{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.022426095820591234, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0163098878695209, 'mean_word_length': 5.061728395061729, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Cinema as family romance

This essay analyses the narratives and iconographies of India embedded in a trilogy of blockbuster Hindi films from the long 1970s: Deewar (1975), Trishul (1978), and Shakti (1982). These films represent some of the decade's aspirations as well as its repressions that together constitute its public fantasies. Their narratives provide access to the political unconscious of modern India revealing the profound anxieties that pervaded the public culture of the decade. The essay explores the extent to which the traumas of the decade were displaced on the family, and the crisis in political culture was recast in social terms as a Family Romance in popular Hindi film. It analyzes Deewar's tensions at narrating and containing an incendiary critique of the decade, and it exposes the ‘revisions‘ to this film's masterplot as they were rescripted in Trishul and Shakti. The essay concludes with proposing the social function of cinema as a Family Romance.