Contemporary art and cinema offer powerful lenses for understanding Engels’ insights about how economic arrangements disguise themselves as cultural values. The contrast between mainstream Hindi cinema’s family fantasies and materialist filmmaking reveals precisely this ideological operation at work.
Image description: A striking triptych image:Left panel, A still from “Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!” showing the iconic ornate wedding celebration scene – everyone in silk and gold, dancing in a palace-like setting with no hint of financial strain. Center panel: A scene replicating a still from “Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham” featuring a family in a London mansion, designer saris, crystal chandeliers and wealth wealth as backdrop to “tradition”
Right panel: A powerful frame from “Masaan” – the ghats of Varanasi with funeral pyres burning, or Vicky Kaushal’s character working at the crematorium, showing the harsh economic realities that Bollywood’s dream families seldom acknowledge.
Swiss Meadows to Funeral Pyres
Image description: A split-screen composition showing Swiss meadows from a Bollywood romance dissolving into the smoky, ash-covered ghats of Varanasi – literally transitioning from fantasy to funeral pyres. Image generated by AI
Bollywood offers a powerful lenses for understanding Engels’ insights about how economic arrangements disguise themselves as cultural values. The contrast between mainstream Hindi cinema’s family fantasies and materialist filmmaking reveals precisely this ideological operation at work.
Bollywood’s expensive dreams seen in Sooraj Barjatya’s Hum Aapke Hain Kaun..! presents massive joint families in perpetual celebration, unmarked by economic pressure. Everyone appears prosperous without visible employment, marriages happen through pure romantic choice and property inheritance occurs without conflict. Similarly, Karan Johar’s Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham wraps family “values” in designer clothing and palatial settings, presenting tradition as something that emerges naturally from wealth rather than being shaped by it.
These films perform crucial ideological work by suggesting that authentic family life transcends material conditions. The Johar aesthetic, where family meetings happen in marble halls and emotional reconciliation occurs in Swiss meadows- creates the fantasy that intimate life can exist separate from economic pressures. They present economic privilege as the natural backdrop for moral behavior, implying that financial security allows families to focus on “real” values.
Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan shatters this illusion with devastating precision. Devi’s sexual autonomy becomes a family disaster not because of abstract moral principles, but because it threatens her family’s social and economic position. Her father’s shame isn’t purely cultural, it’s about material standing, business relationships and economic survival within existing social hierarchies.
Deepak’s inter caste love story reveals how caste restrictions operate as economic barriers disguised as cultural tradition. Their relationship becomes impossible because inter-caste marriage threatens established patterns of resource allocation and social networking. Where Barjatya and Johar present lavish interiors signalling prosperity, Masaan grounds every scene in economic reality—cramped railway quarters, funeral pyres as family business and constant money anxiety.
This contrast with Johar and Barjatya’s films illuminates Engels’ insight about ideology’s operation. Mainstream Bollywood films don’t simply ignore economic pressures—they actively mystify them. They suggest good families naturally prosper, rather than showing how economic conditions shape what gets defined as “good” family behaviour.
Masaan practices the materialist analysis Engels pioneered, revealing how intimate choices become constrained by economic structures that present themselves as cultural necessities. The film demonstrates that family crisis is often economic crisis in disguise and what we celebrate as traditional values are frequently the luxury beliefs of those insulated from material pressure.
Ready to strip away the romantic mythology and face the economic realities lurking beneath your love life? Time to see if your heart follows your wallet – or your wallet follows your heart.
Truth or Dare? The Economics Edition
- Why did your last relationship really end? Incompatibility or incompatible bank accounts?
- Which family “traditions” would disappear if money was not involved?
- How much of your “not ready to settle down” is really “can’t afford to settle down…atleast not yet”?
- If you are honest- are you dating within your tax bracket?
- What would your love life look like if housing were free?