Liberal Indo-Optimism
Koi na jaane apna future kya hoga～
2026-04-04(Sat) 16:00 AST
First, a (history/disclaimer)
I am not Indian. And before I spent the month of March watching an average of two movies a day, I did not watch much bollywood. What follows are my observations of Indian culture and political culture through a foreign lens into the world of North Indian Hindi-language cinema, and I humbly encourage any Indians or people who know about India to berate and endlessly criticise this piece if I am incorrect in some way or another.
When India gained independence in 1947, it took the role of cinema as political propaganda (using the word in a non-pejorative sense) very seriously, and established the Films Division. On paper, it existed merely to screen certain newsreels and documentaries compulsorily before a feature film was to be aired. In practice it was quite broad, and was used as a method of enlisting figures like Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor, and Nargis Dutt into making films that had some political undertones.
The political cinema of the 50s and 60s that resulted from this could be called Nehruvian cinema; what Jawaharlal Nehru himself called "films with a message" that, indeed, had some messages that were quite in tune with the Fabian socialism and secularism that he, and the wider Indian National Congress, believed in. These films could range from the very literal, like Ab Dilli Dur Nahin (1957), which was about a boy visiting Nehru himself to seek justice, to the (slightly) subtle, like Awaara (1951), which had socialist themes, was extremely popular in the USSR, and explored the humanisation of the poor that Nehru promoted.
This Nehruvian cinema starts to fray after his death in 1964, and by the 70s it was effectively crumbling. There began a bit of a division in bollywood afterwards; the economic stagnation, political turmoil, and increasing unemployment of the era, all exacerbated by Indira Gandhi's Emergency, meant that there was more of an appetite to make films that increasingly challenged and questioned state authority like the police; this was a good moment for actors like Amitabh Bachchan, who starred in Zanjeer (1973), which started the movement of the "angry young men" in bollywood from the 70s to the 80s. It did not matter, of course, that the "angry young men" of the era were not that anti-Congress at all; Bachchan was for a time elected in the Lok Sabha as a member of the INC, and he was accused of being too close to Indira's government during the Emergency, but he nevertheless helped expressed a feeling of disillusion at the state and its figures.
Indira Gandhi didn't entirely ignore this feeling. Under her rule, the Films Division made shorts to be played before feature showings that glorified her, in a form that was much more direct, much more personalistic, and much less ideological than what was played during the Nehru era. The Indian Woman: A Historical Assessment (1975) and Our Indira (1973) were examples of this.
As the 80s rolled by, a frankly weird and incoherent time in Indian cinema that deserves its own treatment, the Nehruvian style of film was close to death, injured seriously by a dissolution into general genre cinema, violence, and spectacle. Whatever indirect propaganda existed was usually made by regional or state film corporations that used the machinery in their own ways.
The final nail in the coffin, and the first thing in this history that will be directly relevant to what I will later say, was the 1991 liberalisation. The economics of Indian cinema were changed by the new things that were brought from the liberalisation, from cheaper satellite television at home to the introduction of large, urban multiplexes in major cities. Tickets in these multiplexes were much more expensive than the tickets at the single-screen cinemas that were scattered across the country, and there was both an increasing middle-class and an emerging and wealthy diaspora. All of this meant that a film could recover its cost from fewer people paying more money for it; this, alongside the mood of the era, meant that the industry figures of the 90s would not need to worry about catering to the mass market, and that they could make films about themselves and their sensibilities, the sensibilities of an outward looking Indian middle-class.
A Liberal Indo-Optimism
Between 2001's Dil Chahta Hai and 2014's PK, was what I believe to be the peak of a series of film that had what I'd call a "Liberal Indo-Optimist" message, which is something that I use sort of loosely here. Some of these films are comedies, some are dramas, some are SRK vehicles, some are Aamir Khan vehicles, some are Rajkumar Hirani joints, some might even seem antithetical to the idea, but I believe they all share something.
That something is a set of assumptions about India. India is flawed; its education system is cruel (3 Idiots, 2009), its religious institutions are superstitious (PK, OMG, 2012), its villages lack electricity (Swades, 2004), and its nationalism can be exclusionary (Chak De! India, 2007). But also, that these flaws can be fixed. They can be fixed through individual goodwill, a cosmopolitan and outward-looking openness, a criticism of authorities that can be flawed, and a composite understanding of Indian identity that includes Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and everyone else. A Muslim hockey coach who has to prove his patriotism by coaching the women's team (Chak De! India). The mere idea that an Indian girl can date a Pakistani boy (PK). A diaspora scientist who leaves NASA to bring electricity to a rural village (Swades). A composite team that represents all of India defeats the Britishers at their own game (Lagaan). These are progressive films, in a general and not merely political sense; they assume India is getting better, and that the trajectory of liberalisation, globalisation, and social reform will continue.
These films are different in tone from the more paternalistic propaganda of the Nehruvian 50s and 60s, which emphasised the state more than anything else, and different in content from the more chaotic 70s and 80s. Holi (1984) is a good example of the latter; college students rise up against the authoritarian establishment of Indian education and then end up in jail. 3 Idiots, meanwhile, shows all the protagonists working with the establishment to reach an amicable conclusion and go on to have flourishing careers. Rajkumar Hirani, who directed 3 Idiots, was particularly good at getting the attention of the middle-class multiplex audience; they did not want deep inquiries into Indian society, they wanted to feel good about themselves and about a country that happened to be getting visibly richer for once. He has even been referred to as bollywood's "middle-class reformer."
A decay
While this type of film was very popular in its heyday of 2001-2014 that I identified, it didn't die immediately. If you know Indian politics, you'll know that 2014 was when Narendra Modi and the BJP were elected into power. Modi's vision of India conflicted with the vision of Liberal Indo-Optimist films, but that did not stop them from being made initially. Dangal (2016), which was also popular in China, was very well received at its time, and you can look into films like Pad Man (2018), or quite frankly any other Akshay Kumar film between Modi's rise to power and COVID.
It's also not like only Liberal Indo-Optimist films were made in the 2001-2014 era; 16 December (2002) was quite militaristic and bombastic and it was also well received. What I do feel confident in saying is that films like that were not the dominant mode of politically inclined film of the era, and I feel like those films of the era since 2019 are much more like 16 December than they are like PK.
The CAA protests, the effects of COVID, and the broader hardening of Indian political culture changed that register. Rather than the object of pride being the large and growing middle class, a different object of pride was chosen instead. URI: The Surgical Strike (2019), The Kashmir Files (2022), the historical epics about Hindu warrior kings like Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior (2020) and Chhaava (2025) express a nationalism that is civilisational rather than composite. The protagonists and antagonists are not vague ideals, but specifically defined (usually Hindu and Muslim/Colonial/Liberal respectively), and the state is an instrument of strength. In tone, it is actually much closer to Nehruvian cinema than it is to the Liberal Indo-Optimism that this new type of film replaced; it just has a different message.
That different message was, as I said earlier, aided by COVID, in a particularly unique way: COVID forced everyone inside, and that caused the revenues of big multiplexes to decline significantly. It also accelerated a transition towards over-the-top (or OTT) services at home. What remains in theatres is, almost by necessity, a type of event cinema that demands a large screen and spectacle; anything quieter was reserved for OTT, and even in that field, the Liberal Indo-Optimist films, and any other “films with a message”, were challenged by mid-tier star vehicles.
An outside view
There are probably an infinite number of reasons for why bollywood went from Liberal Indo-Optimism to what it is now. Some will allege the BJP's favouritism of those films over others, some will argue that the same Indian middle-class that was the vanguard of Liberal Indo-Optimism later became the BJP's vanguard, still others will say that the liberalisation did not produce true gains for most Indians. Whatever the cause may be, I might know something about this.
The Liberal Indo-Optimist films were fantasies, in the sense that they imagined an India that was always on the verge of becoming its best self. The post-2019 films are also fantasies, but of a different kind: fantasies of a civilisational greatness that was stolen and must be reclaimed. Both are responses to the same underlying reality; a country that is too large, too complex, and too contradictory to match any single cinematic vision of itself. What I learned from deciding to get really into India for a few months and watching a lot of films is that, to calque the great De Gaulle, India is a large country, with many Indians.
Indian patriotism expresses itself in many different views, and I think something is worth exploring in what exactly the dominant views are and how they shift and how they are represented through cinema. I think the answer of "What is there to be proud of, about India?" can be somewhat in-between the views expressed by Swades and URI; the difference between the nationalism that gives your village rural electricity and the nationalism that bombs your house and fucking kills you.
I think I've lost count of how many movies I watched from March 'till roughly now.