Affective economies of pity, charity, and para-family around disability in Nitin Bose’s Deedar (1951) and Satyen Bose’s Dosti (1964)

This article reads Nitin Bose’s Deedar (1951) and Satyen Bose’s Dosti (1964) to show how Hindi melodrama articulates an affective economy of pity, charity, and para-familial care in early post-Independence India. Using affect theory and disability studies, it argues that these films, working within broader social concerns, transform physical impairment into public feeling: melodramatic omission of accidents, sacrificial gestures, and pathos-laden songs mediate audience sympathy while converting charity into both a survival strategy and a mechanism of hierarchical structuring. Pity operates relationally—structuring fulfilment for benefactors, obligating gratitude from beneficiaries, and producing quasi-kinship networks that substitute for limited institutional support. Far from a single, reducible stereotype, cinematic pity produces contradictory outcomes: it sustains material care under conditions of state neglect even as it reproduces hierarchical dependency. The paper calls for reading popular cinema as an archive of affective practices through which postcolonial India negotiated the imaginations of disability and care.