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The seventies was a turbulent decade for the country and the anxiety was evident in the films. The cinegoer whose life was going through many changes was no more attracted to fairy tale romances. The paradigm shift reflected at the box office when the action hero Amitabh Bachchan gradually elbowed space from the romantic hero, Rajesh Khanna.
The transition from Rajesh Khanna to Amitabh Bachchan changed the way movies were made and more important, what the country was going through. The country was going through recession. The youth was unemployed and frustrated therefore the present hero was anti establishment. The creators of this new hero were dynamic writers like Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar and directors who projected the new image were Manmohan Desai/ Amar Akbar Anthony, Prakash Mehra/ Zanjeer and Yash Chopra/ Deewar, Trishul in mainstream cinema.
This was a phase of multistarrers, of music and entertainment. Simultaneously there was a parallel movement called art cinema pioneered by filmmakers like Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani and ushering a host of new talent from theate and acting schools like Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, Grish Karnad, Om Puri, Amol Palekar and Smita Patil from the Doordarshan.
Playback singer Kishore Kumar who began as Dev Anand’s voice, then Rajesh Khanna’s now came to be identified as Amitabh Bachchan’s voice though Mukesh and Mohammad Rafi also sang for Bachchan.
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