Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (18 page)

The essentialist dichotomy Chopra poses, between India and an undefined “West,” has a long history, dating back to the colonial era. India’s affective and emotional superiority is akin to the material/spiritual dichotomy constructed by nationalist leaders in the nineteenth century, as is the idea of a cultural bedrock that cannot be dislodged with material change (Chatterjee 1993). Like Roy, Chopra also exhibited a concern about dominant representations of India as a “poor country,” and was eager to alter global perceptions.

His decision to base his characters in England was in order to highlight their cultural identity. Talking about the main father character, Chopra explained, “I wanted to exaggerate being Indian, so to put a man in India and be Indian is nothing; you throw a man out for twenty years and he’s still stuck to it, that shows you: it brings the Indian-ness [out] more. So that gave me a very big advantage for my characters and my plot, so that’s why I placed them, so that’s why he became an NRI [non-resident Indian]” (Aditya Chopra, interview, April 1996). As he continued to develop the idea for the film, Chopra realized that it would also be very relevant within India, because with the onset of satellite, he felt, “We were going a little away from the roots.” According to Chopra, while he did not have a “higher” motive, other than making a good film that would be commercially successful, he stated he was “trying to make a film that would somewhere make you pause and think, and somewhere make you react, and make you feel nice about what you are—about being Indian. That was at the back of my mind, but not the main motive” (Aditya Chopra, interview, April 1996). Chopra’s insistence that his main motive was
to make a widely appealing film, but that he still had something larger he wanted to communicate, is an example of the negotiation involved in making what gets designated as “commercial cinema,” that is, films aimed at wide audiences. Throughout his interview, he articulated a tension between making the film he would like to make versus what he believed others would like to see.

Whether discussing Indian youth seduced by foreign media, Westerners who need to be educated about India, or audiences who could feel nice about being Indian, Chopra’s remarks are replete with references to imaginary interlocutors who motivate his filmmaking practice. Another instance where an imaginary interlocutor occupies a significant presence is in filmmakers’ discussions of the condescension expressed toward mainstream Hindi films. Like Shravan Shroff, many of the filmmakers most associated with “
Bollywood
” are second-and third-generation members of the film industry, who related the impact of criticism by their social peers outside the film industry. Chopra, whose father, Yash, began his directorial career in the late 1950s, recollected that when he was a child, he could “stand up” for Hindi films against the condescension of his peers, but he admitted, “I mean obviously you do get affected—say your dad makes a film and someone says something—that happens quite often—‘Oh that film was bad.’ So, it hurts you; you feel bad, because we have a tendency to believe that our identification is our film, so it’s like actually saying something against my dad” (Aditya Chopra, interview, April 1996). He asserted that a motivating factor behind his filmmaking was to counter the criticism leveled against mainstream Hindi cinema: “You know, my target is not to get a pat on my back by my parents or friends who are close to me, who are going to like, in any case, whatever I do. No, that’s not the point. The point is, okay, there is this guy who keeps talking shit about films: I need to convince him. I need to give him something so good that he will also—[so] he just can’t help but like it” (Aditya Chopra, interview, April 1996). It is this desire for acceptance and approval that is a significant driving logic behind the gentrification of Hindi cinema and the transformation of the industry into Bollywood.

Thus far I have been discussing a younger generation of filmmakers who began their careers in the late 1980s (Barjatya), or mid-to late 1990s (Roy, Chopra, Johar), and whose fathers or grandfathers were also filmmakers. The changes in filmmaking initiated by these makers had an impact on films produced by older filmmakers as well. One notable example is Subhash Ghai, the producer/director who began his career in the late 1970s and was quite commercially successful in the 1980s—the
very period that was derided as trashy and vulgar by the press and other filmmakers. His films from 1997 onward have been markedly gentrified in terms of protagonists, production design, conflicts, and narratives. Since 1999, his films have enjoyed greater commercial success outside of, rather than within, India. Speaking in Bombay in 2000, Ghai related how filmmakers needed to think about the “global Indian” and their problems, which he felt made for “more effective cinema” than films focused on issues of class exploitation. He referred to films revolving around personal relationships and generational conflict as “international,” and described
Yaadein
(Memories) the film that he was currently working on: “I am making a movie of a British Indian who has been living there for the last twenty-five, thirty years, and his three daughters have been brought up there. He. . . is very orthodox, very conservative. The daughters are not, so the conflict of values—what happens and how he handles his three daughters, and how the three daughters handle him—is the theme of
Yaadein
” (Ghai, interview, October 2000). Ghai felt that the issue of generational conflict transcended the limitations of culture and nation, reasoning that the film would appeal to people living in Britain and in India, unlike films focusing on farmers or
zamindars
(rural landlords)— issues he felt were specific to India.

Expressing his relief that he was not limited to making films about “U.P., Bihar, or Punjab,” Ghai asserted that films about personal relationships enabled him to grow as a filmmaker. He implicated changes in audiences as allowing him to finally break free from restrictive mindsets and realize his full potential as a filmmaker:

Ghai’s presentation of self is mediated through the choice of narrative focus and the figure of the audience. Ghai portrays certain topics as more
reflective of his cosmopolitan outlook—which is what I think he means by “progressive”—and credits audiences for enabling him to realize his potential as a filmmaker. Like Ramesh Sippy, Ghai represents his evolution as a filmmaker as an intersubjective experience where (imagined) audiences play a significant role in fashioning his filmmaking practice.

This section has delved into some detail about how the social world of filmmakers, changes in the media landscape, and trends in Hindi filmmaking from the mid-’90s resulted in a gentrified cinema, in terms of both the content and style of films. This gentrified—or in the words of the filmmakers above, more “modern,” less “feudal,” not as “silly,” more “international”—cinema is the starting point for Hindi films to be regarded as “cool.” However, what truly enables Hindi films to arrive socially, and what allows filmmakers to make the films they really want, hinted at by Ghai above, is the arrival of the multiplex.
²⁵

“What I think is the best thing that has happened to the Indian film industry in the last five years are multiplexes,” declared Meghna Ghai-Puri, Subhash Ghai’s daughter and the president of Whistling Woods International— a film school started by her father in 2006. We were sitting in her office at Whistling Woods, located in Film City, a sprawling state-owned film and television production facility in Goregaon East, a northern suburb of Bombay. It was May 2006, and we were discussing the changes that had taken place in filmmaking since the turn of the millennium. Continuing with her praise of the multiplex, which centered on the smaller seating capacities of the theaters, Ghai-Puri asserted that multiplexes were “encouraging a young breed of filmmakers to make interesting, intellectual films, which were capturing a certain audience,” who were “more sophisticated” than before (Ghai-Puri, interview, May 2006). Akin to the advent of video and satellite television in earlier periods, the arrival and expansion of
multiplex theaters
have generated considerable discourse by the Hindi film industry, as well as the print and broadcast media, about audiences, aesthetic standards, and cinematic idioms. Much of this discourse is marked by a strong rhetoric of change, progress, and modernization, whether it is addressing the materiality and phenomenology of cinema-going or the symbolic and aesthetic dimensions of film production. Similar to the discussions about video and satellite, the one about multiplexes also serves as a commentary about class, taste, consumption, and filmmaker subjectivity.

While multiplexes have transformed the material conditions and experience of seeing a movie in a theater in India and produced new audience imaginaries within the Hindi film industry, the feature most commented upon by journalists and filmmakers has to do with the engendering of a new type of cinema. Around 2003, the English-language press in India started to discuss the emergence and economic viability of what was initially termed “niche cinema,” which soon got labeled “multiplex cinema,” and attributed a causal relationship between the sites of film exhibition and cinematic practice. Initially used to describe films made with smaller budgets and lesser-known actors, about themes that were characterized as “off-beat” and “different” from a purported Bollywood norm, understood to appeal only to English-educated, affluent, urban audiences, the definitions and descriptions of “multiplex cinema” have been as much about audiences and viewing practices as they have been about aesthetic properties and narrative content.

In the early days of the multiplex in India, they were lauded for their implicit pedagogical function—frequently characterized in a developmentalist vein—of improving the cinematic tastes of the Indian viewer. By offering a range of non-mainstream cinematic choices, multiplexes were cited as the catalyst for reforming the average Indian taste in film, which had been stunted for so long by the formulaic fare produced by the Bombay film industry. For example, in the article, “The Multiplex Effect,” which appeared in the
Indian Express
, the director of the first multiplex in the northern Indian city of Kanpur, Shailesh Gupta, discussed how, when his theater first opened, “Hindi had a virtual monopoly on the minds of the audience,” and that there was little interest in any other cinema, even big-budget Hollywood films. Eight months later, however, due to his programming decisions to screen a variety of films, patronage of an English-language film like
Bend It Like Beckham
brought in decent business. Gupta was willing to experiment with his programming, even if it did not garner huge returns, for he assigned himself the responsibility of inculcating more sophisticated tastes for his patrons: “I am keen to help in the maturing process of the Kanpur film-goer” (“The Multiplex Effect” 2003).

Similar to the discussion about video, front-benchers, and the trashy ’80s, the idea of multiplex cinema is premised on the correlation between content, audience, and conditions of viewing. Multiplexes, with their smaller seating capacities and much higher ticket prices—which translates into more elite audiences—were hailed by a number of filmmakers, associated with the parallel cinema movement of the 1970s and ’80s, as making cinematic risk-taking commercially viable. In the above
mentioned article, veteran filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan, whose films are in Malayalam and are consistently categorized as “art” or noncommercial, asserted, “Audiences and exhibitors are now looking for a different kind of cinema. The advent of multiplexes has also encouraged this change in mindset. If you have a film that might not necessarily run house-full in a 1,000-seat hall, you now have the option of showing it in, say, a 200-seat auditorium, where it might very well draw a full house” (“The Multiplex Effect” 2003). The November 2007 issue of the English-language film magazine
Filmfare
featured an interview with the veteran actress Shabana Azmi: “What the multiplex has done today is release the producer from having to cater to the lowest common denominator. The multiplex has demonstrated that Indian audiences are not [a] monolith, and it is possible to make niche films that can become successful” (Ghelani 2007: 130). In November 2009, at a panel discussion titled “Re-Framing Indian Cinema,” held at New York University in conjunction with the Mahindra Indo-American Arts Council Annual Film Festival, director Shyam Benegal spoke of the impact of multiplexes as thoroughly groundbreaking for Indian cinema. He reflected on how, until the advent of multiplexes, every film that was released needed to be able to fill at least 80 percent of the capacity of single-screen theaters in order for the distributors to break even: “For years and years this was an enormous problem. We always used to say, ‘Why are we having these huge cinemas? Why does it have to be like this? Why is it that only big pictures can be made, big block-busters?’. . . So you couldn’t possibly make films of a smaller kind; it had become almost impossible. It’s really when the multiplexes started that everything started to change. You didn’t have to look at the audience as one big grey mass” (MIACC 2009b). Contrary to the above statements, I discuss in chapter eight how mainstream Hindi filmmakers conceive of their audiences as comprised of diverse constituencies, whose varying tastes need to be addressed or transcended, not a monolithic “grey mass.”

A couple of years earlier, for a special feature about multiplexes in
The
Indian Express
, Benegal narrated a familiar history of cinematic decline connected to the advent of technology and class composition of audiences in the
cinema hall
. Rather than satellite television, however, multiplexes were the technological catalyst for improved cinema. Discussing the 1980s, Benegal wrote, “TV took away the urban middle-class audiences and cinema came to be patronised by the working classes alone— or those who could not afford a TV set at home and those who didn’t have access to TV. At this time, film had to rely on an entertainment
concept that would gather the largest possible audience—a common denominator sufficiently lowered and spread thin. A kind of dumbingdown was taking place” (Benegal 2007). While mainstream Hindi filmmakers castigated video and working-class audiences for the poor quality of filmmaking generally, Benegal focused his comments on the impact of television and working-class audiences on non-mainstream forms of filmmaking. Describing the emergence of an “alternative cinema movement” in the 1970s, which targeted “the professional middle-classes and educated audiences,” he declared that with the spread of television and the retreat of middle-class audiences from theaters, alternative cinema was “wiped out.” With the advent of multiplexes, the possibility for an alternative cinematic practice was revived once more: “The opportunity created in the ’70s and then lost in the ’80s came back with the multiplex in the late-’90s” (Benegal 2007). For Benegal and his peers, the structures of production, distribution, and exhibition, which depended on pleasing large numbers of people, were viewed as inimical to quality cinema. Quantity— either in terms of seats in a cinema or the number of viewers—is seen as incapable of producing quality. The equation of poor quality and poor taste with large numbers has a long history that is not unique to the Indian context (Williams 1983: 192–97). As with many Hindi filmmakers, cinematic quality is also integrally connected to the presence of middleclass audiences in theaters.

The very attribute that Gopalakrishnan, Benegal, and Azmi lauded about multiplexes—that they provided a space for films of ostensibly limited appeal—was also a criticism leveled against them initially. For example, an article about the impact of multiplex films on mainstream Hindi films appearing in the November 2007 issue of the Englishlanguage film magazine
Filmfare
, asserted, “Till two years ago, ‘multiplex films’ was a euphemism for films that were looked upon as too niche, experimental, and commercially nonviable. If and when such films got made, their business was restricted to a few screenings at the still nascent multiplexes in select cities” (Amin 2007: 69). The overall tone of the article was overwhelmingly positive, however, claiming that 2007 was a “watershed year for the non-mainstream Indian film industry.” It characterized the impact of multiplex cinema as “a wind of change taking the Indian film industry by storm,” where “the boundaries between mainstream and offbeat are blurring” (Amin 2007: 69). The reasons offered had to do with the unanticipated commercial success of certain smaller budget, less conventional films, which communicated to filmmakers that audiences were open to new subject matter. The willingness of top stars to
work on projects by directors regarded as “niche” was also cited as a sign of changing times.

During fieldwork in Bombay in 2005 and 2006, I encountered many comments about the paradigmatic effect of multiplexes on Hindi filmmaking. The main thrust of those comments had to do with how certain films would have never been made, or if made never released, prior to the advent of multiplexes. Elaborating upon her point about the revolutionary impact of multiplexes, Meghna Ghai-Puri stated, “A good thing that it’s done is that a film like
Iqbal
can actually see a 75-to 80-print release in India, which couldn’t have happened earlier. A film like
The Little Terrorist
, which is a documentary film, actually got a release in the theaters. Again, something that would have never happened earlier” (Ghai-Puri, interview, May 2006). Ghai-Puri’s comment about
Iqbal
was echoed by many others;
Iqbal
and
Page 3
, both released in 2005, were the two most talked about examples of unconventional films that had reasonably successful runs in multiplexes during that time. The films were very different from each other in terms of theme, plot, protagonists, and visual style: while
Iqbal
was a sweet, touching tale about a deaf and mute Muslim teenager’s dream to play on the national cricket team,
Page 3
was an acerbic and cynical journey into the immoral and decadent world of celebrities in Bombay, as observed by a journalist who writes for the society/gossip pages of a newspaper.

What both films had in common were the absence of major stars, major directors, diegetic song sequences, or expectations for success. While both films were touted by their makers and the press as “hits,” setting into motion pronouncements about audiences, changing tastes, and changing cinema, the determination of commercial success is nonetheless relative, an issue I examine further in chapters five, eight, and nine.
Iqbal
and
Page 3
did reasonably well in Bombay, but not in other parts of India; the trade press, which assesses commercial outcome from the point of view of the distributor, classified both films as “coverage to commission-earners,” indicating that distributors recovered their investment, but did not necessarily earn a profit. The point to be noted here is the simple fact of not losing money was interpreted as a sign of success. Talking about the impact of multiplexes on filmmaking, producer/ director Vikram Bhatt cited
Page 3
and
Iqbal
: “These kinds of films would have been washed out before” (Vikram Bhatt, interview, January 2006).

Bhatt’s declaration was related to the star cast of both films and based on the dominant industry credo that major male stars are necessary to draw crowds to theaters, hence necessary for commercial success. Like HAHK
and DDLJ a decade earlier,
Iqbal
and
Page 3
defied the film industry’s expectations and contravened its
production fictions
; while the former films proved that unparalleled commercial success was possible in a competitive media landscape, the latter demonstrated that audiences existed for films that strayed from mainstream conventions. If HAHK and DDLJ, by virtue of their stupendous business, were “good” films from the perspective of the industry,
Iqbal
and
Page 3
were “good enough” films in terms of their business. In both decades, the return of middle-class and more elite audiences to the cinema hall was cited as the determining factor for these films’ successful commercial outcome.

The commercial viability of limited or narrow appeal was represented by filmmakers as truly enabling, revealing the way multiplexes articulated with filmmakers’ subjectivities in a manner similar to discussions about video and satellite in earlier periods. Vikram Bhatt reflected upon the effect of multiplexes upon his filmmaking: “Even my film,
Ankahi
, maybe, I would not have made it three years back, four years back, because I don’t know if, if it’s going to really involve the masses though it’s a very simple tale. It’s a tale of adultery, so that appeals to all kinds of classes and masses, but even then I feel somewhere the audience would be—it would be a more multiplex film” (Vikram Bhatt, interview, January 2006). At a panel discussion about multiplexes held in Bombay in September 2009, reported in the
Indian Express
, documentary-turnedfeature filmmaker Kabir Khan asserted, “Thanks to multiplexes, we’re now making films we couldn’t possibly have made earlier” (Pillai 2009).
²⁶
An important reason, according to director Sujoy Ghosh, was because “A multiplex audience is usually more accepting of different kinds of films and is more aware of trends in global cinema” (Pillai 2009). For all of the filmmakers quoted here, the multiplex serves as a metonym for a certain type of film, as well as a certain type of audience, which poses far fewer creative constraints on filmmakers than audiences who frequent the traditional
single-screen theaters
.