Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (10 page)

While some of Ghai’s statements are hyperbolic, his assessment of the Indian state’s lack of interest in the film industry as an economic enterprise is accurate. Unlike the U.S. government, which from the early part of the twentieth century treated filmmaking as a business and helped Hollywood to distribute its films globally (Miller 1998), the Indian state did not accord filmmaking much economic significance, even though shortly after Independence India became the second largest film producing country in the world. Despite filmmaking being the second largest “industry” in India in terms of capital investment—and the fifth largest in the number of people employed (Ray 1956: 32)—the developmentalist economic ideology of the newly independent nation-state constructed a hierarchy of needs in which filmmaking was not considered an essential or important sphere of economic activity. Entertainment was not viewed as a necessity in a country that at the time of Independence had a literacy rate of 18 percent, had an average life expectancy of 26 years, was suffering from a food crisis, and had over one million refugees to resettle. Instead, rapid industrialization, infrastructural development, and food self-sufficiency were the main priorities of national economic policy.

Certain policies imposed immediately after Independence had longlasting repercussions for filmmaking. For example, a moratorium on “non-essential building,” due to the shortage of cement and building ma
terials, meant that most states imposed a ban on theater construction. As a result, India has an extremely low number of movie screens—ranging from approximately 13,000 in the 1990s (the number varies because it includes mobile cinemas) to about 11,000 in the early 2000s—given the size of its annual theater attendance, which is approximately 3 billion (FICCI 2006).
²³
In fact, despite being the world’s largest film-producing country, India has one of the lowest ratio of screens to population: 12 screens per million people; in comparison, the United States has 117 screens per million people (Dua 2006). Most state governments also stipulated that movie theaters could not be constructed near schools, colleges, places of worship, residential areas, and government offices.

TABLE 1
TAXES LEVIED ON CINEMA

Source
: Based on Mittal (1995).

Economic policies have treated cinema as a source of tax revenue rather than as an engine of growth. Taxes levied on cinema are akin to those levied on “vices” such as gambling and horseracing (see
Table 1
for a list of taxes levied upon cinema at the various levels of the state). The main bulk of taxation is collected by individual state governments through the entertainment tax, which is a sales tax imposed on box-office receipts, ranging in rates from 20 to 75 percent. While the British colonial government instituted the entertainment tax in 1922, in independent India it was continued and augmented by other forms of taxation. Most state governments increased entertainment tax rates soon after Independence. For instance, the tax rate was 12.5 percent before the Second World War in most provinces, with temporary wartime increases, but by 1949 rates ranged from 25 to 75 percent across the country, with an average of 33.5 percent. Municipalities also began to levy both entertainment taxes and duties on the transport of films from one place to
another. Producers sending films out of the country discovered that they had to pay an exorbitant import duty to the Indian government in order to bring their own film prints back into the country. Additionally, there were sales taxes, other import duties, internal customs duties, income taxes, show taxes, and charges for censorship. By mid-1949, film industry organizations estimated that 60 percent of all box-office revenues were being taken by the state in the form of taxes (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 1980: 138–39).

Of all of the various taxes filmmaking is subject to,
entertainment
tax has been the most contentious issue between filmmakers and the state at the regional level. For decades filmmakers have been requesting the Central government to either reduce, standardize (the tax varies from state to state), or abolish the tax altogether, but to no avail. For example, in 1955 at the “Future of Indian Films” seminar initiated by the
Sangeet
Natak
Akademi (The National Academy of Music, Dance, and Theater), a number of filmmakers asserted, in their presentations, that the entertainment tax was a significant obstacle to the growth and improvement of filmmaking. S. S. Vasan, president of the Film Federation of India, declared, “It is this entertainment tax which has been the bane of the industry. The incidence of this tax, being so high, more than even the betting tax, has not only discouraged people from getting entertained, but has also adversely affected film production in this country” (in Ray 1956: 37). Nehru who was present for the inaugural session of the seminar, categorically dismissed such concerns in his address, stating bluntly, “I am not convinced by Vasan’s argument. . . I do not see at all, broadly speaking why entertainment should not be taxed” (in Ray 1956: 11).

By the 1990s, filmmakers’ arguments against the entertainment tax ranged from the issue of equity—that television, cable, and satellite are not subject to entertainment tax—to the moral/philosophical: that they are providing a great service to the nation by entertaining people, so why should the government tax entertainment? During our interview, producer G. P. Sippy asserted, “For entertaining people, you should get some reward from the government. What is a movie? It brings a smile on your face. If we make even one face smile, that’s the biggest social service which a person does; instead they [the government] will say, ‘Oh you are exposing the bodies!’ ” (G. P. Sippy, interview, 22 September 1996). As apparent from the discussion of state attitudes thus far, entertainment, however, is considered the very antithesis of social service: it is considered a luxury that a developing nation cannot afford.

While state policies
of
taxation and licensing accorded films the status of a vice, state cultural policies treated mainstream films as a threat to other art forms. Even as a British colony, India was the world’s third largest producer of films; therefore, from the point of view of the national leadership after Independence, filmmaking was seen as having escaped the effects of colonialism, unlike other artistic and performance traditions that had suffered greatly. In fact, the popularity of films and their music was viewed as a threat to novelists, painters, classical singers and dancers, and folk performers. A myriad of ministries, academies, and institutes, dealing with the visual, performing, and literary arts, were established shortly after Independence.
²⁴
The Indian state, in an effort to revive and support the “traditional arts” and “high culture,” excluded cinema from these categories and placed it under the purview of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, rather than the Ministry of Cultural Affairs.

The cultural bureaucracy consistently viewed cinema as a “problem” that warranted the attention of a number of government commissions, inquiries, and symposia in independent India. In such inquiries, filmmakers time and again singled out state policies as the source of problems besetting filmmaking, while bureaucrats and state functionaries blamed more intangible factors, such as audience taste. One such instance of this tension is apparent in the
Report of the Working Group on National Film
Policy
(henceforth referred to as “the Working Group”), which provides a detailed look at the perception of Indian cinema as articulated by a branch of the state’s cultural bureaucracy.

The Working Group, comprised of filmmakers and bureaucrats, was appointed by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in 1979; their task was to study the state of the film industry in areas such as production, technology, distribution, exhibition, financing, export and import, censorship, and taxation, and from this to suggest a national film policy. In 1980, after eight months of study, the Working Group submitted a 153-page report that outlined many policy recommendations—none of which were implemented—including a comprehensive film policy as well as suggestions on labor legislation and training facilities.

One area in which the Working Group was to concentrate their inquiry— and formulate policy recommendations—was the status of cinema as an art form and an instrument for
social change
. The report argued that the main factor impeding the growth of cinema as an art
form in India was the government’s indifference toward the health of cinema, as evidenced by many of its policies: taxation, customs and excise duties, as well as regulations governing the construction of theaters. The Group claimed that “the role of the Government in the promotion of good cinema, particularly in the context of a developing society, has not been sufficiently recognized in India” (1980: 9).

The consequence of governmental apathy was that despite the artistic achievements of
Indian
cinema (mainly measured by the awards won at international film festivals), much of it was characterized by “culturally vacuous films, which are exclusively designed for making money through audience manipulation” (Karanth 1980: 9). Expressing anxieties about the market and easily manipulated audiences, the Working Group called on the government to “provide a national platform for good cinema, to positively encourage the production of good films, to take such films to the largest number of people, and to initiate the audience in the appreciation of good cinema” (1980: 10).

In accordance with such goals, the Working Group recommended the establishment of an academy, the
Chalachitra
Akademi,
²⁵
with the design of promoting cinema as an art form, on the same lines as the
Sangeet
Natak
(Music-Dance-Drama),
Sahitya
(Literature), and
Lalit Kala
(Visual Arts) academies. Acknowledging that its list of fifteen broad functions, which ranged from maintaining a national film archive to operating a children’s film center, would be an expensive venture, the Working Group argued that such an investment in “the propagation of film culture and the changing of audience taste” should be viewed as an investment in education and culture. Otherwise, “it is futile to expect that audiences can be converted to good cinema,” and without proper audience support, “good cinema” would largely remain superfluous to the lives of most people (Karanth 1980: 15). The Group concluded this section of the report by stating that the establishment of the
Chalachitra
Akademi, with the objective of “promoting cinema as an art form and as a medium of culture, is absolutely necessary” (1980: 15).

According to some members of the cultural bureaucracy, however, the acknowledged failure of cinema to become a full-fledged art form in India was the result of it being a non-Indian, technological, mass-produced form. The Working Group asked a former chairwoman of the
Sangeet
Natak
Akademi, Kamala Chattopadhyay, her views about the status of cinema as an art form. Referring to the enormous volume of films produced in India, she argued that creative art forms could not be undertaken on a mass scale. Comparing cinema to Indian drama, Chattopadh
yay argued that traditional dramatic performances attained a reasonably high level of quality because they were expressions of the people’s traditional consciousness, whereas cinema in India was “a form superimposed with a lot of appendages of mechanical and technological character. It is not a spontaneous instrument, springing from the soil and the people; therefore, except where there have been creative persons, and these necessarily have been few, the result has not taken on any worthwhile aesthetic value” (in Karanth 1980: 113).

The main conclusion that one draws from examining the report of the Working Group—along with other examples of official discourse—is that cinema in India constitutes a social problem of significant proportion, but that it also contains a tremendous potential to reshape society. The concerted efforts to formulate a national film policy and develop cinema into an Indian art form show the state as being centrally involved in the creation of a modern “Indian” culture; such efforts span a history, from the specifically cultural articulations of nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Chatterjee 1993), to Nehru’s post-Independence initiatives, which established the vast cultural bureaucracy still in place today. The expectations of and claims made upon the state, as expressed in the
Report
—to homogenize a field as diverse as Indian cinema, change audiences’ tastes in film, and use film to advance national interests—all point to the significance of cinema in constructing a certain state-sponsored modernity.

Since Independence, cinema has had multiple significations, representing varying regimes of value within state discourses: as vice; as art form; as tool for development; and as index of modernity. The 1950s witnessed debates centered around whether film could ever be an authentic indigenous cultural form (Chakravarty 1993), which were attitudes still expressed in the 1980s, as evident from the
Working Group Report
.

The primary regime of value for cinema was developmentalist, until the time of my initial fieldwork in the mid-1990s, when new regimes of value began to be articulated around cinema, namely those of cultural
heritage
and economic ascendancy. In the next section, I detail the shift in attitudes toward mainstream cinema and filmmaking, from being a heavily criticized and maligned form of media, to one which the state actually celebrated, touting as an example of India’s success in the international arena. This transformation is located in the altered media landscape produced by
economic liberalization
and the subsequent cultural nationalism engendered by these processes.