ABSTRACT
A significant counterpoint to the subaltern impatience and revolt that characterized popular Hindi cinema of the 1970s was the staging of middle-class civility and desire, away from the generic conventions of the 'masala-Social'. The 1970s were marked by intense political crisis and change in India, and emergent cinematic trends registered here directly and powerfully, there through subterfuge and over-coded iconography the prevailing structures of feeling. Media scholars have noted how many of these serials, although commissioned for delivering 'developmental' messages, were forcefully driven by commercial sponsorship and soon created a consumerist ethos that expanded the Indian market almost beyond recognition. By the end of the 1980s, most of the serials on Doordarshan were produced through corporate sponsorship and advertising and 'carried a message of modernity centring on the nuclear family, with two children and aspirations for a better life through education and more consumer goods'.
