In the years leading up to the Emergency, the “miracle” democracy and its newly minted citizens came to realise that political freedom did not automatically deliver a better life.The country lurched through economic hardship and political unrest. A growing number of Indians wondered why, even after a long struggle for azadi, the India they had dreamt of remained elusive.The Emergency did not create this disenchantment. It crystallised it. By suspending constitutional freedoms in the name of national discipline and internal security, the state accomplished something it had never intended.It taught citizens that its institutions could no longer be trusted merely because they existed. It made official how Indians thought about power, authority, and the relationship between the two. For many Indians, the location for seeking justice – political, economic, or social – gradually migrated from the institutions of the state to elsewhere.Hindi cinema, amongst others, was one of the earliest places where that shift became visible. Like literature, music, or any other form of art, cinema is often a site where society rehearses its anxieties. It does not provide a neat proof or a sociological survey but comes close to offering a psychological snapshot of what a society is thinking. A remarkable year for Hindi cinemaIn a searing satirical moment in Gulzar’s Aandhi (1975), Aarti Devi, a leading politician played by Suchitra Sen, swoops down upon a dusty little town in a glass-domed helicopter to address an election rally. She had expected to be greeted with garlands and cheers of zindabad. Instead, she is confronted with unsettling expressions of public discontent. At the end of the three-minute musical sequence, Aarti Devi is forced to flee the rally but not before a stone hurled at her causes a minor head injury. In real life, another leading politician faced dissent, discontent, and a court verdict invalidating her election. “Singhasan khali karo, ki janata aati hai (Vacate the throne, for the people are coming),” Jayaprakash Narayan issued the rallying cry at a massive protest. Instead of responding through political introspection and democratic means, Indira Gandhi chose to deal a very heavy hand.On that sweltering day in June 1975, the prime minister’s thin yet firm voice crackled through the All India Radio as she declared a state of Emergency. She suspended civil liberties, imprisoned opposition leaders, restricted press freedoms and, as Shashi Tharoor has said, turned “a multi-party democracy – freewheeling, rumbustious, corrupt and inefficient perhaps, nonetheless flourishing” – into an authoritarian state through the stroke of a midnight proclamation. The country was learning two different stories about power. One was being written by the State. The other often flickered across a movie screen. The otherwise turbulent year was perhaps the most remarkable one for Hindi cinema. In addition to Sholay, where a retired police officer looks for redemption not from the system he was once a part of but from two small-time drifters who are its culprits, and Aandhi, which was initially banned on the alleged grounds of causing “damage to the reputation of the Congress Party”, 1975 also saw the release of Deewar, Nishant, Dharmatma, and other noteworthy films. Also read: 26 Scenes From 26 Years of Hindi Cinema Worth Remembering in 2026These movies did not emerge from the Emergency alone. They were expressions of a longer period of social and political disillusionment. In Mere Apne (1971), Gulzar had staged another musical satire, exposing the frustrations of an educated but unemployed generation. B.A. kiya hai, M.A. kiya / lagta hai woh bhi ainvayi kiya (I did my B.A., I did my M.A. / Feels like I just wasted my time doing that). Each indictment – of corruption, joblessness, or inequality – is punctuated by the deadpan assurance: Haal chaal theek thaak hai, sab kuch theek thaak hai (Everything is fine, everything is just great). Imagined dramatic deliverance of justiceThe cinema of the 70s gave that frustration a face. These stories held the hands of ordinary people whose growing disaffection, even if for just a few hours in a darkened hall, found utterance through a solitary hero. Leading the charge was Salim-Javed’s Angry Young Man, who had first burst onto the big screen with Zanjeer in the early seventies.He was not a product of the Emergency, but he embodied precisely the anxieties that the Emergency sought to suppress. He had risen from the street, railway stations, remote villages, forgotten neighbourhoods, and the footpaths beneath sprawling bridges – places that were strung out along the margins of power.Also read: How Hindi Cinema is Preparing India for ViolenceIn an age when the mighty apparatus of the state appeared incapable, or unwilling, to ensure fairness, many of these movies imagined dramatic deliverance of justice not through the state, but through flawed individuals acting outside it. This is why someone like Vijay in Deewar carried resonance. He shuns idealism, holds on to his lived experience of the street, and indicts society, the state, and even God for the betrayals that he and his family endured. He has grown up witnessing how easily the law can be flouted with impunity by those above him. He becomes convinced that the law no longer represents justice. He moves with a brooding moral authority that audiences increasingly felt had disappeared from the local policeman or the district magistrate. Departure from the dominant sensibilitiesAt the same time, alternative cinema – the “Indian New Wave” – offered an entirely different response to the same moment.Transcending linguistic barriers, filmmakers like Shyam Benegal, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Govind Nihalani, Mrinal Sen, and others rejected escapism in favour of realism. They explored uncomfortable truths rather than merely distracting audiences from them. Actors like Smita Patil were alternative cinema’s embodiment of breaking free from oppressive power structures through collective action (Manthan, 1976). Shabana Azmi’s characters in films such as Ankur (1974) portrayed a quieter, more cerebral exhaustion with social and institutional hypocrisy. Mainstream cinema and alternative cinema of this period differed enormously in ideas, style, audience, and ambition. Yet both shared an important underlying conviction that the institutions – both of the state and society – did not deserve automatic reverence and could be challenged. This marked a departure from the dominant sensibilities of earlier Hindi cinema which had shared the youthful sense of life of Nehru’s India. It was an India that was rife with struggles but it possessed immense confidence in its founding story and its future. Yet this confidence did not mean that the films of the fifties and early sixties were blind to hardship. Many of them told stories of injustice, like Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin (1953), and even profound loneliness, like Guru Dutt’s Kagaz Ke Phool (1959). The seeds of the disillusionment that would come to dominate the late sixties and seventies existed, as shown in movies like Pyaasa (1957). They often took different routes to imagining a just and humane society, convinced that it could yet be built. It was a generation, as parliamentarian Manoj Kumar Jha noted in a recent article, “that did not inherit India as a ready-made nation-state; they had to imagine it first.” Many of these films inhabited a moral universe in which good and evil were distinguishable, where communities could endure suffering, and where justice, even if delayed, would eventually prevail. The Gentle Dreamer had preceded the Angry Young Man. The Emergency did not suddenly shatter this dream. It revealed how fragile it had become. In this sense, the shift in Hindi cinema from the fifties to the seventies reflected a deeper shift in Indian society. For many Indians the question had metamorphosed from What should India become? into a more troubled one: Why had the India we imagined failed to arrive? Hindi cinema embodied one of the most subtle transformations of modern India: the movement from faith in existing institutions to a search for justice outside them. Sometimes history arrives quietly, insidiously, disguised as an ordinance, a court judgement, or a film poster pasted on a crumbling wall. A declared emergency has a commencement date. It places power, and its abuse, out in the open. It creates a clear moment of confrontation. A slower erosion of democratic norms, on the other hand, can be harder to recognise. It operates beneath the surface, away from light and scrutiny. It wriggles ahead through weakened institutions, managed public discourse, diminished accountability, and changing definitions of citizenship itself. One of the lessons of the Emergency is that democracy, once established, can never be treated as a finished project. Secured by earlier generations, it is a continuing responsibility that requires constant vigilance, protection and, when needed, doses of reinforcements. That may be one of the reasons why the films of that intense summer more than fifty years ago continue to endure. They remind us that when institutions fail to answer moral questions of a society, imagination finds other ways to ask them. Shivendra Singh is a writer from Lucknow.