Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (14 page)

“With the multiplexes, seeing a movie has become an elite affair.” In December 2005 I was standing in the Soho branch of Chanel with Asha Mehta, a Hindi film actress who was visiting New York City with her boyfriend, director Tarun Kumar, whom I had known since 1996.
¹
The three of us had met for lunch nearby and were strolling through the neighborhood when Mehta spotted the Chanel store and decided to check out their handbags. While Kumar was paying for the purchase, a purse with a price tag greater than my monthly rent, Mehta was discussing what she felt was a drastic change in the social status of Hindi cinema: “Before, the elite didn’t watch, or they said they didn’t watch, even if they did, because they looked down upon it. But now Hindi movies are stylish and cool; Bollywood is everywhere—even in the discos.”

Over the years, I had been hearing some variation of Mehta’s assertion—that Hindi films had become “cool”—from a number of people associated with the Bombay film industry. During my first stint of fieldwork in 1996, when I interviewed Bhawana Somaya, the editor of
G—
a glossy, English-language film magazine— she related how her teenage nieces had informed her, “By the way, Hindi film is in now; it was out earlier.” In 2006, during my last research trip to Bombay, Shravan Shroff, the thirtysomething CEO of a national chain of multiplex theaters, asserted during our interview, “I think Hindi films are very cool now,”
while Nester D’Souza, the manager of the erstwhile Metro Cinema declared, “It’s no longer uncool to be seeing a Hindi film.”

Implicit in the deployment of cool as a category is its opposite or other—a period when such a desired status for Hindi films had not been achieved—as Shroff elaborated upon in his assertion, “Earlier it used to be uncool to see Hindi movies. During my school days, when I had to tell somebody that my father has something to do with the film industry, I couldn’t say it because people thought that it was really stupid. How can you have anything to do with the Indian film industry? And we guys grew up on Hollywood films and aping films like
Top Gun
, etc.” By stating that he grew up with Hollywood films, Shroff indirectly communicated his elite class position, since the circulation and presence of such films prior to the mid-1990s was very limited in India.
²
Additionally, India is one of the few countries in the world where locally produced content is predominant: even with the greater presence of Hollywood films, foreign content comprises only about 5 percent of total screen time (Kheterpal 2005). Despite being the third generation of his family to be involved with the business side of filmmaking, Shroff’s earlier disavowal of Hindi films and filmmaking positions him within a very specific and circumscribed class fragment of Indian society—the elite who, according to Mehta, looked down upon Hindi cinema.
³
The present for Shroff is marked not by shame and repudiation, however, but by pride and acceptance, which he attributes to the improved quality of films:

Not only do Shroff’s statements represent the disdain that Hindi filmmakers have historically expressed toward their own practice, but they also reveal the tremendous concern for acceptance by individuals who filmmakers regard as their social peers, but not as their typical audience. Shroff’s allusion to the “kids today” who “ape” leading actors Shah Rukh Khan and Saif Ali Khan is not a comment about the newfound popu
larity of Hindi film stars (who have always commanded tremendous fan followings), but about the popularity of such stars among a small social fraction who, from Shroff’s perspective, would have never been fans during his youth.

Thus, from the perspective of the Hindi film industry, “cool” is an attribute that includes films, filmmakers, and
audiences
. When used as an adjective to describe Hindi films, cool signifies a general state of improvement marked by higher production values as well as a visual style and narrative content that is coded as modern and sophisticated. From Mehta’s statements, it is apparent that cool also refers to the open and acknowledged consumption of Hindi films by socially elite audiences and to the circulation of these films in spaces marked as upscale. Finally, as apparent from Shroff’s remarks, cool denotes a self-confidence among filmmakers where they are not embarrassed or apologetic about filmmaking and the film industry; therefore, “cool” is a polysemic category that encompasses aesthetics, affect, social class, identity, and subjectivity.
⁴

In this chapter, I examine the film industry’s discourses of quality and change—indexed by such declarations of Hindi films’ newfound coolness— in order to illustrate the connections between the sentiment of disdain, the category of coolness, the process of gentrification, and the construction of Hindi filmmakers’ subjectivities, specifically their sense of self and relationship to the larger world (Holland and Leander 2004). Hindi cinema’s social transformation or path to “coolness,” often lauded by filmmakers and journalists, began in the mid-1990s with the erasure of the signs and symbols of poverty, labor, and rural life from films, and with the decline in plots that focused on class conflict, social injustice, and youthful rebellion. While journalists, filmmakers, and scholars attribute the narrative and aesthetic changes that I label as gentrification to changes in audience demographics (Deshpande 2005; Inden 1999; Joseph 2000b), I argue that filmmakers’ own subjectivities, generational status, and class backgrounds play an important role in these transformations. Filmmakers’ explanations for the aesthetic qualities of mainstream Hindi cinema and their narratives of change and progress display concerns about social status, cultural identity, and modernity.

Nonetheless, filmmakers’ characterizations also reveal how audiences are centrally implicated in their evaluative discourses about Hindi cinema, as commercial filmmaking is a complex intersubjective enterprise, where audiences comprise the “significant others” (Mead 1934) who help to define filmmakers’ subjectivities as cultural producers.
⁵
While the constitution of the subjectivity of a self-identified commercial filmmaker—one
who makes films for audiences who number in the millions (or billions)— like other instances of self-making, is dialogical, social, and dependent upon the interactions with others (Kondo 1990; Mead 1934; Taylor 1992), these others—in the case of Hindi filmmakers—are not actually observable people, but imagined interlocutors (McQuail 1997: 112). All of the remarks at the opening of this chapter demonstrate the existence of imagined interlocutors—and arbiters of taste—whose consumption of Hindi films have accorded them an upgraded status. If certain imagined audiences have elevated the reputation of Hindi cinema, others are held responsible for the opposite, and this chapter explores the discourse of quality, mediated through the figure of the audience. The final significant element in the discussion about cinematic quality and filmmaker subjectivity is the role of technology, specifically the agentive character attributed to video, satellite, and the multiplex theater for precipitating changes in films, audiences, and filmmakers; therefore, in filmmakers’ discourses, both audiences and technology operate as significant agents in the transformations of Hindi cinema; I illustrate how they both serve to mediate filmmakers’ presentation and representation of their selves.

This chapter is organized into three main sections, corresponding to filmmakers’ narratives of change and temporality regarding the quality and status of Hindi cinema. I begin with filmmakers’ criticisms of filmmaking in the 1980s—a decade that was emblematic of Hindi cinema’s uncool past. While filmmakers cite the arrival of video as the catalyst for the decline in cinematic quality, I reveal how such evaluations of quality are connected to the imagined audience for Hindi cinema in the 1980s. I discuss filmmakers’ ambivalence toward these audiences and the manner in which they distanced themselves from them as a self-defining activity. In the second section, I detail the discourse of improvement that begins in the mid-1990s, which is mostly pegged to the arrival of satellite television and the changing class composition of film audiences. I outline the significance of certain features of the social world of filmmakers, however—specifically generational identity, class background, and personal taste—in order to understand the changes that enabled Hindi films to be considered cool a decade later. Finally, I discuss the impact of the multiplex theater and its role in producing a new generic category in relation to cinema and a social category with respect to audiences. Additionally, I address how this particular technological innovation is invested with tremendous liberatory and artistic potential by filmmakers, which enables them at last to make the films that they want.

During many of my conversations and interviews with filmmakers, the 1980s emerged as a particularly dreadful period of filmmaking, in contrast with both earlier and later periods of Hindi cinema. Aamir Khan—one of the most successful
actors
in the industry who produced the internationally celebrated
Lagaan
(Land Tax) in 2001, and then made his directorial debut with the critically acclaimed
Taare Zameen Par
(Stars on this Earth) in 2007—asserted vociferously, “[the] ’80s, I believe, was the worst period of Indian cinema. The number of films which were trashy were unbelievable, and I as an audience was, you know, really shocked!” He related that, as a teenager watching films, during this period he was extremely disappointed by the kind of films being made, which he described as “horrible.” When I asked him what was horrible about the films, he exclaimed, “What was not horrible? That would be easy to answer. They didn’t have good stories; they didn’t have good music; they didn’t have good lyrics; the performances were loud; and the scenes were horrible; and nothing was nice about them! They were just trashy—the right word for them is trashy. Ridiculous films were being made. Very few of them were nice. You could really count the number of films in the year, which were decent and, you know, worthy of viewing, and that also reflected in the [boxoffice] collections because the collections started dropping” (Aamir Khan, interview, March 1996). Other filmmakers mentioned clichéd plots and dialogues, excessive violence, garish sets, and vulgar choreography as further illustrations of the decline in cinematic quality by the mid-to late 1980s. One of the most successful and influential producer/directors in the contemporary industry, Karan Johar, attributed the degeneration in filmmaking to the general social malaise of the decade where, in his words, “nothing happened either in society or in politics.” Johar’s comments were made to a group of nyu faculty (including me) and graduate students who had the opportunity to visit his film shoot in Sleepy Hollow, New York, in November 2005.
⁶
He continued by asserting that “kitsch” did not exist in “Bollywood” until the “South Indian invasion” during the 1980s “when everyone was dancing on pots, pans, utensils, and suddenly, hundreds of dancers are dancing behind the main pair.”
⁷

What Johar was referring to was a phase in the Bombay industry, starting in 1983, when a number of Hindi films were produced and directed by filmmakers from the Telugu and Tamil-language film industries, most
frequently starring the southern actresses, Sri Devi or Jaya Prada, with the Bombay star, Jeetendra.
⁸
These films exhibited a style of choreography that was frequently derided by the press at the time as calisthenics, and a visual style described as kitschy. During my fieldwork in 1996, I encountered a curious ambivalence among Hindi filmmakers regarding the southern Indian film industries: while the Telugu and Tamil film industries were often described as more efficient, disciplined, and organized than the Bombay industry, and certain directors, actors, and technicians were held in highest regard, lauded as innovative path breakers,
⁹
the overall characterization of South Indian cinema (referred to as a collective rather than by the individual language cinemas) was not very flattering. Everything was described as more excessive than in Hindi films: the visual style more garish, the women heavier-set, the humor cruder, and the drama louder.
¹⁰

The dominant explanation for the “horrible” ’80s had less to do with the influence of South Indian cinema, however, and more to do with the introduction of videocassette technology and its concomitant problems of
video
piracy
and changes in the patterns of film consumption. Home videocassette recorders began to be imported into India in 1982, when the Indian government relaxed import restrictions for VCRS and color television sets for a short period before the asiad games, which took place in New Delhi in November of that year.
¹¹
An estimated one million color television sets were imported as a result of this policy change, with the total number of sets in India increasing from five thousand to five million in less than two years (Pendakur 1989). While the number of videocassette recorders imported was lower, the impact on the Hindi film industry was noticeable by the fact that references to the “video menace” started appearing in the film trade press by early 1982. For example, the trade magazine
Film Information
, dated April 10, 1982, reported that at least a thousand pirated videos of the film
Desh Premee
were circulating in Bombay prior to the film’s release on April 23, thereby cutting into the film’s potential business (“The Real Stab” 2007 [1982]: 23).

Initially, filmmakers only sold video rights for overseas distribution and did not entertain the option of domestic video rights, in a futile attempt to stave off competition from the new medium.
¹²
Videos of Hindi films were openly screened in a variety of public venues, however, such as hotels, restaurants, cafés, and long-distance buses. Emerging in 1983 and spreading rapidly throughout India, the video parlor (or video theater) was the one institution that caused the greatest anxiety for the film industry: it was a simple hall with a television and a VCR, seating any
where from 50 to 100 people (Pendakur 1989), who could watch several films on video at a fraction of the cost of movie theaters. Producers and distributors did not realize any revenues from these screenings and kept pressing lawmakers to crack down on them. Trade magazines like
Film Information
, in the period from 1982 to 1984, were filled with filmmakers’ outrage about the open sale, circulation, and screening of Hindi films on video, reminding readers that such circulations were illegal.

While the economic impact of video on the theatrical exhibition sector is evident, how did the advent of video result in a decline in cinematic standards or in Khan’s words, “trashy” films? What was it about video that engendered poor filmmaking? It is in this realm of explanation where the discussion of cinematic quality really becomes a discourse about audiences and a commentary on class, and the trashy “ ’80s” actually span a period from about 1985 to 1994. Filmmakers and the Englishlanguage press in India laid the blame squarely on the changing class composition of audiences frequenting theaters.
¹³
In response to my question about the changes that he had witnessed over time in filmmaking, Ramesh Sippy—the director of
Sholay
(Flames, 1975), one of the most successful and iconic Indian films of all time—presented a narrative of decline mediated through technology and class. Speaking about the impact of vcr technology, Sippy said, “Besides losing revenue, the type of audiences began to change very drastically. The upper classes completely skipped cinema, and as television sets became cheaper, and video came in more, you found the middle classes disappearing. So what you had left was the common man from the lower classes.” With the vcr leading to an upper-and middle-class “flight” from movie theaters, leaving only the lower classes as the ticket-buying public, the quality of filmmaking began to suffer, according to Sippy, “So it was a vicious circle. Films started to deteriorate in their content because they had to appeal to the lowest denominator, which meant much more basic kind of films—crude films, action, thrills, a crude kind of romance—which drove even the occasional viewer from the other classes further away. If he wanted to think once in a while to go and see a film, then he went and saw it and considered it all crap and just couldn’t go back” (Ramesh Sippy, interview, 25 April 1996). In Sippy’s remarks, we see the connections asserted between audiences, their class position, and cinematic quality. His assertion that lower class taste in cinema was abhorrent to viewers from more elite backgrounds has been a longstanding feature of the discourse about audiences, so
cial class, and taste generated by the film industry and English-language media in India.

In fact, even prior to my fieldwork I had encountered Sippy’s narrative in articles appearing in prominent nationally circulated English-language news magazines. For example,
India Today
’s cover story, “Cinema Turns Sexy: Films become increasingly raunchy, ribald and explicit,” from November 15, 1991, begins by quoting various members of the Hindi film industry expressing their displeasure with the state of filmmaking, and then offers its explanation: “Cinema is the moving mirror of the times, and they have changed. The biggest shift has been in the composition of the audience in cinema halls. The frontbenchers—those who go to whistle and leer at double entendres and bare skins—now extend to the dress gallery [the most expensive seats in a movie theater], while the more genteel folk stay home and watch video. . . the halls are now overflowing with young men who want something new, exciting, and fast-paced” (Jain 1991: 28–29). “Front-bencher” is a specific audience category used by the film industry and the press to describe viewers who sit in the cheapest seats, which happen to be in the very front of a movie theater. As a shorthand reference to poor male viewers, the category is highly pejorative and, apparent from the above description, suffused with assumptions about the links between class, gender, age, and taste in films and behavior in theaters. Filmmakers and journalists perceive and represent poor young men as having the most prurient tastes in cinema—in complete opposition—and the most distasteful—to elite audiences.

The idea that the movie theaters were filled with “front-benchers,” whose tastes are diametrically opposed to “more genteel” audiences, was the subject of the cover story, “The goonda as hero,” for the February 16, 1992, issue of
Sunday
which had as its subheading, “Hindi films move away from middle-class values and cater to front-benchers” (Khanna and Dutt 1992: 63). The authors argued that since middle-class audiences stopped patronizing movie theaters, fewer films were being made that targeted their tastes and sensibilities. Producer and lyricist Amit Khanna explains: “Audiences in movie halls comprise urban lumpen youth. Since the returns from video and cable are not commensurate with the returns from the box-office, today’s films are by and large being made for the front-bencher—the guy who lives in Dharavi and is only too aware of the breakdown of the system” (Khanna and Dutt 1992: 64).

The article also featured an extended discussion about the box-office failure of
Lamhe
(Moments) that further illuminated perceptions in the film industry about audience expectations and taste being based on class
distinctions (
Figure 1
).
Lamhe
was released in November 1991 and continued to have a rich discursive presence over the course of my fieldwork— from five to fifteen years after its release. The film represented a love triangle of sorts—spanning two generations and two continents— set amidst an extremely elite social world where the protagonists lived in palatial homes both in Rajasthan and England. It was a highly anticipated film by producer/director Yash Chopra, whose previous film had been a huge commercial success, so its disappointing performance at the boxoffice was described as “one of the biggest shocks of recent times.”
¹⁴
Rauf Ahmed, the editor of
Filmfare
, a leading English-language film magazine, offered an explanation for
Lamhe
’s failure, “Everyone in
Lamhe
just talks and talks and talks. The front-benchers, who are the only people in the cinema halls today, don’t have the patience for so much dialogue” (Khanna and Dutt 1992: 68). Though categorized as a flop at the box-office,
Lamhe
was considered a major hit on the video circuit, but according to the article, “Since the major profits still flow in from box-office returns, filmmakers such as Chopra are now finding out that they will have to cater to the front-benchers, or else face financial ruin” (Khanna and Dutt 1992: 69).

FIGURE 1
Anil Kapoor and Sri Devi in
Lamhe
. Courtesy and copyright of Yash Raj Films,
www.yashrajfilms.com
.

As apparent from the remarks above, this perceived need to cater to poor and working-class audiences, though represented as a commercial imperative, was suffused with normative value judgments and disdain, where such audiences were castigated for their alleged tastes in cinema. The direct effect of such bad taste upon cinematic quality was elaborated by Sippy, who was honest about his own filmmaking, acknowledging that he did not do his best work during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although Sippy asserted that a good director should not make excuses for his mistakes, his explanations for his filmmaking in this period relied heavily on the degeneration narrative. Discussing a few films of his that were both box-office and critical failures, Sippy attributed their lack of success to the general commercial scenario of the time: “These films were made in a period where the video invasion had begun, so we were losing a lot of the discerning audiences. Actually during that entire period we will not find very many great box-office successes, whatever kind of film you made. The standards fell all around—no excuses meant here—but when the returns are not there at the box-office you do get disturbed. After all you owe responsibility to the distributors and financiers to bring out a product that makes money. So you had to start curbing your budgets, because the returns were not really there at the box-office.” Sippy’s distress at the poor box-office outcome of his films and his subsequent measures to ameliorate the situation is not presented as a simple commercial decision, but one that crucially reshaped his filmmaking practice: “You start curbing budgets; somewhere you start restricting your area of thinking; because before, my way of thinking always was, ‘Don’t talk to me about budgets, I just want to make the film that’s got to be made.’ After that I started to think that the budget is important, and it’s got to be kept in mind. So maybe I started mentally, sort of, drifting into that trap, and probably at the same time subjects that were picked on were not as nice . . . so everything seemed to be working the wrong way around” (Ramesh Sippy, interview, 8 July 1996). Sippy’s reflexivity about this period, along with his own representation of his internalization of the constraints imposed by the changing technological and economic landscape for filmmaking, is an example of how the subjectivity of a commercial filmmaker
is forged in concert with figures of the imagined audience, mediated through box-office returns and new technologies of distribution such as video.