Khalid Mohamed analyses the slow disappearance of the working-class protagonist from Hindi cinema, exploring how shifting audience economics, changing industry priorities, and the dominance of aspirational narratives have pushed labouring lives out of the cultural frame.

Why has the labour class vanished from the cinematic narrative? Is it because the working poor no longer matter as consumers, erased from relevance by an economy that targets only those who can spend? The previously crucial front-bencher of the single-screen era—who once shaped the box office—has been written out by multiplex culture, which has priced out the lowest common denominator and converted cinema into a premium outing for the upper middle class. Today’s films reflect the aspirations of those who can afford the ticket, not the realities of those who deliver the food, drive the cabs, or build the cities. The question remains: if the working class is no longer seen, heard, or counted—even in the stories we tell—what does that say about the nation we are becoming?

THE DISAPPEARING HERO

Except for a once-in-a-bluish moon, Zwigato helmed by Nandita Das, which at least wore its heart in the right place, Bollywood has nailed the coffin of the once-prolific working class hero to focus essentially on daredevil super heroes and toxically chauvinistic blood-and-gore avengers.

Squashed in an elevator to my sixth-floor apartment, it was crowded with a mix of five delivery men aka couriers, ranging from the ages of 20 to 60-plus.
Indeed I’ve to still sight a woman in this relatively modern profession, somewhat like the postmen of yore. At most women recruited for delivery gigs is guesstimated at five per cent.

Back to the elevator squash, one of the delivery professionals in his late 20s, emaciated, short in height, and sweating profusely, his arms were packed with parcels of pizzas, miscellaneous online orders ranging from clothes and carpets to electronic gadgets. Evidently, he was about to keel over with fatigue, and needed water to prevent dehydration of a severe kind.

He accepted a bottled glass of water, gulping it down and shyly accepted whatever little money I could give him. To my question about his wages, quite reluctantly, he disclosed that each successful delivery fetched him Rs. 13.
“That’s gross exploitation!” I remarked, he scooted off. “Please sir, “he pleaded in a Bihari accent of a migrant worker. “We aren’t allowed to talk about such things.”

Minutes later, Nandita Das’s Zwigato (2023) through the screen of my mind. She had dealt with the very subject, but I’d forgotten the film as soon as the last frame faded.

It's no surprise that Nandita had zeroed in on the life of Manas Mahto, a resilient delivery man, set albeit against the backdrop of Bhubaneshwar, Odisha. Das’ feature films have rigorously examined pertinent themes: Firaaq (2008) on the after-effects of the Godhra riots and a biopic Manto (2018) of the radical writer Saadat Haasan Manto.

Her socially concerned and progressive values have been the spine of her acting performances, feature films, documentaries, as well as her personal life, and after two divorces as a single mother of a 15-year-old son Vihaan.

A BROKEN CINEMATIC CONTRACT

Consistently, Nandita Das’ films, however, have lacked a lacerating and lasting effect, which is why Zwigato appeared to be a well-intentioned but just another drop in the ocean of socially-committed themes which couldn’t bring about a whit of a change in our attitudes, sitting in the comfort of our homes, and receiving online services, as a given, taken for granted.

On seeing the exhausted delivery boy in the elevator, I had to re-watch Zwigato on Amazon Prime. Focusing on a former factory floor manager who loses his job during the pandemic, he has to carry out the laborious routine of a courier, at piffling wages.

Meanwhile, his wife (Shahana Goswami, excellent as always) takes on odd jobs, becoming the bread-winner, and arousing Manas’ ingrained male chauvinism, a predictable trope. Apart from wearing its heart in the right place, Das’s account was unfortunately still came across as excessively mundane, dropping such self-pitying lines of dialogue as, “Woh mazdoor hai, is liye majboor hai” needed to be way more probing than espousing an acceptance of the status quo, where the only hope can be que sera que sera.

I couldn’t help feeling perhaps, the casting – which some critics found to be absolutely apt – of TV reality show’s star Kapil Sharma in the central part of the underdog – didn’t evoke that key factor of empathy.

The Kapil Sharma Show, on since 2016, which sends a majority of viewers into dizzying paroxysms of laughter, is my problem. The major TRP-grabber designed to promote Bollywood films up for imminent release, depends stubbornly on drag acts, slapstick and variations on the wisecracks which were once the specialty of Santa-Banta.

Still who am I to differ from the nation at large? In fact, reportedly when the show’s Film City sets had been devastated by a fire, Shah Rukh Khan and the late Lata Mangeshkar had donated generously for his show’s revival. That’s beside the point really. The macro-point begs the question: Why the Working Class Hero has gone almost extinct, in Hindi language cinema, both in the mainstream and indie spheres?

THE RISE OF ASPIRATIONAL CINEMA

The prime reasons could be the fact that our prolific output of cinema –roughly a thousand annually - either has to centre around aspirational or already upper-crust heroes, a trend which mushroomed ever since Aditya Chopra’s still-adored romance Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) could afford to take off on an Eurail trip all over Europe from London to Paris and more and back. With that the overseas audience for Bollywood escapist entertainers, comprising NRIs mostly, spiralled and how.

While helping a friend in a script for a role featuring Salman Khan, I had ventured to ask, “But where does his money come from? What’s his backstory? Can’t it even be suggested?” The filmmaker scowled at me, “What difference does that make? Rich is rich – be it first-class or private jet plane flights.”

Right. With the onset of the mid-new-millennium, romances had to shift gears from the ceaseless number of lavishly-budgeted love stories to the daredevil exploits of VFX-abetted super-heroes – incorruptible cops, undercover espionage spies, and of course, fervent annihilators of terrorists often accompanied by a minority community assistant to keep all sections of the audience –or vote-banks – assuaged.

Comedies of the House Full and Grand Masti franchises, to name just two, have become pretexts for execrable humour outwitting the David Dhawan double-entendre ‘sarkailo khatiya’ squirm-fests of the 1980s-‘90s. And there has been the ascent of male toxicity with remakes of southern cinema, notably Kabir Singh (2019) and Animal (2023).

Am I taking you far away from my kick-off premise of Nandita Das’ Zwigato? Admittedly yes, because as this article mapped its own (hopefully) logical course, Zwigato at its very least serves as a wake-up call.

WHAT WE CHOOSE TO REMEMBER

Because on the heels of the nation’s post-independence, the 1950s disclose that the oppressed wage worker was the pivot of films in consonance with the socialist democracy ideal of New Industrial India.

The significant exemplars are Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen (1953) about a farmer reduced to pulling hand rickshaws, B. R. Chopra’s Naya Daur (1957) on the conflict between traditional tongawallas versus the introduction of bus services, Shakti Samanta’s Insaan Jaag Utha (1959) an unconventional take on a woman dam construction worker and a con man, and on a lighter note Satyen Bose’s Chalti ka Naam Gaadi (1958) hopping between three garage mechanic workers, one of them in love with a ritzy woman. That frontline actors Balraj Sahni, Dilip Kumar, Vyjayanthimala, Madhubala, Sunil Dutt, Ashok Kumar and Kishore Kumar didn’t have any compunctions about essaying roles devoid of glamour is in stark contrast to today’s A-listers who would thumb down such parts since that wouldn’t sit well with their established images.

Back in the 1980s, in a conversation, the otherwise versatile Rishi Kapoor had laughed, “Imagine casting me as a beggar or factory worker. If I don’t wear double knit sweaters and custom-made suits audiences would throw rotten tomatoes on the screen. It was only Manmohan Desai who could get away with murder, presenting me as a qawwali singer in Amar Akbar Anthony (1974). By contrast, as a desperate Kashmiri terrorist in Jai Hind (1994) I was a joke but had to do it since Manoj Kumarji wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

On the other scale of the spectrum, Amitabh Bachchan’s ‘angry young man’ was consolidated in the avatar of the dockyard worker (a la Haji Mustaan scriptwriters Salim-Javed have affirmed) in Yash Chopra’s Deewaar, (1974) followed by the implied stone colliery blaster in Trishul (1978) the redemption seeking coalminer in Kaala Patthar (1979) and earlier even as a wily date palm tree toddy tapper in Sudhendu Roy’s Saudagar (1973), plus Manmohan Desai’s Coolie (1983) and the hotel waiter in Desai’s Naseeb (1980), and Prakash Mehra’s Namak Halaal (1982) which in their disparate ways, all added to that explication of Bachchan ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai.

In all likelihood Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan could slide into the wage worker mode but why should they when they are pigeon-holed into the no-grime-all-glory characters today?

I’ve cited only a select number of films and actors, to be sure – the vanishing of the genres of the Muslim socials, make-peace-not-war pleas and the naratIves of the relentlessly exploited wage-earner are all but extinct even in parallel cinema. No more Mani Kaul’s Uski Roti (1969) a truck driver and the self-explanatory titled Nauker ki Kameez (1999), Shyam Benegal’s Ankur (1974) on the expose of the sexual exploitation by a farmland’s owner, or Kumar Shahani’s focus on the seduction of a domestic help in Tarang, (1984) not to forget the early 1970s works of Saeed Mirza’s Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Aaata Hai (1980) and Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro (1984).

I could list the stray exceptions to the current formula, but will accept that the topic itself needs a deeper and insightful research.

Here, I can only hope that there will be more efforts like Zwigato which keep us in touch with the reality, whatever their flaws may be. Or there will be more couriers and delivery boys-men, their stories being ignored cavalierly?

And as the fear of the delivery boy in the elevator lingers on, I can only conclude with an excerpt from the classic song written by John Lennon:  

As soon as you’re born, they make you feel small /By giving you no time instead of it all /Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all /A working class hero is something to be /A working class hero is something to be /When they’ve tortured and scared you for twenty-odd years /Then they expect you to pick up a career /When you can’t really function at all, you’re so full of fear.