salim-Javed kept insisting, in film after film, had failed a generation. The films were, at the same time, the most commercially successful of the decade. A state that wanted to maintain its legitimacy might have paid closer attention.

The 1990s — The NRI, the Mall, and the New Indian Dream

India’s economic liberalisation, which began in earnest in 1991 under Manmohan Singh’s finance ministership, did not merely open the economy to foreign capital. It opened the cultural imagination to a new model of aspiration, and Bollywood both reflected and actively propagated that model with extraordinary speed.

The pivot was Yash Chopra and his family’s production house, Yash Raj Films, whose films of the early 1990s — and especially Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), which has run continuously at Mumbai’s Maratha Mandir cinema since its release — constructed a new kind of Indian hero for a new kind of Indian moment. Raj, played by Shah Rukh Khan, is a British-Indian who is simultaneously globally mobile and culturally rooted.

He drives a BMW through the Swiss Alps but can pull out a dhol at a moment’s notice. He is cosmopolitan and traditional at once — the aspirational fantasy of a middle class that wanted liberalisation’s prosperity without liberalisation’s cultural disruption. That the film’s plot turns on an NRI earning a Punjabi patriarch’s approval — rather than defying him — was not a conservative accident. It was a precise calibration of what its audience was willing to imagine.

The 1990s produced Bollywood‘s wholesale reimagination of Indian geography. Films moved from the railway platforms and chawls of the 1970s to the Swiss Alps, the streets of London, and eventually the gated communities of a newly prosperous India. The villain, correspondingly, shifted from the corrupt landlord or the dacoit to the overseas don — someone who had left India, accumulated criminal wealth abroad, and now threatened the homeland.

The economic logic was transparent: liberalisation was good, foreign wealth was dangerous, the ideal Indian was someone who could travel the world and come home richer but unchanged. This was aspiration as ideology, and it was vastly more effective at communicating the middle-class politics of the 1990s than any party manifesto.

The 2010s — Mythology, Muscle, and the New Hero

Something shifted visibly in Hindi cinema in the years surrounding 2014, and while it would be reductive to attribute this entirely to political change, the correlation is too systematic to dismiss. The decade that followed Narendra Modi’s electoral victory produced a cluster of films whose ideological vocabulary was organised around a set of concepts — national honour, Hindu civilisational pride, military sacrifice, the strongman as saviour — that were not absent from earlier Bollywood but had never before occupied quite so central a position.

The most instructive example is not the explicitly nationalist films (Uri: The Surgical Strike, The Kashmir Files, Pathaan in a more complicated register) but the quieter reconfiguration of what the hero looks like and where he draws his authority. The Bachchan-era angry young man was angry at the system. The new hero — Ranveer Singh’s Alauddin in Padmaavat, Akshay Kumar’s across a dozen films, Prabhas’s Baahubali (which, though Telugu, was a cultural event in Hindi-speaking India) — is angry at enemies of the civilisation.

The antagonist is no longer the domestic class system but the foreign invader, the terrorist, the secessionist. The state is no longer the entity that failed the hero — it is increasingly the entity the hero serves and redeems.

The mythological turn is equally significant. Baahubali‘s world-building drew explicitly on the visual grammar of Hindu epic tradition, and its extraordinary commercial success — it became the highest-grossing Indian film ever made at the time — demonstrated the size of the appetite for that grammar.

Adipurush, Brahmastra, and a clutch of announced mythological productions followed. This is not simply entertainment responding to demand. It is the construction of a shared visual language in which certain symbols, certain types of heroism, and certain types of transgression are normalised at a mass scale. The screen, as in the 1950s, is doing the work that institutions cannot do — but the values being embedded are substantially different from Raj Kapoor’s or Guru Dutt’s.

The Bollywood Frame and Contemporary Indian Politics

The reason the Bollywood frame helps in understanding contemporary Indian politics is that it tracks something that conventional political analysis consistently underweights: the pre-political formation of values. Elections are decided by voters who already know, before they enter the booth, what a leader should look like, what sacrifice means, who counts as the enemy, what prosperity should feel like.

Those frameworks are not built by political parties in election season. They are built across decades of cultural consumption, and in India, Bollywood has been the primary instrument of that construction.

Consider what seven decades of Hindi cinema have collectively taught its audience. The 1950s taught that virtue was independent of birth but dependent on suffering — the poor hero was morally credible precisely because he had endured. The 1970s taught that institutions were corrupt but that individual moral agency could still cut through, at great personal cost.

The 1990s taught that prosperity was legitimate if it was earned abroad and brought home, and that cultural roots could survive globalisation if you were careful. The 2010s are teaching that the nation has enemies whose defeat requires a new kind of hero — one who does not ask whether the system is just but whether the civilisation is threatened.

Each of these lessons shaped a political common sense. The Emergency-era films, by delegitimising official institutions, prepared a generation for cynicism about government that both helped and hurt the democracy in different moments. The 1990s films helped build the cultural consent for liberalisation that made its political sustainability possible. The 2010s films are building something whose full political consequences are not yet visible, but whose direction is not difficult to read.

The films do not cause political change. But they produce the audiences that political change requires.

A Watching List — The Films That Explain How We Got Here

If you want to understand Indian political culture from the inside, a reading list of constitutional debates and Five-Year Plans will take you only so far. The following films, watched in order, constitute something closer to a genuine education.

Begin with Awaara (1951) to understand what secular, socialist aspiration looked like when it was new and genuinely believed — and to understand how Nehruvian India wanted to think about itself. Follow it with Pyaasa (1957), because Guru Dutt will immediately complicate the optimism and introduce you to the India the official narrative was not capturing. Then Mother India (1957), because no other single film has done more to define the emotional grammar of Indian womanhood, for better and worse.

Watch Sholay (1975) with political attention, not just as a Western. Then Deewar (1975) immediately after, and notice how two films from the same year, both starring Bachchan, make essentially the same argument about institutional failure in completely different registers. Arth (1982) and Sparsh (1980) will show you the parallel art-house tradition that was making different arguments at the same moment.

For the liberalisation turn, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) is inescapable, but watch it alongside Bombay (Mani Ratnam, 1995) — which addresses the communal violence of 1992–93 directly and with a courage that is striking in retrospect. The juxtaposition tells you everything about the decade’s contradictions.

For the 2010s, Lagaan (2001) is the hinge point — a film about colonialism and collective effort that was the last great expression of a certain inclusive nationalist sentiment before the register changed. Place it next to Uri (2019) and the difference in what the nation is defending, and who it is defending it against, becomes impossible to miss.

The final film on the list should be Gulabo Sitabo (Shoojit Sircar, 2020) — a small, precise film about two men fighting over a crumbling Lucknow haveli that neither owns. It is, among other things, about what happens to a society when everyone is claiming inheritance from a past they have competing versions of. It is also very funny. In this respect it is both an outlier and, perhaps, a map.

India’s Constitution has been amended 106 times. Bollywood has never needed amending — it simply made a new film. This is why it has, in some ways, been the more resilient document.