What the Angry Young Man Was Actually Angry About

It wasn't teenage rebellion. It was a very precise reaction to the Indian economy between 1971 and 1977.

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The Angry Young Man is usually described as a mood: Amitabh Bachchan, a scowl, a dock fight, a mother. It was actually a fairly specific piece of political writing, and Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar knew exactly what they were doing.

The setup

Between 1971 and 1975 India had a war, a drought, an oil shock, food inflation, a national railway strike involving over a million workers, and a rapidly collapsing confidence in the Nehruvian promise that the state would deliver a decent life if you were patient and honest. The Emergency was declared in June 1975. Sholay and Deewaar both released that year.

Hindi cinema's dominant hero until then had been the romantic — Rajesh Khanna, at the peak of a stardom that had no equivalent before or since. That hero's problem was love. He was not concerned with rent.

The switch

Zanjeer in 1973 replaced the problem. The new hero's problem is that an institution has failed him and is not going to stop failing him. Inspector Vijay does not want a girl; he wants a specific man punished, and the system will not do it.

Deewaar makes the economics explicit. Vijay works on the docks. The film's most famous exchange is about what the brothers have accumulated — a badge versus a building — and the mother is the tiebreaker on which accumulation counts. This is a film about the distribution of legitimate reward, staged as a family melodrama.

Why the mother is always there

Because the films needed a moral authority that was not the state. If the police, the courts and the employer have all failed, the audience needs some institution left standing to adjudicate. Nirupa Roy is that institution. Every time the Angry Young Man wins an argument and still loses the scene, it is because the mother has ruled against him.

This is why the formula could not survive the 1990s. Once liberalisation made accumulation itself respectable, the moral question — is it legitimate to take what the system withheld from you? — stopped being interesting. The hero could simply be rich.

The films, in order, if you want to trace it

• Zanjeer (1973) — the switch is thrown.
• Deewaar (1975) — the economic argument is made explicit.
• Trishul (1978) — the argument is extended to inheritance and legitimacy.
• Kaala Patthar (1979) — written after the Chasnala mining disaster; the anger is finally pointed at industrial safety rather than at crime.
• Ardh Satya (1983) — the parallel cinema answer, in which the same anger is diagnosed as pathology rather than celebrated.

That last one matters. Govind Nihalani took the Angry Young Man, made him a real sub-inspector, and showed the same rage producing custodial violence rather than justice. It is the most important critique the movement received, and it came from inside the same decade.

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Filed under Amitabh Bachchan · Salim–Javed · 1970s · Politics. Written for The Bollywood 100.