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In this new essay on the Hindi film Laal Singh Chaddha (Advait Chandan, 2022), an adaptation of Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994), I suggest that the Hindi film is making an intervention in public discourse by deliberately negating the forms in which Hindu nationalism and Indian capitalism come together. In my recently published book, Stories that Bind: Political Economy and Culture in New India, I have argued that neoliberalism and Hindu nationalism come together in the Indian context through the form of the popular story and I call this form, spectacular realism. In brief, I show that nation and capital acquire a spectacular, transcendental authority through the popular story suturing them to the ordinariness of the common person. As such both, Hindu nationalism and neoliberalism but more importantly, the intersection of these projects, win consent for themselves. Developing this argument further, I am suggesting that Laal Singh Chaddha wants to tell a different story about the ordinary and the common person than the one that makes this commonness the foundation of the spectacle of the nation and capital. It is precisely for this reason that the film has faced intense opposition.

Madhavi Mohan Murty is an associate professor of Sociology with affiliations in Feminist Studies and Digital Arts and New Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  Her research and teaching interests center on popular media, nationalism, globalization, feminism, postcolonial theory, cultural theory, and modalities of difference such as race, caste, and gender. Her latest book, "Stories that Bind: Political Economy and Culture in New India," focuses on the intertwined projects of Hindu nationalism and neoliberalism in India and their narration in popular culture. 

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