In 1978’s Nasbandi, bankrupt brothers I.S. Johar and Rajendranath try to lure unsuspecting citizens into sterilisation camps with promises of cash, a Murphy radio, or a tin of Dalda. But their marks turn out to be undercover cops, who drag them into a giant tent and begin prepping them for the very procedure they were pushing.

Lying flat on cold steel tables, the brothers look up and spot a painting of Draupadi’s vastraharan. Panic sets in. They start praying. As nurses tug at their striped boxers, the underwear begins multiplying endlessly until a mountain of shorts buries the operating table. Defeated, the doctors give up.

This scene captures I.S. Johar perfectly: irreverent, anarchic, and biting. One of Indian cinema’s original enfant terribles (and, incidentally, Karan Johar’s uncle), Johar smuggled political satire into slapstick parody. His films lampooned superstition, censorship, religious fundamentalism and even the Kashmir conflict, earning bans, financing blacklists and establishment fury. And yet audiences flocked to see them.

How? Johar understood the power of community-driven, underground cinema. Spoof was his Trojan horse. With a handful of industry allies, lookalike “duplicates” of Bollywood stars, improvised scripts and a Jaspal Bhatti–style deadpan, he created India’s first truly indie comedies. Far removed from the studio system, his films were cheap, chaotic, and utterly free.

Johar and the Origin of Indian Spoofs

Before Nasbandi, there was 5 Rifles. The film is uneven—marred by Johar’s own acting and formulaic detours—but it announced a director working entirely outside industry rules. No studio money. No writing room. No safety net.

That independence let him break every cinematic norm: casting doppelgängers as leads, improvising scenes, ignoring the three-act structure. He paired veterans like Jeevan with complete unknowns, and gave qawwali singer Aziz Nazan a breakout hit with Jhoom Barabar Jhoom Sharabi.

His casting choices were pure subversion. At the peak of Rajesh Khanna’s superstardom, Johar gleefully hired Rakesh Khanna—a knock-off who looked like kaka after a rough night in the ring. That one casting decision distilled the essence of spoof: mischievous, disobedient, and deeply funny.

The film’s mainstream failure only strengthened its cult fandom, built on the fringes of cinema and censorship alike. With lax CBFC oversight and an ironclad creative backbone, Johar crafted India’s first vasectomy-themed Inglourious Basterds.

If 5 Rifles hinted at Johar’s guerrilla ambitions, Nasbandi made them explicit. Here, a vigilante biker gang of Bollywood duplicates—“Anitav Bacchan,” “Sev Anand,” “Shahi Kapoor”—takes on a sterilisation squad led by Jeevan and “Shatrubin Sinha.” Rogue officials undergo forced vasectomies; Jeevan boasts of filling his daily quota while asking Delhi for a factory license. 

Unsurprisingly, the film was banned. But that only added to its myth. Smuggled tapes and whispered screenings transformed Nasbandi into an underground classic. The state promptly banned it. Bootleg screenings only cemented its cult status.

Spoof as Resistance

People often ask, “Why hasn’t India made its own Tropic Thunder?” The answer is simple: studios will never bankroll a satire of themselves. Johar understood this decades ago. That’s why he worked outside the system.

His legacy continued in Malegaon, the small Maharashtrian town whose DIY spoofs—immortalised in Reema Kagti’s Superboys of Malegaon—turned no-budget parody into social commentary. Their Superman doesn’t fight Lex Luthor; he fights gutkha addiction, a nod to the stimulants that workers across the world rely on to keep working, to stay alive, and, paradoxically, to remain dead inside; trapped in an endless cycle of life, death, and asbestos-filled survival.

Other spoofs remapped India in stranger, truer ways. Sindhi Sholay features a multicultural, multi-religious cast; the Holi scene is transformed into Cheti Chand with a fun fair; a festival that, in the heartland, is joyfully celebrated by everyone across religions, unlike in our increasingly siloed cities. Here, everyone knows the local dialect and can still read the Sindhi script, reinforcing a shared cultural fabric that feels both intimate and defiant. In the film, Thakur is treated for diabetes by a local GP named Dr. Kishore Motwani, pure Monty Python-level genius. The scene works as both a cheeky in-film commercial and a jab at refined sugar and processed foods. The gag lands even harder when you realise the film’s producer is himself a halwai (a dessert chef), making it an accidental masterclass in self-own satire. 

Rather than macro political sermons, these films tackle local issues and deliver sharp jabs to hometown power structures. They’re too nimble to clamp down on. Meme pages operate on the same principle: local jokes, colloquial codes, living dialects. People feel seen because they actually are.

They were also instruments of peace in the aftermath of bombings and communal tensions. Local cable networks, powered by homegrown video labels, continuously broadcasted spoof films made in Malegaon, Khandesh, and Central Maharashtra, in every possible dialect, across rural networks. These goofy, sharp, and familiar stories called for peace, kept people indoors, and did the work of grassroots peacekeeping far better than any official statement ever could.

Cinema Without Permission

So what do Johar and Malegaon tell us today? That the moment we stop waiting for certification, studio approval, or polite nods, we open the door to comedy that is sharper, truer, and more dangerous.

The studio system traps us in safe, recycled satire. Real rupture comes when we step aside, funding and enabling new voices instead of hogging the frame. The cult of the star is dissolving anyway—hashtags and influencer churn have already eaten it alive. What we need now is collective, local storytelling: messy, chaotic, painfully present.

If the future of Indian comedy exists, it isn’t in glossy studio satires. It’s in the flicker of a bootleg projector: a fake Amitabh staggering from a forced vasectomy, a scrawny item girl breakdancing under a dying tube light. That raw, untamed space—beyond censors, beyond studio airbrushing—is where India’s real comedy culture lives.