Film scholars acknowledge that after 1947, mainstream Hindi cinema in India played the part of a "national cinema", albeit without official support from the state.
Even in the 1990s, most Hindi-language films produced in Mumbai were focused on family values, which became a covert way of addressing national issues.
Hindi cinema uses family stories as national allegories by using available symbols. For example, the mother representing the sacred nation, the policeman or the judge as state authority, the club dancer as bad modernity and the doctor as good modernity.
Major historical events after independence find themselves reflected in Hindi film narrative, but the first important one - the disaster of the Sino-Indian War of 1962 - appears as a silence, a kind of obliteration of earlier optimism.
Another big change in film motifs after 1947 happened with India abandoning Nehru's socialism as a political model and embracing the market economy in 1991. After this date, the state began to withdraw.
This occurred under PV Narasimha Rao, prime minister from 1991 to 1996, and Hindi cinema began to deal with the lives of rich people, beginning with Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (1994).
The state is absent in the narrative of this film and the nation is portrayed in this film as a happy family.
The moral thrust of Hindi cinema in the 1990s still rested on the old notion of loyalty - to one's family, to one's community or to a relationship - and this is tested when relationships are thrown into crisis. The relationship is important because it symbolises the one that binds the characters to the nation. In Lagaan (2001), for instance, the loyalty is to the village community as represented by its cricket team, which has to play a match against a colonial team.
It was only in the new millennium that globalisation made its impact in India's cities, when the English language created a prosperous class with much greater spending power, as wages began to be tuned to global standards.
Secondly, this newly anglophone class felt closer to the West than it did to rural India.
In the initial phases, globalisation was regarded with alarm by Hindi cinema and an example was the genre dealing with adultery, beginning with Jism (2003), in which marital unfaithfulness happens because of the global influence.
By 1994, however, new aspects begin to appear and the first of these is that Hindi cinema seems to be meant for those who understand English.
The titles and legends appear only in English and characters break into English, usually to use swear words. There is also a splintering of Hindi cinema with some films doing well in multiplexes in the metropolitan cities and others doing well largely in the semi-urban areas.
As motifs in cinema, the parent is now reconstituted as an obstruction to the aspirations of youth - perhaps first hinted at by Rang De Basanti (2006). This film does not have personal advancement as a motif but the parent-as-obstruction-to-aspiration is a theme in films like Bunty Aur Babli (2005), Guru (2007) and 3 Idiots (2009). The rise of the new economy marks the moment at which children abandoned traditional vocations and followed new paths.
The Congress party lost power in 1999 to the BJP, and films like Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (2001) and Veer-Zara (2004) portray Pakistan as an undemocratic political entity. Another key theme in new cinema is the weakening state.
When India embarked on its economic liberalisation in 1991, the Congress party may have confused regulation with enforcement. Hindi cinema, worryingly, responds to this positively.
Apart from its portrayal of law enforcement as incurably corrupt, it depicts illegal activity as a way of advancing oneself in films like Bunty Aur Babli, Dhoom 2 (2006) and Kaminey (2009). In the comedy Lage Raho Munnabhai (2006), a hoodlum learns to tell the truth in his personal life, but does not abandon crime.
These themes are prevalent in films targeted at urban audiences but in Dabangg (2010), which did very well in rural India, the policeman hero is eulogised for the way he metes out personal justice in his village rather than implementing the law impartially. Still, these "semi-urban" films - often with Salman Khan as their star - may be regarded as resisting anglophone India.
A majority of mainstream Hindi films address anglophone audiences since they have greater spending power and these audiences have many similarities with audiences in the diaspora, which Hindi films increasingly target.
But these anglophone audiences wield little power electorally and this has meant that Hindi films portray politics as a contaminated realm, as can be seen in Raajneeti (2010).
India's growth story after 2000 has also seen ostentation increasing with lavish lifestyles showcased in films as in Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani (2013).
When the poor (especially farmers) are shown, they are treated not as heroes but as sad subjects of anthropology as in Peepli Live (2010). Farmers, it must be noted, were once played by the biggest stars as in Mother India (1956) and Upkaar (1967).
But as Hindi cinema became identifiable entirely as Bollywood after 2000 it has become less of a national cinema and more of a global brand.
If the world of Hindi cinema was once a moral ideal, one can imagine a future in which it is "hyperreal", a reality in itself bearing no relation to the actual world.
Om Shanti Om (2007), for instance, is constructed entirely as an advertisement for Bollywood in which celebrities appear as themselves. The story itself is simply a vehicle for Shah Rukh Khan to perform as an entertainer.
If this film is any indication, Bollywood may not even remain Indian much longer.
MK Raghavendra is the author of Seduced by the Familiar: Narration and Meaning in Indian Popular Cinema (Oxford, 2008), 50 Indian Film Classics (Collins, 2009) and The Politics of Hindi Cinema in the New Millennium: Bollywood and the anglophone Indian Nation (Oxford, 2014).
