Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (21 page)

While actresses like Rehman, who obviously had a vested interest in the idea, insisted that the film industry had become respectable by the 1950s, some form of stigma was still attached to women acting: this is apparent not only by the fact of such assertions as Rehman’s, but also in the practices of social reproduction carried out by filmmakers themselves who did not allow their daughters or daughters-in-law to act. Raj Kapoor—a hugely successful and popular star, director, and producer— insisted that his daughters-in-law, both leading actresses in their time, quit acting after they married his sons (both actors) because “the Kapoor family women do not act.” Kapoor’s father, Prithviraj, had begun what became the most well-known acting dynasty within the Hindi film industry. Raj’s sons also became actors, while none of his daughters did. When Kapoor’s granddaughter Karisma decided to pursue acting after his death, it created quite a stir in the film industry and was heavily commented upon by the Indian film press, especially because, unlike “star sons”— a term used by film journalists to refer to the sons of former actors— who are “launched” with much fanfare and have their debut films lavishly produced by their fathers, Karisma’s debut film was not produced by her family and was regarded by the industry as a B-grade venture. In
fact, while the sons of actors, producers, directors, and writers have been entering the film industry as actors since the early 1970s, it is only from the mid-1990s that “star daughters” have had a presence in the industry.
¹⁶
Nonetheless, actresses from film families still comprise a smaller proportion than actors from film family backgrounds. Many prominent film families whose sons became actors did not follow the same pattern with their daughters: the most that one would hear about them in the press was in relation to their weddings.
¹⁷

Even in the late 1990s I encountered statements indicating that the stigma attached to working in films still endured, and that women continued to bear the burden of the film industry’s reputation. Ayesha Jhulka—an actress who grew up in Delhi and in her own words came from a “very disciplined family,” as her father had been in the air force— relayed the main perceptions that her friends and family had of the Hindi film industry: “They feel that the industry is a very bad place, and they feel that it’s a dirty place and no respected family’s daughter should be doing that.
Acche ghar ke ladkiyan filmon mein nahi jaati hai
[Girls from good homes do not join films] and all that stuff. I also have faced a lot of opposition from my relatives” (Jhulka, interview, 28 May 1996). Jhulka landed her first role as a result of winning a beauty pageant in Mussoorie in 1988; it was sponsored by Weston Cassettes, an audio company that had ventured into film production.
¹⁸
The reward for winning the pageant was the lead role in a Hindi film.
¹⁹
She explained that she was able to become an actress due to the support from her grandparents and parents, despite opposition from her larger extended family. Rather than offering the more common explanation, locating the stigma of acting within the public nature of the filmic image, Jhulka speculated that the reason for the bad reputation of the film industry had to do with the openness with which actresses enjoyed their social and sexual freedom. The visibility of an actress’s mobility and autonomy—that her various relationships and liaisons were always in the public eye—was what led to her tarnished reputation.

Even though Jhulka surmised that a scenario where a woman had multiple relationships prior to marriage was a social norm rather than an aberration, she was quick to point out that “we have girls coming from very, very good families here, and it’s not a bad place you know once you are here.” She also believed that people living in Bombay were less judgmental of actresses, since they have more exposure to—and awareness about—the film industry. Echoing Devi and Rehman from earlier eras, however, Jhulka indirectly acknowledged the potential problems of sexual harassment that
women
could face, asserting that it was up to women to manage this issue: “You should just know how to handle the wrong people.”

What becomes apparent from examining the pronouncements about respectability within the Hindi film industry, through the various decades, is that it is always in a state of becoming: it is a process that has been initiated, but not fully achieved; for if the industry had completely achieved respectability, members would not have to keep announcing its attainment or its temporal dimension, whereby the past of disrepute is contrasted with the present of respectability, evident also in Amitabh Bachchan’s remarks in the introduction of this book.

Although the pronouncements of the industry as a more respectable place were circulating during my initial fieldwork, most of the discussion centered on actresses. Because of the nature of the industry’s work culture, very few women were involved in the area of film production at that time. Assistants who normally begin in their teenage years work long irregular hours, frequently into the night, and are at the beck and call of their bosses. Even when a shoot is not going on, assistants are expected to be constant companions to either the producer or the director; such a working scenario is perceived by many families as having the potential for sexual harassment or exploitation. The site of my fieldwork caused a great deal of consternation among my own extended family, which kept warning me to be “extra careful” while I was in Bombay.

When I returned to Bombay in 2000, I was pleased to see women working as assistants to directors, producers, and production designers. With each subsequent trip I have noticed the greater presence of women in film production. In my conversations with some of these young women, who were English-educated and came from middle-class backgrounds,
they remarked that their families were more amenable to their working in the film industry because it was becoming more organized, professional, and respectable. Sharmishta Roy, the art director introduced in the previous chapter, whose father was also an art director, recounted how her family was initially opposed to her working in the industry, but that the stigma did not exist any more. Like other women she also euphemistically acknowledged that “problems” could arise for women, but it was up to them to “deal with” them. “See, my family, my father, was very reluctant to let me get into the film industry. There was a certain stigma attached to women working in the industry. That is not there any more, right? I think we are all very respected. You could work anywhere in the world, and you’d probably encounter the same problems. It depends entirely on how you deal with it. And what kind of responses you evoke from other people” (Roy, interview, October 2000).

Roy surmised that the change in the film industry’s image had to do with the greater job security it offered compared to previous times, although she thought for recent entrants it could still be very unreliable. She also felt that the change had to do with an increasing number of middle-class men and women entering the field. Roy described how she was careful to learn about the family backgrounds of people she was hiring as assistants: “You see, before I take in my assistants I interview them, and I make sure I know what kind of family background they have. So initially they [the parents] are hesitant to let their daughter come in, because, film industry, you know? And once they have met me, and they’ve discovered that I am like most people, it’s easier for them to send their daughters” (Roy, interview, October 2000). Roy’s statement that she was “like most people” indexed a normative middle-class social world and habitus shared between herself and her potential assistants: in her domestic arrangements—she lived in a joint/extended family household (her parents, younger brother, and his wife) in a three-bedroom flat in a high-rise building in Bandra; in her personal comportment—modestly and simply dressed, wearing little to no makeup; in her personal habits— she did not smoke or drink; in her work ethic—hardworking, focused, and the recipient of multiple awards for her art direction; and in her family background—her mother was a housewife, and her sisters were college-educated and settled in North America, while her brother worked in the computer animation industry.

The increased presence of women across the various sites of production was touted by members of the industry and the media as yet another
sign of the growing respectability and professionalization of the film industry that had been set into motion from the beginning of the millennium. Respectability became indexed in interesting ways. For example, during fieldwork in 2006, the owner of a chain of multiplex theaters in Bombay proudly showed me the young women sitting behind the ticket windows at one of the theaters and mentioned that they were the first cinema halls to have “girls” selling tickets (
Figure 6
). The fact that women were comfortable enough to work in such a capacity at his theater signaled the intrinsic high quality and respectability of his establishment. He also asserted that women working in the box-office signaled the improvement that cinema and cinema-going had undergone in the last few years.

FIGURE 6
Box-Office, Fame Adlabs, Andheri (western suburb of Bombay), 2006. Photo by the author.

While the involvement of educated women from middle-class and upper-class backgrounds was cited as necessary for the moral and aesthetic improvement of cinema and the film industry in its early years in India (Majumdar 2009), by the late 1990s the participation of women from such backgrounds in filmmaking indexed the overall
respectability
of the Hindi film industry. Talking about the growing presence of filmmakers’ children in the industry, Pamela Chopra, the wife of noted pro
ducer/director Yash Chopra, used the example of Karisma Kapoor to communicate the tremendous shift in perceptions that had taken place: “Can you just imagine Raj Kapoor’s daughter saying, ‘I want to become a heroine’? Oh my God no! And yet, when Daboo’s daughter [Karisma; Daboo was the nickname for Raj Kapoor’s son, Randhir] decided she wanted to become a heroine, Daboo couldn’t say no. Because the industry had changed by that time” (Pamela Chopra, interview, 26 March 1996). The status and condition of women as a social, cultural, and moral index of a community, society, or nation, has a long history dating back to the colonial project in South Asia and elsewhere.
²⁰
The presence of middle-and upper-class women both on-screen and off-screen has mutually indexed respectability within the industry: actresses from “good families” signal that the industry is a respectable place to work, enabling the entry of women from similar social backgrounds to work behind the scenes in the industry; with greater numbers of women working in production, acting starts to lose some of its stigma as well.

As I have already noted, however, when I first began my fieldwork there were few women working behind the scenes and the set was an extremely masculinized space. In such a scenario, how was respectability discussed and enacted? In the next section, I examine the gendered dimension of behavior on sets and other sites of production.

One evening, while I was waiting to carry out an interview with an editor of a trade magazine at his apartment, a young woman and her mother came to seek advice about getting a break in the industry from the journalist’s friend, Imran, who presented himself as an industry insider and expert.
²¹
The woman and her mother sat down next to me on the sofa. From their conversation with Imran, which was in Hindi, I gathered that this was not their first time meeting him for advice on this matter.

They mentioned meeting a producer, whose name I did not recognize, and Imran asked how the meeting went. The mother said unhappily, “You know he wanted her not to sign any films for a year and a half, until the release of his film.” Imran responded, “I checked this guy out. I asked around and this guy, he’s a small-time producer, and he doesn’t have a very good reputation. He’s more like a ‘Casanova’ [he used the English word]. He likes to keep seeing new girls and boys and then tries to bind them to some type of contract where they can’t sign any other film, and so I don’t think you should take the offer.”

The mother agreed, “Exactly, what if some big break comes along and she’s bound because of this other film?”

Imran then warned the mother, “You know you should not be visiting producers like this with your daughter. This is not the right way to try and break your daughter into the industry. It is not right to take a girl around like this. It will give producers the wrong ideas. You should hire a secretary—a good secretary—who knows the industry, and the secretary can go around to producers with the portfolio and get the contacts. A secretary will be able to do a lot more than you as a mother can.”

The above anecdote communicates the very stereotypes of the industry as an unsavory and hyper-sexualized space that many of its members have been trying to counter for years. Imran’s reprimand to the mother reveals how actively soliciting producers for roles can be interpreted by them as an excessive willingness or desperation, a situation ripe for sexual harassment and exploitation. The fact that Imran advised the mother to hire an agent for her daughter, one who would use photographs to mediate the interaction with producers, underscores that such a practice was not necessarily the norm within the Hindi film industry.
²²
The avenues for a novice actor to get noticed—without any prior kin or social connections to the film industry—are constrained in gender-specific ways.

Male actors hoping for their first big break often visited sets, hoping to catch the eye of a producer or a director, or to develop an on-set social relationship so that they may build up a network of contacts. For example, one day in April 1996, while I was observing a film shoot, I finally asked one of the assistant directors about a tall, broad twenty-something who had been attending the shoot regularly. I was curious as to who he was, for he came to the set every day and simply sat to one side without ever speaking to anyone. No one ever seemed to pay him any attention. The assistant director replied to my query with a nonchalant, “Oh, him? He’s the struggler.” “Struggler” is a common term for actors without any kin or social connections who are trying to get a break in the film industry. I started noticing the steady stream of “strugglers” who visited the various film sets that I was observing. While the process could be quite boring, uncomfortable, or humiliating, I noticed that the men who were “struggling” to get into the industry did not seem to be struggling for a living: they could afford to spend their days on film sets and not at work. Some of them worked on television as a way of earning an income and then spent the rest of their time on film sets.

Roaming film sets, however, was a very gendered practice, restricted to men. If actresses did the same, they would be communicating that
they were willing to go to any lengths to get a role, and would be vulnerable to harassment and exploitation. While men can actively seek work, women require someone to advocate for them. The most common route for unconnected women to garner leading roles was to be “discovered,” implying their passivity in the process. The news of producers’ discoveries is a recurrent feature of film journalism in India, and such discoveries are disproportionately of women. Winning beauty pageants such as Miss India, Miss World, and Miss Universe—after which individuals are commonly offered leading roles in films if they desire to pursue an acting career—is another method for women to become actresses. In these various instances, being sought after by filmmakers, rather than seeking them out, is an important dimension of displaying respectability, based on archetypical gender binaries: men are active and struggling; women are passive and waiting to be discovered; men are public, women private.

Not only did I notice different norms for entering and navigating the industry, I also observed how everyday life on sets was distinctly gendered. At film shoots, actresses frequently had a parent, family member, close friend, or personal staff member present at all times. Part
of
this extensive retinue has to do with the fact that many actresses start their careers in the film industry when they are about fifteen or sixteen years old; this contrasts with men, who are in their early twenties. Even unmarried women in their late twenties had a parent or a friend present on the set during film shoots, however. For instance, Madhuri Dixit, who was at the peak of her acting career and was almost thirty years old at the time of my initial research, frequently had her father present on the set of
Dil
to Pagal Hai
. He paid little attention to the shoot, and sat quietly reading a book. While actresses frequently had to wear sexy, revealing clothing in certain sequences, once they were off camera their body language changed, going to great pains to cover themselves and create a zone of modesty and privacy in the very male and very public space of the set.
²³
For example, I observed actresses covering their thighs with a towel or their torso with a shawl if the clothing they wore was leaving those areas exposed. Whenever possible, actresses retreated to their makeup rooms or trailers in between shots, while actors frequently stayed present on the set, if the time in between takes was short. All of these practices reinforce that the film industry is perceived as a morally hazardous space for women and illustrate that the very fact of being an actress brings a woman’s sexuality into the foreground, marking her as an openly sexual being, in a manner not experienced by actors.

However, being regarded as an object of male desire is necessary for an
actress’s standing and success within the industry. Rani Mukherji, who began her career in 1997, spoke to a group of us from NYU in 2005, when she was shooting for
Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna
(Never Say Good-bye) in the New York area. In response to a question about the “male gaze” posed by a graduate student, Mukherji said she never felt uncomfortable on a film set, but she did wonder at times about the reactions in a movie theater. Mentioning that in her earlier years she had gone to see her films in theaters, protected by the anonymity of a Muslim woman’s
burqa
, she commented about the whistling and clapping that occurred in theaters during songs or other erotically charged moments in films: “You think, ‘Wait a minute, is that okay?’ But if it wasn’t there, it would also be worrisome.”
²⁴
Actresses are thus constantly negotiating between the onscreen requirement of physical desirability and the off-screen demand for social respectability. While the former is necessary for professional success, the latter is important for high social status.

This negotiation was apparent during a photo shoot involving Aishwarya Rai I observed in 1996. Rai, currently one
of
the most well-known Indian actresses globally, was a former model and Miss World 1994, and was just beginning her career in Hindi films during my first stint of fieldwork.
²⁵
One part of Rai’s photo shoot took place on a fishing boat anchored in the Arabian Sea adjoining Versova, a northwestern suburb of Bombay (
Figure 7
).
²⁶
Since the only women on the boat besides me were Rai and her hairdresser, I was drafted to help out in small ways, like holding up a sheet so that Rai could change her clothes. During one part of the shoot, Rai posed in a modest, one-piece bathing suit with a knee-length sarong wrapped around her waist, which covered her thighs. She perched on the stern of the boat while the photographer stood in front of her clicking away, and his assistant crouched down behind him and took his own photographs of Rai. After the shoot, Rai complained to me about the assistant, specifically the angle from which he was taking photographs of her. She was worried about his intentions and kept asking me if I knew anything about him and whether he was a “decent” guy. She was also concerned about her outfit being too revealing and said, “In my modeling days, I was always very fussy and particular about what I wore, so I don’t want people to think I’ve changed now.” The “now” indexed not only Rai’s transformation from being a model to an actress, but also a movement across vastly disparate moral worlds—from the high status and respectable world of modeling and advertising to the more ambiguously positioned and morally questionable film industry. Rai’s anxieties about the assistant’s photographs and her clothing arose directly as a result of the
aura of ill repute that inhered in the film industry when she began her career.

FIGURE 7
Aishwarya Rai’s photo shoot by Rakesh Shreshtha, Versova (western suburb
of
Bombay), 1996. Photo by the author.

Respectability was not only an embodied practice, but also a fertile subject of discourse within the film industry. In the following section, I focus on the three main topics that emerged from my interviews, through which respectability was explicitly indexed: origin stories; discussions of middle-classness; and the value attributed to formal higher education. Each topic generated a specific trope that underlies the varied statements of diverse filmmakers: the “accidental” nature of becoming a part of the industry; the binary of
filmi
vs. middle class; and the generational clash over education.