Villains of Popular Hindi Cinema

Let me share some of the interesting observations on popular Hindi cinema (I will not call it Bollywood).

The Hindi film industry always reflects the social realities of the nation-sometimes directly sometimes indirectly-most of the time by creating stereotype characters especially villains. If u study the kind of villains in Hindi films, u can sketch the changes happened in our society.

For example after independence when the whole nation was in a state of hope to build a better nation, the characters in the films represented that vision. That time the society was basically based in villages. Agriculture and ownership of land were the main issues. So Hindi film industry produced villain who was a greedy landlord who want to take over the poor man’s land. Even then almost every film ended with a note of hope to change this system.

Then when slowly the society gets more urbanized the villains became greedy factory owners. Then city “gunda” (mafia) became villain and police became hero. Slowly when the bureaucracy and law enforcing system in this country could not meet the demands of masses, gradually police became villain and interestingly the mafia man was raised to hero. After sometime politicians became villains and then Pakistan became main villain along with Muslim terrorists.