Why is Bollywood obsessed with the 90s?

Why has our popular culture become so fixated on the 1990s and early 2000s? Before I delve into this, let's take a glance at a few updates from the film industry over the past month. Sunny Deol has delivered the most successful film of the decade. Gadar 2's humongous success has gone beyond Bollywood’s imagination. I am not reviewing the film for its quality but its triumph is being attributed to its honest portrayal of the core family unit, nationalistic sentiments and Sunny Deol (Do you even remember his last hit film before Gadar 2 blew everyone’s mind away?)

Then Guns & Gulaabs, Prime Video’s recent series directed by Raj & DK, is a flamboyant ode to mid-90s Bollywood action-crime films. The 90s nostalgia hits its peak in the series with a villain named Chaar-Cut Atmaram with a Sanjay Dutt’s mullet hairstyle from the nineties. It boasts of rotary landline phones, cassette players and cassettes with ‘jhankar beats’, students playing book cricket (remember this?) and north Indian gangsters indulging in good old dialoguebazi and pulpy violence.

Another news from B’town suggests one of the most adored onscreen pairs of nineties, Akshay Kumar and Raveena Tandon (who had also got engaged but didn’t marry) are going to reunite after 19 years in Welcome To The Jungle (a sequel to 2007 film Welcome). There will of course be references to their romance and their signature song Tip Tip Barsa Paani (Mohra, 1994). And ofcourse, the king of Bollywood, Shah Rukh Khan will be back this week with a massy, nineties-style, revenge-vigilante action movie Jawan. The hysteria over the advance booking suggests it’s going to be a massive film.

There has to be a reason behind this sudden love for the past. Conversations in living rooms are abuzz with discussions about the Tara-Sakina love story, the nineties’ chartbuster Main Nikla Gaddi Leke and and the excitement surrounding a potential Border 2. We are witnessing the resurgence of unadulterated nostalgia not just in small town single screen theatres but also among the most expensive multiplexes. It's a rare “universal hit” that the film industry had been yearning for. It’s intriguing that something that was deemed outdated a few months ago has gained renewed ‘retro’ appeal. Individuals, particularly from the millennial generation seem highly inclined towards these nostalgic feelings.These are the decades encompassing their childhood, teenage years, and early adulthood. Incidentally, it's this particular age group that you see in viral videos grooving to the tunes of Gadar 2 in theatres.