I’ve long thought of writing a series on India during the eighties using cricket and movies as markers. Art and sports are often leading indicators of the zeitgeist and my view is that the decade was full of dashed hopes, even hopelessness, amidst modest successes. That changed during the ‘90s when the country liberalized its economy and hope made its way back in the Indian subconscious.
This was the decade during which massive numbers of bright Indian students began to leave India to study in United States and eventually settled here. Some became CEOs of long standing multinational firms, Nobel prize winners, and influential entrepreneurs in this country. America was optimistic and promising. A land of golden opportunity, as long as you understood that the emphasis was on the word ‘opportunity.’ The country was incredibly cool too!
It was also formative for me since I started as a teenager when the decade began and became an adult when it ended.
India’s disastrous economic policies guided by a command and control framework was symbolized most effectively by the clunky ugly Ambassador car, a remnant of the extinct Morris Oxford. It was manufactured by a firm based in Calcutta, the capital of a state that was governed by the Communist party. It barely saw an innovation in the decades of its existence but was the symbol of potent political power. (Paul Fernandes has an excellent Flickr page of cartoons on it from which the two thumbnails below have been used.)
While India transitioned to the smaller Maruti as well as the larger Standard 2000, Contessa and other now extinct cars during the ‘80s, these were still ersatz versions of clunkers. Innovation was still non-existent in most sectors. (R. K. Laxman cartoon source.)
As the country was coming out of the ‘80s, America under Reagan was the shining city on the hill, with people like Lee Iacocca, Andrew Grove, Jobs-Wozniak, Bill Gates, and others whose relentless pursuit of excellence seemed to be without boundaries. The MBA degree replaced the PhD as the objective of the creme’ de la creme’ of Indian universities.
Indians could not be shackled anymore. Those who could, fled to the United States, Canada and the oil-rich Gulf countries. Those who stayed, fought against the system and enabled small shifts that eventually led to the tech boom of the 90s and 2000s.
Hindi cinema of the ‘80s began with Rajesh Khanna, Amitabh, Jeetendra and would end with the fresh faced Aamir, Salman and Shah Rukh who are still kings of the box office, just as Tom Cruise has been in Hollywood.
In cricket, the nation transitioned from Gavaskar to Tendulkar. India won an ODI world cup, a World Championship of cricket, and hosted a World Cup. Slowly, cricket had begun to replace other sports in our mind-spaces. As a kid growing up in Bombay, I used to play badminton, hockey, table-tennis, football, as well as Indian sports such as kabbadi, kho-kho, gilli-danda, and carrom. Many of these sports disappeared from the radar by the time the ‘90s came around, possibly due to lack of physical spaces/infrastructure, and also due to the sheer economic powerhouse that cricket was to become in the post-satellite TV era.
India was riddled with one crises after another; separatist terrorism in many states, the Sri-Lankan civil war, mass riots, election-malpractices (booth capturing in Haryana/Bihar), populist polices that bankrupted states, the list is endless. There were draconian constraints on the freedom of the press and indeed, freedom of expression. India was the first country to ban ‘The Satanic Verses’. Pick up any issue from the 1980s of the India Today archives and you will be shocked by how violent India used to be. (R. K. Laxman cartoon source.)
There were also sources for optimism; a slow opening up of television which led to - finally - TV series (including soaps), series based on the Mahabharata/Ramayana, and election coverage guided by Prannoy Roy’s Psephology Indian cricket looked more promising at the end rather than at the beginning. (That was slowly to give way to despair during the ‘90s.)
This substack series will attempt to cover this rather large landscape, year by year, in random order as the muse strikes. I may or may not write them one after another. I could interrupt the ‘flow’ by posting on some other topic. My posts will be largely personal, and not an academic’s view of history. Hence, while I will try to maintain accuracy, my inclination is to capture the zeitgeist rather than get into a recounting of events. Thus, it aims to be impressionistic painting rather than a map. I’m sure to miss out on seminal events. Please keep me honest.
I’m going to have fun writing it and I hope you will enjoy it.