ABSTRACT
Amar Akbar Anthony celebrated the nation-state under the sign of an enlightened dharma. As politics, it affirmed the liberal ethos of India; as allegory, it demonstrated the underlying origins of all Indians—one mother but different beliefs, a variation on Savarkar's original version of Hindutva. That was in 1977. Any reader of Bombay Cinema senses that things changed rather dramatically after that. The hegemony of the Congress Party as the natural rulers of India came to an end; the nation (though not as a consequence of the end of this hegemony) teetered toward regional divisions, terrorism, and general exhaustion after the euphoria of the first few decades of independence. Outside, the Iranian revolution of 1978-79 rekindled, uncomfortably for India, the specter of Islam. Ten years after this revolution, the Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie (invariably referred to in the media as an Indian Muslim) confirmed old Hindu phobias about Islam's essential inflexibility. Two factors define the post—Amar Akbar Anthony world: the rise of Hindu fundamentalism and cultural globalization. I take up the first of these in this chapter. As for cultural globalization I take it up in the next chapter with reference to cinema and the diaspora. Between these two—fun-damentalism and cultural globalization—may be located the essential "drama" of Bombay Cinema in the post-Amar Akbar Anthony (1977-), post-Amitabh Bachchan (1986-) period.
