The problems we didn’t see:
I grew up on Bollywood the way most of us did, as background noise, as comfort, and as a second language. Movie nights meant Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, cousins humming Tujhe Dekha Toh Ye Jaana Sanam, and our parents saying things like “They don’t make love stories like this anymore.” But now that we’re older, we’ve started to realize: maybe that’s a good thing.
Because the films we grew up on didn’t just entertain us, they quietly taught us what love, gender, and normalcy were supposed to look like. They made red flags look romantic, control look like care, and privilege look like fate. Under the garb of culture and entertainment, they normalized things that shouldn’t have been normal at all.
Gendered Red Flags
Think of every iconic “love story” we’ve grown up watching. The hero chases the heroine endlessly, refuses to take no for an answer, and wins her over, not through respect, but through persistence. We were told it was “romantic.” In reality, it was just harassment set to music. From Kabir Singh’s obsession to DDLJ’s charming defiance, Bollywood has long mistaken possession for passion.
It’s the same logic that rewards intensity over empathy. The “angry young man,” first made heroic by Amitabh Bachchan in the 1970s, became the blueprint for what masculinity should look like: brooding, damaged, and emotionally unavailable. When these men did cry, it was always privately, never gently, and almost always redeemed by a woman’s love.
The psychology of this isn’t random. Gender socialization theory explains how men are taught to equate dominance with masculinity and emotional restraint with strength. And Bollywood, consciously or not, has played an enormous role in reinforcing that.
If men don’t cry, women must fix them. That’s been the formula for decades.
Class and Caste: Whose Story Gets to Be Told
Bollywood’s relationship with class and caste is equally skewed. “Poor” is often just a backdrop, a plot device, not a lived reality. The rich are the default. From Student of the Year’s designer uniforms to Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara’s Spain road trip, even “middle-class” is coded as elite.
And caste? Unless the movie is about caste (Article 15, Sujata, Masaan), it might as well not exist. The default setting of Bollywood is upper-caste, upper-class, urban India, a fantasy so polished it doesn’t reflect 90% of the country.
Working-class characters rarely have depth. They crack jokes, serve chai, cry in the background, and vanish when the hero’s story is complete. Sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital could explain this: Bollywood mirrors those who have the power to make films, which means it mirrors privilege itself.
Beauty Standards: The Same Face in Every Film
Bollywood has always sold beauty as fairness and desirability as thinness. Even when the story is set in a dusty small town, the heroine somehow has airbrushed skin and salon-styled hair.
Fairness creams, fat jokes, and the token “dusky” character (played by an actor two shades lighter than reality) have shaped how we see beauty in Indian cinema.
Colorism in Bollywood is not subtle. Actresses like Nandita Das have spoken about the “Fair & Lovely” gaze of casting directors. Skin tone and body type are coded into who gets to be loved on-screen and who gets to be laughed at.
Psychologically, this ties into internalized colonial beauty standards, the idea that fair, thin, Eurocentric features are aspirational, and a residue of colonial hierarchies that Bollywood still hasn’t washed off.
Mental Health & Trauma: The Aesthetic of Pain
In most movies, therapy is a punchline. A “crazy” character is laughed at, trauma is romanticized, and healing is reduced to a song montage. The one exception, Dear Zindagi, was revolutionary precisely because it treated therapy as normal, not dramatic.
But for every Dear Zindagi, there are a dozen films where pain becomes poetic and toxic coping is glorified. A man drinks to forget her. A woman stays to fix him.
In a society where mental health stigma already runs deep, Bollywood has helped sustain the idea that vulnerability equals weakness.
From a psychological perspective on media socialization, repeated portrayals of suffering without recovery condition audiences to normalize dysfunction, to see trauma as personality instead of something that needs care.
Nationalism and the “Other”
Then there’s how Bollywood handles patriotism. Over the years, love for the nation has started looking more like hostility toward others. Muslims, Pakistanis, or vaguely “foreign” villains populate the enemy category in countless blockbusters.
This isn’t just lazy writing; it’s narrative conditioning. Movies like Gadar, Mission Kashmir, or Uri frame aggression as love for the motherland.
Sociologically, this fits into the concept of imagined communities: nations are constructed stories, and cinema is one of their most powerful storytellers. When the story always pits “us” versus “them,” that’s not patriotism; it’s propaganda disguised as pride.
Why These Stories Still Sell
Here’s the harsh truth: they work. Toxic heroes, rich characters, and predictable plots are guaranteed profit. Producers prefer the comfort of clichés over the risk of change. Patriarchy sells better than experimentation.
Economically, it’s a simple case of profit maximization under risk aversion. The Indian film industry invests where returns are predictable, and social progress, unfortunately, is not.
But that’s starting to shift. As audiences become more self-aware, filmmakers are being forced to confront their own blind spots. Social media callouts, critical reviews, and a generation that grew up watching both Kabir Singh and Darlings are slowly redefining what sells.
The Change We’re Seeing
It’s not all bleak. There’s a slow but visible shift.
Films like Thappad (on consent and emotional abuse), Darlings (on domestic violence), Qala (on generational trauma and ambition), and Made in Heaven (on sexuality and hypocrisy) are proof that Bollywood can be self-aware when it tries.
More women are directing, more actors are speaking up, and more audiences are calling out the problematic.
Sociologically, this feels like cultural evolution through reflexivity, a society becoming aware of the narratives it consumes and beginning to reshape them consciously. We’re not rejecting Bollywood; we’re rewriting it.
Conclusion: Learning to Watch Consciously
Maybe Bollywood didn’t teach us wrong; it just didn’t teach us carefully.
We inherited a film culture built on patriarchy, class privilege, colorism, and selective empathy, and we loved it blindly. But growing up means learning to love critically.
Because films are more than fiction. They’re social blueprints. When we normalize obsession, erasure, or violence on-screen, we quietly make peace with them off-screen too.
So the next time you stream something, watch consciously. Notice who gets the last line. Who gets to be seen? Who gets forgiven?
Maybe the responsibility now lies with us, to clap for better stories, to call out the bad ones, and to remind filmmakers that we’ve outgrown the red flags we once applauded.