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The Angry Young Man is gone. Bollywood now celebrates only the anger

A lot has changed between Amitabh Bachchan's Zanjeer and Ranbir Kapoor's Animal. Today, the hero is the very man the old Angry Young Man used to fight.

India has lost its Angry Young Man. The new heroes are perhaps angrier, although mostly played by older actors pretending to be young, but they are increasingly becoming a lost cause. They neither contribute to Bollywood’s cinematic legacy nor fight for a larger social purpose. Rather than exploring issues like class divide, caste discrimination, unemployment, corruption, or systemic injustice, their anger is often reduced to personal revenge and wounded masculinity.

When the iconic writing duo Salim-Javed created the Angry Young Man archetype, embodied by Amitabh Bachchan, they gave Hindi cinema a hero whose rage came from social injustice. In films like Deewaar (1975), Zanjeer (1973), and Trishul (1978), Bachchan’s characters were culturally disillusioned, working-class men who constantly stood up against an unfair system. Their anger was rarely driven by personal insult alone. They fought not just for themselves, but for everyone around them.

Compare that with today’s “much angrier” heroes: Shahid Kapoor’s Kabir Singh (2019), Salman Khan in Dabangg (20190), Ranbir Kapoor’s Animal (2023), Allu Arjun’s Pushpa (2021),  Yash in KGF (2018) and in the upcoming film Toxic, among others. While these films may have been commercially successful, most of their protagonists are fighting for personal gain rather than a larger cause. Mainstream cinema today rarely takes a socio-political stance. In Kabir Singh, the protagonist slaps his lover, displays obsessive and abusive behaviour, and the film........

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