Unlike Hollywood, which churns out dozens of disaster films every year, the Indian film industry doesn’t seem to care much about mass destruction. Indian anxiety – expressed in the entertainment industry – seems to mostly be about Pakistan.

There are many movies in which there is a standard formula: Pakistan tries to destabilise India one way or another. An Indian hero leads a mission to save India and succeeds against all odds.

There are several genres missing from Indian movies. Science fiction, for example, is completely absent. So is any type of exploration of a dystopian, post-apocalyptic scenario. Perhaps there are a few reasons why the apocalypse is not imagined in popular culture.

Dystopian fiction was a child of the threat of nuclear war. Dystopian fiction might have existed on the margins before nuclear war became a reality. But it was really after the second world war that the first truly mainstream dystopian fiction hit the world: 1984. Published in 1949, this novel imagines a post-nuclear war United Kingdom ruled by the authoritarian Big Brother.

It is difficult to imagine that George Orwell could have created the dystopian world of 1984 without the anxiety caused by nuclear weapons.



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