Arup K. Chatterjee appeared on Padhaku Nitin, with Nitin Thakur, on Aaj Tak, and the two discussed the importance of 1990s in shaping present-day India. The discussion was based on Chatterjee’s article, published in The Indian Express.
Arup K. Chatterjee’s reading of the 1990s begins with a refusal to treat the decade as a neat calendar box. He insists that the 1990s were not simply ten years that began in 1990 and ended in 1999, but a longer historical phase that continued to shape the present. He compares it to the idea of the “long nineteenth century,” arguing that one must see the 1990s as a cultural and historical terrain rather than a closed interval of time. That larger frame matters because, in his view, the decade did not merely produce memories. It generated a structure of feeling that still governs media, politics, and taste today. Films, songs, television, advertising, cricket, and consumer goods all became part of that shared atmosphere. The decade, then, was not only remembered; it was still being lived, reworked, and re-activated through contemporary culture.
One of Chatterjee’s central claims is that the 1990s were inseparable from India’s economic crisis and liberalization. He recalls the secretive movement of gold to the Bank of England in 1991, first under Chandrashekhar and then under P. V. Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh, as a sign of the country’s financial vulnerability. He links this moment to the World Bank’s structural adjustment loan and to the overhaul of FERA, the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act of 1973. For him, the economic story is also psychological. A society that learns its property is being pledged and its financial system is being overhauled cannot remain culturally unchanged. The reforms of 1991, and the wider LPG logic of liberalization, privatization, and globalization, were not simply market measures. They altered the nation’s imagination of itself. The 1990s were therefore years when economic policy and cultural mood moved together, and when anxiety, aspiration, and new possibility coexisted in unstable balance.
This economic turn also reconfigured the meaning of memory. Chatterjee argues that the 1990s produced a distinctive emotional archive, one formed by debt, hope, spectacle, and political churn. He lists the many prime ministers of the decade, not merely as an administrative fact but as evidence of instability and churn in public life. Yet he insists that the 1990s should also be remembered as hopeful years. They brought a new media environment, a new consumer landscape, and a new confidence in the circulation of images. At the same time, they also introduced a social memory of scarcity and aspiration. In his view, the decade taught Indians to think of themselves through mediated desires. If earlier generations encountered foreign drinks, snacks, and brands mostly in films, then the liberalized 1990s made those products visible in everyday life. That shift, he suggests, transformed both consumption and consciousness.
Chatterjee’s strongest cultural argument concerns cinema, which he describes as a central window through which Indians saw the world. For many, film had long been a substitute for direct experience, especially of global goods and lifestyles. In the 1990s this changed, but not entirely. Films still shaped how people encountered brands, social styles, and foreign spaces, even as the market itself expanded. He reads the decade as one in which the screen and the street began to mirror each other more closely. Product placement became normalised, consumer goods entered plots, and the language of aspiration spread through the popular film. In his account, this does not mean that cinema merely sold products. It means cinema became a key site where the new consumer culture could be imagined, staged, and naturalised. The 1990s Indian film, for him, was not a simple entertainment object. It was a social text that revealed how the economy was changing from within.
He is equally attentive to television, perhaps the decade’s most democratic medium. Chatterjee reminds the listener that television serials, Doordarshan, cable channels, and programmes such as the news show of the era all helped to produce a new public culture. The 1990s were the years when politics itself began to appear as a televised event, and when educational commentary, media spectacle, and election culture overlapped. He notes that this was the period in which a kind of “247 news television” began to take shape, and politics became a form of entertainment as well as public instruction. Television also produced a new shared archive of memory. Many who grew up in the decade remember Friday nights, film broadcasts, serials, and the changing habits of family viewing. Chatterjee treats this not as trivia but as historical evidence. Television, for him, helped remake India’s collective memory, just as it remade the rhythms of leisure, family life, and political attention.
Music occupies an equally important place in his account. He argues that the 1990s brought both continuity and rupture in Indian film music. The decade gave the country new voices such as Kumar Sanu, Alka Yagnik, and Udit Narayan, even as it marked the end of another musical age. He treats the songs of the period not merely as songs, but as carriers of memory and mood. He also points out that the 1990s were a time of plagiarism, pastiche, bricolage, and open borrowing. That is why contemporary films such as Dhurandhar can reanimate older songs so effectively. Their use of 90s music is not innocent. It is an act of cultural reassembly, an attempt to make the audience feel that the decade itself has returned. Chatterjee reads this through the lens of dark humour and cinematic memory. The soundtrack becomes a machine for reviving the 1990s as both pleasure and unease, as something nostalgically familiar and slightly uncanny.
Chatterjee argues that Dhurandhars’ 90s-like soundtrack is not just ornamental. It is political, historical, and psychological. He says that people were talking about the film’s politics, while he turned to the music because music offered another entry into its meaning. He describes the soundtrack as a bricolage of older songs, assembled in fragments, and used to produce a strangely addictive effect. In his account, the film’s music works like a pastiche that triggers memory and reanimates the decade’s emotional world. He compares this technique to Quentin Tarantino’s archival reuse of music, but also links it to a specifically Indian cultural practice of borrowing, quoting, and refashioning. The key point is that the soundtrack does not simply recall the 1990s. It turns the decade into a mode of feeling that can be consumed again in the present.
Chatterjee’s remarks on Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge insist that the film is not merely a love story and not merely a tale of gender emancipation. It is also an economic allegory. He connects the film to India’s liberalization, the gap between projected and realised foreign direct investment, and the cultural politics of the newly globalised middle class. In his reading, the film’s brand consciousness, foreign locations, and consumer imagery reflect the actual conditions of the 1990s economy. He cites the figures that Indian FDI rose from 3.2 billion to 132 billion between 1990 and the later 1990s, while India’s share of global FDI rose only from 0.5 per cent to 2.5 per cent, still far behind China. Such figures matter to him because they reveal the distance between promise and fulfilment. The film’s train journey, diaspora romance, and family consent are all linked to that larger economy of aspiration. The film thus becomes a symbolic map of liberalisation itself.
He extends this economic argument to consumer goods and advertising. The 1990s, he says, were the era in which FMCG goods, product placements, and brand imagery entered Indian cinema with unusual force. The availability of Kellogg’s, Thums Up, Coca-Cola, and other brands in films such as Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!, DDLJ, and related works was not incidental. It was part of a broader restructuring of Indian desire. Chatterjee sees these goods as markers of an economic order that promised abundance while still being uneven in reality. He notes that the major FDI inflows of the period were concentrated in FMCG, and that the new consumer culture often appeared more expansive than the economy’s structural capacities actually were. In this sense, the films and advertisements of the decade were not merely reflections of prosperity. They were compensatory fantasies, attempts to visualize abundance in a country where abundance remained partial and unequally distributed.
Chatterjee’s interest in literary and aesthetic theory leads to a discussion on Gulzar. He describes Gulzar’s work as phenomenological in the sense that it deals with lived experience, sensation, and perception. He also says that Gulzar used quantum mechanics and scientific language not as literal science, but as a poetic idiom, a map rather than the territory itself. This matters because Chatterjee sees 1990s popular culture as a place where high and low forms meet. Gulzar becomes, in his reading, a poet who helped popular consciousness absorb new metaphors, especially those drawn from scientific and cosmic language. That is why the moon, the stars, memory, longing, and the scale of the universe recur in his remarks. The 1990s, for Chatterjee, were not only a decade of markets and media. They were also a decade in which poetry, science, and mass culture entered a new alignment.
Finally, Chatterjee repeatedly returns to the idea that the 1990s remain alive because they formed the imagination of a generation. He speaks of the demographic dividend, of people born or raised in the later 1980s and 1990s who now occupy positions of cultural influence. Their nostalgia is not accidental. It is built into the historical experience of that decade. He also admits that nostalgia can be deceptive, that it may idealise a space that never truly existed. Yet he does not dismiss nostalgia. He treats it as a historical force. The 1990s are remembered because they were formative, uneven, and emotionally charged. They gave India liberalization, consumerism, television, music, political turbulence, and new cinematic forms, but they also gave it anxiety, debt, and unresolved contradiction. That, in essence, is Chatterjee’s account: the 1990s were not simply a decade after which life moved on. They were the beginning of the present cultural condition, and their songs, films, brands, and political moods still echo in India’s public life.
Arup K. Chatterjee 