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Hindutva, Immorality, and the Facade of Liberation in Bollywood: Revisiting Anil Kapoor and Dharmendra’s Characters in "Dil Dhadakne Do" and "Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani"


Bollywood’s cultural narratives often serve as contested spaces where societal values, moralities, and ideologies like Hindutva intersect. 

The films "Dil Dhadakne Do" (2015, dir. Zoya Akhtar) and "Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani" (2023, dir. Karan Johar) exemplify this tension, particularly through the portrayal of male characters—Anil Kapoor as Kamal Mehra and Dharmendra as Kanwal Lund—who embody immorality through infidelity, non-ownership of the infidelity, and abusive behavior. 

Despite their transgressions, both films construct narrative arcs that excuse or sanitize this immorality, projecting a veneer of liberation while ultimately reinforcing the patriarchal, upper-caste, North Indian Hindi-speaking Hindutva culture. 

The communicative inversion that turns Kamal Mehra and Kanwal Lund into victims of their circumstances forms the narrative infrastructure of Hindutva misogyny, incorporating within the discursive space claims of liberation and emancipation while retaining the power of immoral misogynist men. 

Cowardice is rewarded. 

Immorality is emancipation. 

And caste-privileged men can transgress while enjoying the privilege of the familial structure. Demanding loyalty and devotion while violating the fundamental normative codes of family. 

While, after, and in spite of these transgressions, they can be returned to their position of power within the hierarchal structure of the family through nods to superficial emancipation. Further, in "Rocky Aur Rani," the audience is invited to empathize with the transgressing man and get enlisted in the journey of the protagonists to support him in continuing the transgression (Rocky and Rani meet because Rocky is looking to find the long-lost love of his married grandfather, who had found the love as an extramarital affair).

And all of this whitewashing is done through liberal virtue signaling. This continual co-option of progressive performance is at the heart of Hindutva's upholding of its ideological project without close scrutiny. This also forms the crux of its appeal to an entire generation of middle-class, English-speaking Indians educated in the immoralities of neoliberal excess, dressed up in Hindutva chest-thumping.

The Hindu Hindi culture of North India, soaked in misogyny is further reproduced as an anchor for desire, the role of the woman to enlighten the misogynist caste privileged man.


Immorality, Misogyny, and Patriarchal Entitlement

In "Dil Dhadakne Do", Anil Kapoor’s Kamal Mehra is the quintessential patriarchal figure: a wealthy Punjabi businessman whose authority over his family is unquestioned, yet his moral failings are stark. Kamal’s infidelity, everyday immoral transgressions, and emotional abuse of his wife, Neelam (Shefali Shah), are revealed through the film’s depiction of their strained marriage. His dismissive attitude toward his daughter Ayesha’s ambitions and his coercive control over his son Kabir’s future further underscore his abusive tendencies. 

Yet, the film frames Kamal’s behavior as a product of societal pressure and personal flaws, culminating in a redemptive arc where he reconciles with his family without facing meaningful consequences for his actions. 

Kamal is redeemed for waking up one day and standing by his daughter, while his infidelity and immoral actions go unquestioned. This simple no-risks attached act of showing support for his daughter redeems him, erasing questions of accountability for his serial immoral behavior. 

The audience, along with his wife and family, are invited in to forget and forgive his transgressions.

Similarly, in "Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani", Dharmendra’s Kanwal Lund is portrayed as a sympathetic patriarch whose past infidelity is romanticized as tragic rather than reprehensible. To create a narrative arc justifying this infidelity, his wife Dhanlakshmi (Jaya Bachchan) is depicted as controlling (the Hindi-Hindutva narrative constructs the oh-so-oppressed man at home chasing extramarital affairs because his wife is controlling).

Kanwal’s dementia serves as a narrative device to soften his accountability to his partner. The film’s resolution, where Kanwal’s past is reconciled through Rocky and Rani’s efforts to reconnect him to the woman with whom he had an affair, packaged as a love story, excuses his moral failings under the guise of emotional complexity.

In both films, the immorality of these male characters—infidelity, emotional abuse, and patriarchal control—is not only normalized but also excused through narrative arcs that prioritize family unity and emotional reconciliation. This reflects a broader Bollywood trope: the redemption of the flawed patriarch while upholding the overarching Hindutva structure with the patriarch not held to the foundational moral structures that constitute the definition of family (fidelity, loyalty, transparency, and accountability for actions).

The Facade of Liberation

Both films position themselves as progressive, critiquing patriarchal norms while gesturing toward gender equality and personal freedom. 

In "Dil Dhadakne Do," the cruise setting and the ensemble cast’s interpersonal dramas suggest a modern, cosmopolitan critique of traditional family structures. Ayesha’s struggle for agency and Kabir’s rebellion against his father’s expectations are framed as liberatory.

However, the film’s resolution—where the family unites after a dramatic confrontation—reaffirms the sanctity of the North Indian, upper-caste Hindu family. Kamal’s infidelity and abusiveness are sidelined, and the narrative prioritizes familial harmony that upholds the misogynist patriarch over accountability, aligning with Hindutva’s valorization of the patriarchal family as a microcosm of the Hindu nation.

In "Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani," the narrative arc is even more explicit in its progressive posturing. The film tackles issues like toxic masculinity, caste, and gender norms, with Ranveer Singh’s Rocky evolving from a brash, hyper-masculine figure to a more sensitive partner. Yet, Kanwal’s past infidelity and transgressions are romanticized through a nostalgic lens, and the film’s resolution—where Rocky and Rani bridge their families’ differences—upholds the traditional family structure. The portrayal of Dhanlakshmi as a domineering matriarch as a justification for Kanwal's immorality reinforces Hindutva’s suspicion of female agency, while Kanwal’s moral failings are excused as personal weakness rather than systemic entitlement.

This facade of liberation—where progressive rhetoric masks the perpetuation of patriarchal norms—reveals Bollywood’s complicity in upholding Hindutva’s cultural politics. The films’ narratives of “liberation” are carefully crafted to avoid challenging the core tenets of North Indian, Hindi-speaking, upper-caste Hindu identity, which Hindutva seeks to universalize as the essence of Indianness.

Hindutva and the Sanctification of the Patriarch

Hindutva’s ideological project relies on the construction of a homogenous Hindu identity rooted in traditional gender roles and family structures. In Bollywood, this manifests in narratives that sanitize male immorality while projecting an image of moral and cultural superiority. Both Kamal Mehra and Kanwal Lund, as upper-caste, North Indian patriarchs, embody the idealized Hindu male: flawed yet redeemable, authoritative yet sympathetic. Their infidelity and abusiveness are framed as personal failings rather than systemic issues rooted in patriarchal entitlement, allowing the films to maintain the sanctity of the Hindu family.

The narrative arcs of both films excuse the immorality of these patriarchs by prioritizing emotional reconciliation over structural critique. In "Dil Dhadakne Do," Kamal’s redemption is achieved through a dramatic rescue sequence, where his physical heroism overshadows his moral failings. In "Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani," Kanwal’s past immoral behavior is reframed as a tragic love story, with his dementia serving as a convenient narrative shield. 

These resolutions align with Hindutva’s immorality peddled as a moral framework, which emphasizes family unity and male authority as pillars of cultural identity, at the same time excusing misogyny and immorality.

Ranveer Singh’s characters in both films further complicate this dynamic. As Kabir and Rocky, Singh represents a modern, urban masculinity that appears to challenge traditional norms. Yet, his characters ultimately reinforce the patriarchal status quo by operating within the confines of upper-caste privilege and familial duty. 

North Indian Hindi Hindutva misogyny is framed as an anchor of desire, only to be then redone as liberation when the misogynist North Indian male finds a woman who saves him by teaching him progressive values. 

This duality reflects Bollywood’s broader strategy of co-opting progressive ideals to serve Hindutva’s cultural agenda, where modernity is celebrated only insofar as it does not threaten traditional hierarchies.

Bollywood’s Complicity and No Accountability Culture

The portrayal of Anil Kapoor’s Kamal and Dharmendra’s Kanwal reveals Bollywood’s troubling tendency to excuse male immorality while projecting a narrative of liberation. 

By sanitizing the abusive and patriarchal behavior of these characters, "Dil Dhadakne Do" and "Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani" uphold the North Indian, Hindi-speaking, upper-caste Hindu culture that aligns with Hindutva’s ideological vision. 

Hindutva thrives on the concoction of misogyny and immorality, simultaneously marginalizing narratives that challenge caste, religion, and gender hierarchies.

Bollywood's whitewashing of immorality is part of a broader neoliberal transformation of middle-class India that finds in progressive tropes the tools for upholding immoral transgressions. The everyday acceptance of immorality as normative shaped middle-class India's acceptance and mobilization behind the immoral corruption of Hindutva. The everyday indecencies of Hindutva are also the normative indecencies of the middle-classes that form the audience base of films such as "Dil Dhadakne Do" and "Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani."

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