It’s a commentary on the way Indians perceive businessmen that the Mahabharata has been reimagined at least twice as a war between rival tycoon clans; Shyam Benegal’s 1981 film Kalyug and Kiran Nagarkar’s play Bedtime Story . From the opening credits sequence itself, Benegal sets the tone for the film’s engagement with the capitalist ethos and how it echoes the martial sensibilities of the Mahabharata, especially the warrior’s code as spelt out by Lord Krishna in the Gita.

The opening credits sequence of David Lynch’s TV show Twin Peaks depicted the fading, bleeding beauty of old industrial America, a place of dying lumber mills and rundown automobile units. In Kalyug, Benegal employs an equal and opposite approach — ominous music accompanies borderline gratuitous shots of tech-porn (by India-in-1981 standards, that is). Gleaming machines scythe their way through assembly lines, a welding arc is almost in your face and friction sparks fly everywhere in the frame. Two of our onlooking players — Shashi Kapoor and Victor Bannerjee — take their protective masks off nonchalantly, their suits spotless amidst the machinery.

With just a minute-long montage, Benegal communicates key attributes of the evil businessman prototype: filthy rich, complacent, duplicitous (takes off masks at any given moment) and in-your-face with his wealth and influence over his perceived subordinates.

Kalyug was evocative of two things — one, the earlier Bimal Roy wave of socialist realism ( Do Bigha Zameen , Bandini , Madhumati ), and two, the idea that the big bad world of business (and by implication, cartloads of cash) tears families apart. Deewaar (1975), one of the most successful Bollywood films of the ’70s, underlined the latter point again and again. The brothers Vijay and Ravi Verma lose their father due to the machinations of a corrupt businessman, the ensuing butterfly effect transforming Vijay into the personification of the muscle and corruption that set him down this path in the first place.

Not that Benegal wasn’t interested in critiquing these two ideas. Kalyug is always humane and sometimes, even affectionate towards its subjects, especially to the women in these warring families, whose horror at the proceedings escalates steadily. But eventually, the Khubchands and Puranchands ( Kalyug ’s Kaurava/Pandava analogues) do go to war over a big, extremely lucrative government contract. And this pattern is repeated over and over again, in films before and after Kalyug , propagating a quasi-biblical message: You can either serve love or Mammon ( pyaar chahiye ya paisa chahiye , as an old song goes).

Two films, both named Saudagar (literally ‘businessman’ in Hindi), are instructive in this context. The 1973 film starred Amitabh Bachchan as Moti, a gur (jaggery) vendor who marries Mejuben (Nutan) because he feels his business will skyrocket; Meju is a gifted gur chef. By the end of the gur-making season, he saves up enough money to return her meher (dowry) and promptly divorces her. In the 1991 Subhash Ghai film, Rajeshwar Singh (Raaj Kumar) is ready to believe that his childhood friend Veer Singh (Dilip Kumar) would betray him for wealth and power, because Veer, after all, is an orphan who the young heir Rajeshwar picked up off the streets. The climb up the ladder is seen as all-consuming and is treated like an axiom, this time by Ghai, who, after all, never really moved on from his ’70s’ potboilers.

TV serials led the way forward for the ‘corporate family drama’. Dastaan gave Indian audiences their first Dubai dreams. Ashish Vidyarthi and Parmeet Sethi played rival businessmen. Chattaan starred Shammi Kapoor as Shamsher (Kapoor’s actual first name), a retired tycoon trying to keep his family together, even as a young entrepreneur Kamal (Anang Desai) tries to break the empire from within. Parampara was another long-running show about business families at war. And after it went through the death by a thousand cuts preferred by soap operas, so too went the trope, it seemed (before Jassi Jaisi Koi Nahi resurrected it briefly in the mid-2000s).

As if to signal the shift, along came the Aditya Chopra-Karan Johar generation by the end of the ’90s, soon after the Indian economy opened itself up to multinational corporations. Not to put too fine a point on it, these were films featuring rich kids, much like Johar and Chopra themselves. And the brats were fighting the power, i.e. daddy, in the tradition of Kajol’s character in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1994).

Suneel Darshan and Vipul Shah, two of the most regressive filmmakers around, took up arms on behalf of the old order. In Darshan’s Ek Rishta (2001), an old business patriarch Vijay Kapoor’s (Amitabh Bachchan) ideas are challenged by his US-educated son Ajay (Akshay Kumar), who has an IT degree (machines = modernity = decadence). Communication breakdown ensues, Ajay leaves the family unit to build his own business from scratch, only to realise his folly by the end of the film and return to save the family (i.e. the family business) from Vijay’s villainous son-in-law Rajesh (Mohnish Behl), a throwback to the evil businessman prototype. In Shah’s Waqt (2005), the same father-and-son pair returns, and this time Bachchan has to teach his wastrel son the value of money — by throwing him out of the house until he becomes a man, i.e. aligns his sense of self-worth with industrial capitalism.

Now, thankfully, we have films about 20-something entrepreneurs in the wedding planning business ( Band Baaja Baaraat ), or donating sperms in lieu of a day job ( Vicky Donor ). The tyranny of khaandaani business sob stories seems to be on the wane (apart from curve balls like Shaandaar , which ambitiously tried to skewer two genres at once: the princess fairy tale and the warring-businessmen genre). And much as I enjoy watching Akshay Kumar cry snotty tears, long may it stay that way.

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