Many have said Kader Khan's death marked the passing of an era, but in truth, that era passed long ago. Kader Khan was an inescapable presence of Hindi cinema in the 1980s and '90s. His successive collaborations with directors and actors, created definitive, masculine protagonists: a sentimental Amitabh Bachchan, transitioning out of his working-class hero avatar; a neo-middle-class Jeetendra; a tapori Govinda. It was also Hindi cinema's least elite time.

While today, a kind of laddish, ironic nostalgia might hark back to those films, their vulgarity, stereotypes and casual misogyny and a not-always consistent control of loudness cannot be denied. These are the very qualities that a corporatised Bollywood claimed to supplant with a 'superior', very middle-class cinema, sanitising this aesthetic away.