Echoes of Laughter: The soft radicalism of Hrishikesh Mukherjee

When Chupke Chupke was released in 1975, it was a cinematic anomaly.

- TDG NETWORK

The same year gave us Deewaar and Sholay, seismic films that split Hindi cinema into 'before' and 'after'. But while Bachchan was becoming the nation's Angry Young Man, Hrishikesh Mukherjee was building something quieter, something subtler—a language of middle-class comedy rooted not in chaos, but in calibration.

To fully appreciate Chupke Chupke and the ecosystem it belongs to, you need to understand what it resists. These films resist excess. They resist grandiosity. In an era inching toward operatic melodrama and vigilante justice, Mukherjee and his peers created small revolutions set in drawing rooms, kitchens, and government offices. Their rebellions were linguistic, domestic, and behavioral.

Let's walk through five films that, like Chupke Chupke, turned civility into subversion and turned comedy into cinema's gentlest art form. GOL MAAL (1979): THE FARCE OF FORMALITY Mukherjee's own Gol Maal is arguably Chupke Chupke's thematic sequel. It, too, hinges on performance—Amol Palekar's Ramprasad must don twin personas to survive the tyranny of an employer who fetishizes sanskaar. But where Chupke Chupke used shuddh Hindi to mock linguistic purism, Gol Maal skewers cultural orthodoxy itself.