The term ‘Bollywood’ was, as late as in the new millennium, resisted by doyens of the film industry in India because they took the term to be pejorative, i.e. that mainstream Hindi cinema simply aped Hollywood (4). It has been argued that there are two types of cultural nationalism at work with regard to the meaning of popular cinema today. The older one insists that mainstream Hindi cinema is first and foremost located at ‘home’, i.e. in India. The second sees only a distinct cultural constituency including not only audiences within India but a cross-over segment as well. It would appear that the term ‘Bollywood’ shorn of its pejorative implications is a promoted by the second kind of ‘cultural nationalists’. The indications are that the term ‘Bollywood’ first became acceptable currency not within India but in the UK and USA, in places like Bradford, Leicester and Birmingham, where Hindi films are marketed as a brand with ‘Bollywood’ being a kind of label (5). I would like to stretch the argument to suggest that since a part of the overseas audience consuming mainstream Hindi cinema would be South-Asian without being Indian, the term ‘Bollywood’ may have even become a more acceptable label than ‘Indian’ because it does not signify a specific national identity which might invite hostility (6).  

What makes Bollywood a brand is not the content of cinema – as constituted by film narrative (7) – but a certain kind of allure produced by a characteristic visual excess brought in by spectacle, choreography, costume, and music. It is this visual excess that allows Bollywood to become a ‘lifestyle statement’ and enables it to be employed in areas outside cinema itself. It is Bollywood and not mainstream Hindi cinema that has assisted in Indian capital becoming conspicuous abroad through Indian restaurants, clothing and décor. Well-known instances are the moderately successful musical Bombay Dreams (2004) produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber and with music by AR Rahman and the various selling campaigns used partly by clothing stores and restaurants. The well-known British departmental store Selfridges had a month-long focus on the theme of Bollywood in May 2002 with Indian clothes and items of décor exhibited in its London and Manchester shops. During this period a broad based promotion of South-Asian film, dance, music and theatre – called ‘Imaginasia’ was also undertaken in Britain (8). With this transformation in the spectator profile of the mainstream Hindi film, one might anticipate a transformation in its political role within India as well and it may not be doing what it once was.

The political role of mainstream Hindi cinema after 1947
It is now a truism to say that mainstream Hindi cinema assisted in the imaging of the Indian nation. The growth of cinema in the former colonies went through several stages.  In the first stage – between 1910 and 1915 usually – there was an explosion of locally produced cinema that was soon wiped out by mass-entertainment from the West (9). Even in India, which was to later dominate its domestic market, 85% of the screen-time in the 1920s was occupied by foreign imports (10). Some of these local commercial cinemas reasserted themselves later but they also provoked reactions of a predominantly negative kind among Third-World critics and theorists and the critical writing or the theoretical speculation that Hollywood generated was absent. It was perhaps as a response that the first wave of ‘national’ filmmakers emerged from the former colonies: Youssef Chahine from Egypt, Satyajit Ray from India, Lester James Peries from Sri Lanka, Leopoldo Torre Nillson from Argentina, TG Alea and Humberto Solas from Cuba and Fernando Birri from Brazil.

While the ‘National’ filmmakers were largely from the Western educated elite of the former colonies and their films were often officially designated as representing National culture, the more successful of the local entertainment cinemas – especially Indian and Egyptian – also took up the task of building nationhood in earnest. If Egyptian cinema went on to represent ‘Arab’ rather than ‘Egyptian’ cinema, it has been shown by film theorists that Hindi entertainment cinema, which had been suturing cultural differences and producing a homogeneous mass culture even before 1947, became a useful tool in defining and maintaining the Indian Nation (11). The Hindi film was intended to appeal to people spread over a wide territory and it kept its language simple and accessible, much more so than the Hindi of AIR or Doordarshan (12).The Indian Nation is therefore discernibly ‘inscribed’ in mainstream Hindi filmic texts after 1947. Theorists have broadly noted that Independence acquires ‘figurability’ in mainstream Hindi films after 1947 (13). Jawaharlal Nehru, who perhaps looked upon the mainstream film as a cultural embarrassment, declared that the film industry was not a priority and the Nehruvian state declined to do for the film industry what it did for the other industries (14). Mainstream cinema therefore assisted in the collective imagining of the Nation despite the state’s apathy towards its development.  
 
Much work has been done with regard to Hindi cinema’s ideological/ political role and the more influential approach has been post-Marxist. M Madhava Prasad’s approach to Hindi cinema immediately after independence depends on two key arguments. The First is that Parsi theatre which was apparently the original model for the mainstream Hindi film took inspiration the romance which preceded the advent of realist fiction in the west. The romance was typically a tale of love and adventure in which a high-born figure, usually a prince, underwent trials that tested his courage and at the end of which he returned to inherit his father’s position and to marry (15). But there are problems in tracing Hindi cinema through the medium of Parsi theatre of the early twentieth century because the attributes of Parsi theatre are not rigorously documented and much wisdom on what it was like rests on hearsay. Also, if Parsi theatre uses the model of the romance, the model hardly finds correspondence in Hindi cinema of the 1940s and 1950s. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to find films in this period in which the protagonist ‘inherits his father’s position’. The films that Prasad cites as examples – Mehboob Khan’s Andaz (1949) and Raj Kapoor’s Awaara (1951) – feature enormously wealthy fathers but both films conclude on a tragic note with the ‘heirs’ also being handed prison sentences. Neither film concludes with the affirmation of a ‘feudal order’ (16) as one would expect from Prasad’s conjectures. The motifs familiar to us from the typical films of the same period are those like the legal profession (Aag, 1948, Mahal, 1949), orphans (Anokhi Ada, 1948, Dastaan, 1950), shadowy criminals and sleazy nightclubs (Baazi, 1951, Jaal, 1952) and it will take some effort to detect ‘feudal’ motifs in many of these films and a factor is the absence of a landowning class. The protagonists of the Hindi films of the 1940s and 1950s, when they own land, usually till it themselves. While the acolyte is a character in many of these films, there may be other explanations for them. The rich protagonist’s dealings with his acolyte friend in Andaz may appear like an endorsement of ‘feudal’ relationships but it owes more directly to Sanskrit dramatics with its reliance on the vidhushaka or clown.  

Allegory of the Nation
A more useful understanding of mainstream Hindi cinema’s political role after 1947 can perhaps be arrived at through an older study (17) which is generally not cited by film theorists today. A study of audience reactions to Hindi cinema testing several independent hypotheses on popular cinema’s social role concluded that it was largely an instrument of ‘cultural continuity’. Hindi films apparently stabilize the social system by representing new needs and mythologizing ‘tradition’. New needs are historically created and an ‘instrument of cultural continuity’ perhaps needs to bridge the gap between the expectations created by traditional belief and the actual dispensations of history. What popular film narrative apparently does is to problematize the experience of history in a language familiar to tradition and then provide fictional resolutions. This implies, as one might expect, that it is the immediate expectations of the present which are the key to what is problematized.  As an instance, the economic liberalization of 1991-92 aroused apprehensions in the public about how the moral fabric of the Nation might be affected with the end of Nehruvian socialism and non-interventionism by the state. A key film of the period, Baazigar (1993), responded by portraying the struggle between two families for the control of a business empire as a fight to the death between the scion of one family and the patriarch of the other, with the police hesitating to intervene.  As argued elsewhere (18) the anti-hero of this film – like that of an earlier one Jaal (1952) – are engendered by the distance of the moral state and their amorality shows itself (within the conventions of the popular film) in the most dastardly way possible – they way they take advantage of and betray defenseless women. At the basic level, therefore, it would seem that popular cinema proceeds by allegorizing the historical circumstance in the language of myth (19). This finds correspondence in Frederic Jameson’s assertion that ‘Third World’ texts are national allegories although Jameson approaches the issue from another side (20).

A principal way in which the Nation is inscribed in Hindi cinema after 1947 is by allegorizing it as a community. In Mother India (1957), the Community is the village and in Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (HAHK, 1994) Kailas Nath’s family gatherings represent the Community. In Border (1998) the Community is a battalion in the military while in Lagaan (2002), it is the cricket team. In each of these films the Community is constituted to include religious minorities, different castes and social classes. The Community, like the Nation, commands loyalty and betraying it or its creed merits punishment. This sanctity accorded to the Community means that it has a greater significance than suggested by its physical constitution. To elaborate, the village in Mother India is not merely an Indian village just as the cricket team in Lagaan is not merely a village cricket team. The Community as the Nation in microcosm also means that the deepest conflict in the narrative are arranged within and not caused by agencies external to it. The character(s) at the moral centre of the narrative as well as those creating discord are therefore part of the Community – as in Mother India, HAHK and Lagaan. While the Community is a convenient way of representing the Nation, the narrative may also invoke it explicitly and without resorting to allegory. Upkaar (1967), for instance, not only allegorizes India and Pakistan as estranged brothers and Partition as the division of their ancestral land but also introduces the military, war and the defense of the Nation as motifs. The ‘community’ is only one way in which the Nation may be inscribed because there is a more fundamental motif – an issue brought into crisis by Hindi melodramas after 1947 which is ‘loyalty’.

Melodrama and the Nation
It is generally accepted that melodrama is the form chosen by popular cinema to emphasize its concerns but the relationship between Hindi cinema’s ideological side and melodrama is still uncertain. The tendency among Indian film theorists is to rely on Western theories of melodrama to explain Indian popular cinema (21). The key work here is perhaps by Peter Brooks, who traced it to the aftermath of the French Revolution when the traditional sacred (Church and Monarch) lost their centrality (22). The ‘moral occult’ within melodrama, i.e. the metaphysical system that rewards and punishes, is considered a corollary to the democratization of society (the Republic becoming the agent of morality instead of King and God) and this gives melodrama special value. While Indian film theorists appear, generally, to be in agreement about melodrama being a consequence of the democratization of society, they decline to explain how a narrative form regarded as a repository of ‘feudal’ values is also a vehicle for the ‘democratization of society’.

Not only is there no evidence that Indian film melodrama owes in any way to European history, but it is also very different from standard Western melodrama in which the spectator is brought to a state of recognition (23). Western melodrama allows for point of view and the spectator is encouraged to follow the same emotional trajectory that a focal character might have taken. In Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955), for instance, we are gradually led to the same recognitions that the woman played by Jane Wyman makes. In contrast, Indian film narrative always chooses the omniscient eye (24). This means that when gaps of knowledge are created, they are only for the characters, the audience being privileged with complete information at every juncture. Instead of forcing recognitions, consequently, Indian film melodrama chooses to affirm truths which are familiar. This requirement that the truths essayed by popular cinema will be ‘familiar’ means that a film cannot defeat narrative expectations. It can be argued that ‘radical subversions’ would be difficult in cinema without narrative expectations being belied in some sense (25) and Hindi popular cinema has perhaps no capability to be other than socially conservative although, as I shall demonstrate, it has occasionally found the means to get out of this bind.

The ‘social’ originated in the colonial period and post-Independence melodrama may be understood as a continuation of the social of the earlier period but there are nonetheless crucial differences. The most apparent difference between the ‘reformist’ films of the 1930s/ early 1940s and their counterparts around 1947 (and after) is that the melodrama in the later cinema is of a much more heightened kind. There is apparently a greater degree of ‘moral polarization’ in films like Anmol Ghadi (1946) in as much as the film places an object of immense love/veneration at its center (the mother) and gets heightened effects entirely through this placement. Indian popular cinema never took an ambivalent position with regard to right and wrong (which find correspondence in ‘good’ and ‘bad’) but in Anmol Ghadi, we also see an individual denoted as ‘good’ conducting himself in a way judged as ‘wrong’ and this seems to be without precedent. My own understanding is that ‘wrong’ conduct is towards a new entity introduced into the narrative, and the subsequent redefining of the moral framework to admit a reference to this entity. The new entity demanding loyalty in Anmol Ghadi is the mother and an association can be made between the figure of the mother and the future nation (26). The idea of the nation therefore plays some part in redefining the moral framework within film narrative around 1947. A new moral issue viz. ‘loyalty’ comes into evidence with Independence and it is usually possible to read the involvement of the Nation into melodramas whenever loyalty is the central issue – whether to a community or a relationship. It is the issue of ‘loyalty’ which implicates the Nation or an affiliated notion (like the Land, the State or even Tradition) morally and helps inscribe the Nation in any popular film after 1947. It should be observed here that in the most famous Hindi film before 1947 – PC Barua’s Devdas (1935) – ‘love’ is not accompanied by the notion of ‘loyalty’. But the inscription of the Nation does not mean that the Nation is a constant in cinema. It waxes and wanes depending partly on the exigencies of the historical moment. In the years after the disastrous Sino-Indian War of 1961, for instance, the Nation is weakest in cinema. Loyalty is still an issue in a film like Mere Mehboob (1963) but not the central one.   

An examination of the most celebrated Hindi melodramas after 1947 – films like Andaz (1949), Awaara (1951), Mother India (1957), Sangam (1964), Deewar (1975) and Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (1994) – reveals that loyalty is the issue which comes under test each time although the apparent object of loyalty varies. A narrative ploy is a sacrifice of some sort in which a course of action is taken as a way of affirming a loyalty. In Mother India and Deewar, for instance, the mother sacrifices her son when he becomes a danger to the community. In Sangam, a man kills himself because his relationship with his childhood friend demands it. What is significant here is that the sentiment of loyalty in each of these films is a ‘universal’. To elaborate, it is a sentiment which does not address a single class or segment but an undifferentiated audience. HAHK may be dealing with an affluent class but when the protagonists agree to marry against their personal choices and in accordance with the wishes of their families, they affirm that the joint family is a transcendental object of loyalty and this sentiment is familiar enough to be a ‘universal’ among Hindi film audiences. The allegorical side of Hindi film melodrama coupled with the ‘universality’ of the loyalties it affirmed, it can be argued, made the Nation – that Hindi cinema helped to imagine – a largely inclusive one and this is true of Hindi cinema until the early years of the new millennium.

While the ‘affirmative’ aspect of Hindi cinema is almost without exception, there have been moments when the Nation and State were publicly viewed more ambivalently than at other times and Hindi cinema has been able to respond to this ambivalence. Deewar (1975) which carries echoes of Mother India (1956) is still very different from the earlier film in one crucial way. Mother India was made in a period of great national optimism (27) while Deewar came out during the Emergency when Prime Minister Mrs Gandhi had armed herself with dictatorial powers and the State was viewed with fear and apprehension. In both Mother India and Deewar the male protagonist has a disadvantaged childhood, embarks on an unlawful path as an adult, and in both the films his mother plays a key role in his killing. But important here is that in Deewar, the audience’s sympathies are deliberately channeled in another direction when criminal protagonist is allowed to upstage both his mother and his lawful brother – even as the film nominally upholds the latter (28). If the sentiments it expresses are still familiar, its ‘insincerity’ now comes to its assistance.  

While the poorest people in India may never have constituted the bulk of Hindi film clientele, mainstream Hindi cinema not only helped an undifferentiated mass audience to imagine the Nation but also provided mechanisms by the State could be interrogated although the underlying sentiment was affirmative. With mainstream Hindi cinema becoming Bollywood and the diaspora becoming a key commercial factor, its address has become more asymmetric, and Bollywood is perhaps not even as ‘Indian’ as Hindi cinema once happened to be.

A period of transition
The 1990s represent a period of transition for Hindi cinema because ‘Nehruvian socialism’ ended with the economic liberalization of 1991-92 and Hindi cinema changed track significantly after that. It took more than two years for Hindi cinema to transform but the effects were far reaching. Some of the effects of the economic measures upon Hindi film narrative were (29):

1. Hindi cinema did away with the underprivileged as principal subjects of film narrative and began focusing exclusively on the rich – as in Hum Aapke Hain Koun…!
2. The economic liberalization was interpreted as the State withdrawing from the public space. Since the State vacated film narrative as a participant, the stories became simpler. Films tried to compensate by focusing on spectacle – ritual as in HAHK and foreign locations as in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) and Hero No. 1 (1997).
3. The Nation was represented as an abstraction without the State being implicated in the film narrative. Allegories of the Nation flourished as different kinds of communities – a happy family in HAHK, a school in Mohabbatein (2000), the household of a musician-guru in Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999), a cricket team in Lagaan (2001).
4. The state withdrawing from its own institutions led to the police being represented as unfettered by the law – as in Satya (1999). Gangland wars became a metaphor for unregulated competition, with the police behaving as private agencies.
5.  With there being no possibility of social conflict between classes in film narrative, conflict was pushed to the boundaries of the Nation. This registered as ‘patriotism’ in films like Border (1998) and Lagaan (2001).

Most of the films of the 1990s continue to be melodramas although Border and Satya may resist the description. One aspect that distinguishes a melodrama in Indian cinema – from a film which is not – is that a melodrama has a strong closure at the level of the family (30). This requires the support of many other factors but the notion of loyalty usually imparts this strength. A romantic attachment coming to fruition represents a closure but unless it is strengthened by other factors involving loyalty of some sort, it may not be strong enough to render the film a ‘melodrama’. In Lagaan the romance is weak but loyalty to the ‘community’ is a crucial issue and the same is equally true of Border. In Satya familial bonding is absent but loyalty to a friend becomes a useful substitute.  

Globalization and Hindi cinema
Even as Hindi cinema was responding to the end of socialism, there were far-reaching developments in the social space because of the growth of new economy businesses – especially the IT sector – and its contribution to the global economy. The following were the apparent developments which could ultimately have impacted upon the shape taken by mainstream Hindi cinema in the new millennium:

1. The new economy industries which took root in the 1990s were different in as much as their business originated abroad rather than within India. This saw Indian professionals traveling overseas as never before and not as tourists as had once been the case (32).
2. The wage levels in the new economy companies were comparable to that in the West while the cost of living remained comparatively low. This meant that the employees in new economy businesses had a spending power undreamt of earlier. This led to an explosion in consumption and the proliferation of shopping centers and malls in the cities.
3. Because the new businesses were global, an association was made between wealth and working knowledge of the English language. The Anglophone Indian, it gradually meant, was the one with the greatest spending power.
4. The development of India became skewed with the concentration of new economy businesses in the metropolitan cities. The proliferation of multiplexes in the cities – because of the new spending power – saw the price of admission in movie houses going up in the cities but remaining the same outside. Mainstream cinema therefore began to target city audiences.
5. With the globalization of India, the Indian from the metropolises came culturally closer to those in the diaspora – closer, in fact, than he or she was to those in small towns only a few hundred miles away. Because of this factor the cultural perspective of Bollywood was also increasingly shared by South-Asians in the diaspora.
6. With the Indian economy becoming more dependent on private enterprise and the economy booming the corporate sector began to more gain influence in the running of the State than it once had.
7.  Where mainstream Hindi cinema had been regarded as a pariah by the Indian State, the commercial success of Bollywood abroad gave it immense respectability.

In the earlier phase, globalization was viewed somewhat in the same way that modernism had been viewed in the 1950s – as something attractive but also threatening because of what it might do to tradition. One way in which this was manifested was in the noir thrillers involving adulterous women as in Jism (2002) and Murder (2004). The ‘global’ in Hindi cinema after 2000 combines a hint of glamour with more than a touch of the alarming. Like the ‘modern’ it is an attractive but also uncertain quantity that might influence Indians harmfully – which is perhaps the message of the Hindi noir heroine. Interestingly, film researchers detect the influence of noir in the Hindi films of the fifties (33). While this influence has been identified as pertaining largely to the visual codes, there is an aspect that connects directly with the Hindi noir films of the new millennium. Many of the films of the forties and fifties are also nominally structured as thrillers. More importantly, they introduce the unexpected into their narratives in ways involving character ambiguity.  Let me cite two examples to illustrate this point: In Guru Dutt’s Baazi (1951), for instance, the unexpected is introduced through the heroine’s respectable father secretly being an urban gangster and the owner of a nightclub, an emblem of bad modernity in the fifties. The agency responsible for the darker side of his dual nature is therefore ‘modernity’.  Mehboob Khan’s Andaz (1949) is not a thriller but the heroine Neeta’s free manner makes the male protagonist Dilip (Dilip Kumar) believe she loves him. Later on, the film introduces the heroine’s fiancé Rajan (Raj Kapoor) and Dilip is unable to come to terms with his presence in her life. My argument is that the heroine’s conduct is ambiguous and the agency blamed for this ambiguity is ‘modernity’. It is because Neeta is brought up as a ‘modern’ woman that Dilip misreads her behavior and tragedy results.

Film researchers are convinced too easily that Indian cinema of the fifties was imitating Hollywood in order to be modern (34) but the thriller format had perhaps another significance. The thriller of the forties and fifties was perhaps a way of problematizing the uncertainties in the modernization project: If the outcome of modernization was uncertain, the ‘modern’ could be employed as the entity within the narrative that accounted for a mystery. What we were apparently witnessing in the Hindi noir thriller after 2000 was a replication of tendencies in the fifties with the ‘modern’ replaced by the ‘global’. The outcome of globalization was as uncertain as the outcome of modernization was in the Nehru era and this was being problematized by the Hindi noir thriller. The characterization of the adulterous woman may owe to American noir (Jism was a version of Body Heat – 1981) but it addressed apprehensions in the minds of public about the possible erosion of traditional values when India embraces the ‘global’ wholeheartedly.  The motif of the adulterous/murderous woman can even be read as the resistance of tradition to globalization. When a later film about adultery Karan Johar’s Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna (2006) deals with the subject as a love story (set in New York), it may be taken to represent the moment when globalization was no longer considered a moral threat – although ‘untraditional’ behavior still happens overseas. It is significant here that loyalty is placed in crisis in each of these films. The threat of globalization then manifests itself in loyalty losing out to desire as in Jism.

Melodrama and personal aspiration
The transformation in the shape taken by Hindi cinema in the two decades 1990-2009 can perhaps be best grasped through an examination of the top four blockbusters of each decade – determined by the ‘adjusted gross earnings’(35) – and rearranged chronologically:

Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (1994)
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995)
Raja Hindustani (1996)
Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998)
Kabhi Kushi Kabhi Gam (2001)
Gadar Ek Prem Katha (2001)
Ghajini (2008)
Three Idiots (2009)
 
All the above films are romances but, while the first five are family melodramas and Gadar is a patriotic anti-Pakistan film set immediately after Partition, the last two are different. Ghajini is an action film inspired by Memento and Three Idiots is about three friends in an elite educational institution. Both of them play up urban affluence but unlike Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! which is also about affluent people, they are neither family nor community based as the five earlier films are (36). In Ghajini a rich businessman who has a memory defect wreaks vengeance on the gangster who ruined his life and killed his sweetheart. On unpacking the story, recognizing that the ‘psychological thriller’ aspect is an add-on and the gangster simply a pretext for the action, the film emerges as a love story about an aspiring model and a fabulously wealthy corporate tycoon. The central figure is the model and the touching thing is her claiming him for her boyfriend without knowing that her actual boyfriend is the tycoon incognito. The film provides an affirmation that in the world it is depicting people can aspire to reach above themselves.
If Ghajini is about people reaching above their own stations, Three Idiots is about students who pursue their aspirations instead of ‘succumbing to the rat race’. Both films have weak closures and the reason is that in neither film is loyalty the issue thrown into crisis.

The biggest hits of the period 2005-09 – excluding those listed above are Dhoom 2 (2006), Om Shanti Om (2007) and Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (2008), none of which are traditional melodramas. The last two may contain melodramatic elements but have been billed as ‘comedy’ rather than ‘drama’. There is apparently a movement away from melodrama in Hindi cinema although the transformation only sensed now will need further investigation. A way may be the scrutiny of the ‘melodramatic elements’ in the two films.

Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om is a tale about reincarnation and its first half is about a young person’s obsession with the film industry. Om Prakash Makhija (Shahrukh Khan) is a young man smitten by a film star named Shanti (Deepika Padukone). Om lives a middle-class existence with his mother and he works as a junior artist and saves Shanti’s life during a sequence involving a fire. Shanti is enthralled by him but he accidentally learns that she is secretly married to a powerful producer named Mukesh Mehra and is also pregnant. But Mukesh Mehra is in financial trouble and intends to marry the financier’s daughter. He therefore kills her in cold blood on a film studio set by setting it on fire. Om Prakash tries to rescue her but is also beaten up by his henchmen. Om dies in hospital after he is hit by the car of another film star Rajesh Kapoor. But Rajesh Kapoor’s wife is giving birth to a son at the same hospital and he is reborn as Rajesh Kapoor’s son Om Kapoor.
 
When the second half begins it is thirty years later and Om Kapoor (Sharukh Khan) is already a leading film hero. A mad old woman (Om Prakash’s mother) imagines she is Om Kapoor’s mother and tries to meet him. Helped by this, by accidentally being on the burnt down film set and also meeting Mukesh Mehra, Om Kapoor recollects his past life. He is reunited with the old woman and Om Prakash’s friend Pappu Master. The three plot vengeance against Mukesh Mehra and they are ably assisted by a Shanti look-alike named Sandhya (Deepika Padukone). The story of Om Prakash and Shanti is reworked as a story to be filmed by Mukesh Mehra and the producer is lured to the burnt down set where Shanti was murdered. Before they can extract vengeance, however, Shanti’s ghost appears and kills Mukesh Mehra.

Om Shanti Om owes much of its success to its showcasing of Bollywood. The second half of the film also includes a Filmfare Awards ceremony in which Om Kapoor is chosen best actor. This ceremony shows various other film stars appearing as themselves – Feroz Khan, Abhishek Bachchan, Rekha, Chunky Pandey, Govinda, Salman Khan, Hritik Roshan - and behaving in accordance with their public images often cultivated outside cinema. Although there is a ‘mother’ in Om Shanti Om who should have provided the melodramatic intensity, Pappu Master becomes surrogate son to Om’s Prakash’s mother and this – along with the fact that Om Kapoor has surviving parents weakens the bonding between Om and her. Secondly, although Om Prakash was madly in love with Shanti, Om Kapoor’s feelings towards her look-alike do not amount to love. The closure is weak and this will be understood if the film is compared with Rakesh Roshan’s Karan Arjun (1995), which is also about reincarnation but in which the forlorn mother virtually waits for her two sons to be reborn to wreak vengeance upon the man who killed them. One could argue, therefore, that Om Shanti Om is a film about individual aspiration although the protagonist Om Prakash who aspires to be film star needs to be reincarnated to realize them. The film, while being about ‘love’ also does not see it necessary to invoke the issue of loyalty.

 Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi is a stronger melodrama (because of its strong closure) although it is also about aspiration. Surinder marries his teacher’s daughter Tanni as a promise to his dying father but she is modern and loves dancing while he is a stolid clerk in a power company. In order to win her he pretends to be a dancing aficionado named Raj and Tanni is torn between her growing love for Raj and her sense of loyalty towards Surinder. At the climax she discovers that the two are the same person and reconciles her different feelings towards the ‘two’. The melodramatic element is strengthened by the sense of community in the film, the conflict between family loyalty and personal choice in heterosexual attachments. The film is set in Amritsar and conveys the sense of people in a relatively small city aspiring for the ways of Mumbai. In a sequence, the dance teacher applauds the dancers for performing as well as those from Mumbai.  

Individual aspiration has not been a key motif in Hindi cinema because it works against the notion of the community and the family. In Rangeela (1996) which is about an aspiring actress, the woman realizes the ephemeral nature of success in tinsel town and settles for the love of a poor man instead of the male star who loves her. In three key Amitabh Bachchan films Trishul (1978), Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (1978) and Agneepath (1990), it is family instability which drives the protagonist to advance himself and his advancement is not celebrated.  Happy endings involve families coming together and the affirmation of natural loyalties; they were never primarily about personal success until now.    

Conclusion
The Indian ‘growth story’ has apparently had huge consequences for the mainstream Hindi film and the chief of these is the sense of a community absent. More broadly speaking, blockbusters like Three Idiots and Ghajini decline to make loyalty the issue. Friendship prevails in Three Idiots but loyalty to it is not brought to crisis as a melodrama might have it. The Hindi film may feel closer to the diaspora today but that does not imply the end of the nation-as-community. Films like Kal Ho Na Ho (2003) and Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna (2007) dealt exclusively with non-residents and KANK did not even invoke India but there was the sense of the absent Nation which gave the communities they dealt with their cohesion. This sense was perhaps created by references to the American state themselves being downplayed or absent as in KANK. Three Idiots and Ghajini have one more thing in common which is that they seem to be aimed at an Anglophone public. The characters speak Hindi but they might be more comfortable in English. In Ghajini, for instance, the man with short-term memory leaves instructions for himself only in English. Where Hindi cinema addressed the Nation, Bollywood is increasingly addressing the Anglophone Indian, to whom upward mobility is the primary concern and who has spending power.