Spatial Insecurity, Troubled Nationalism, and the Urban Middle-class: Geopolitics of Select 1980s Hindi Masala Entertainers

Abstract

The proposed project aims to study select masala Hindi films popular during the 1980s in India. The purpose is to analyze how the films of this genre negotiate with the impending threat to the existing national identity in the wake of the post-emergency politics of separatism, regionalism, and representation. Placed right before the 1990s neoliberal drive in the Indian economy, the 80s middle- class– hitherto a socialist and hermetic community– was paranoid by an ‘invasive’ global culture, permissiveness, politics of rights, and reform. This study 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 city, and the national spectrum. The study posits that irrespective of the genre, the majority of the 1980s Hindi films can be considered as a microcosm of India’s national identity going through a crucial transition manifested as a crisis of middle-class domesticity. Despite a latent narrative strain of begrudging mediation with the demands of a new and libertarian time, this meta- genre normalizes duty, fidelity, and caste/gender/racial archetypes in service of a traditional domestic hierarchy at their climax, and successfully foretells India’s continuing struggle with modern liberalism, individual agency, identity conflicts, and inclusivity.