MERITOCRACY, CASTE, AND THE PERFORMANCE OF ASPIRATION: A TEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF SERIOUS MEN (2020)

Abstract

This paper offers a qualitative textual analysis of Sudhir Mishra's Serious Men (2020), adapted from Manu Joseph's 2010 novel, read as a sustained cinematic argument about how inequality is reproduced and legitimated in contemporary urban India. The study is organised around three research questions: how the film critiques meritocracy within a deeply unequal society, how its portrayal of the father–son relationship between Ayyan and Aditya Mani illuminates the psychological burden of intergenerational ambition, and how the director uses the trope of the manufactured prodigy to challenge audience perceptions of the credentialed “Serious Men” who populate the country's scientific, bureaucratic, and educational establishment. Two complementary theoretical lenses guide the interpretation. Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital and social reproduction provides the structural frame through which the film's critique of meritocracy and its dramatisation of compensatory family labour are read, while Erving Goffman's dramaturgical theory of the presentation of self provides the interactional frame through which the prodigy performance and the elite audience's credulity are analysed. Purposive sampling of analytically dense scenes, supported by a verbatim transcript, was subjected to a three-pass close reading in which deductive concepts and inductive themes were brought into iterative dialogue. The analysis finds that the film exposes meritocracy as a performative illusion underwritten by inherited capital, reframes the father–son bond as a site of accelerated capital accumulation in a household denied inherited dispositions, and turns the prodigy trope into a critique of institutionalised seriousness itself, showing that the elite audience trained to recognise merit is also the audience most easily fooled by its surface signs.

Keywords: meritocracy, caste and class in India, cultural capital, qualitative film analysis