Family and Genealogy

Where ‘family’ usually includes family formation as a component, that is, with love and romance as the beginning, genealogy and romance are kept distinctly separate in Indian popular cinema, with the parental presence and the joint family taking on different functions. The argument in the chapter is partly that the parent or parent-surrogate plays the part of a past or context in popular cinema; actions are charted in relation to this ‘past’ or ‘ vestige of tradition ’. Still, there is no compulsion for characters to follow family dictate in films, and this is true even in the epics where a character may be loyal to his family or break with it with equal justification. If the logic appears to be ‘varnashrama-dharma’, dharma is a nebulous/slippery term and a seemingly contradictory notion, which allows the popular film to present sometimes contrary ethics as equally valid or laudable at different times. The chapter looks at how genealogy features in popular cinema in different avatars and what it signifies.