Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (22 page)

The majority of people I met during my fieldwork represented their involvement or entry into the film industry as a complete accident—something that they had never anticipated, desired, or planned for when younger. For example, Madhuri Dixit responded to my question of whether she had always wanted to be an actress: “Actually no, I never thought I’d be an actress someday. I didn’t have any intentions and I was
not really interested. With me, it just happened. I think that’s where destiny comes in. I was offered a film and I took up the offer, and that’s where the bug bit me actually: when I did my first film, then I got interested” (Dixit, interview, 25 November 1996). When I asked Manisha Koirala, an actress who hailed from a politically elite family in Nepal—her grandfather and two great uncles were prime ministers at various points in the country’s history—whether she had planned on being an actress, she replied, “No it was out of the blue. I was always interested in theater, but I never thought of films as a professional career. I was thinking of becoming a doctor in fact, and out of the blue I just wanted to have— I just wanted to earn—some pocket money during my vacation, and so I just got into films. Then it grew serious with me. Initially I had not taken it seriously” (Koirala, interview, 23 May 1996). Even the beauty pageant winner, Ayesha Jhulka, stated that she was never interested in acting, and that her foray into beauty pageants was just for “fun”; she initially rejected the film offered to her because she was studying to be a fashion designer and did not want to leave her course of study. She then had second thoughts and decided to give acting a chance: “I thought, if these people have offered me [a role], why not try?” All three women presented their initial foray into acting as completely fortuitous or frivolous, rather than their life’s goal, plan, or dream.

I contend that the explicit disavowal of any prior desire or ambition to be a part of the film industry, along with the reliance on the trope of chance or destiny, is a form of “face-work” performed especially by actresses, which is closely connected to the moral stigma historically associated with women working in the film industry. In the case of Koirala, her explanation was a particularly palpable instance of face-work: a few months later when I was interviewing Meena Iyer, a journalist who wrote for the English-language film magazine
Filmfare
, she informed me that Koirala was her “discovery.” According to Iyer, she had met Koirala at a party in Delhi, through a mutual acquaintance who had informed each of the other’s presence at his home that evening. “Apparently she came because she got to know that I was a film journalist and she thought that she’d get me to introduce her to people in Bombay,” Iyer recalled. “You’re so pretty, why don’t you join the movies?” Iyer had told the aspiring actress, so the next day Koirala and her mother met the film journalist at the airport as she was returning to Bombay. Iyer remembered Koirala’s mother mentioning to her that her “daughter is keen” and asking whether she remembered the conversation the two had had the previous evening: “Did you mean that?” Iyer responded affirmatively and told
them to come to Bombay; both mother and daughter arrived in the city a couple of weeks later. Iyer introduced them to some of the top producers in the industry with a very positive outcome: “Wherever I went she was signed immediately. It was because she was so pretty. That was the basic qualification, nothing else” (Iyer, interview, August 1996).

The issues of working style, hierarchies of access, and structural organization also raised by this example are discussed in chapters five and six. The point here is less about the veracity of either Koirala’s or Iyer’s statements, and more about how in her interview with me, Koirala completely erased any agency on her part in getting her first break as an actress. When I asked her to elaborate on how she got her first role, which was the female lead in a big-budget multi-generational drama produced and directed by Subhash Ghai, one of the top filmmakers of the industry, she merely stated that Ghai had given her a screen test. When I asked her how she met Ghai, she informed me that Iyer had introduced them to each other. The difference between Koirala and the mother-daughter pair discussed in the previous section is that Koirala’s interest in becoming an actress was mediated by Iyer, who facilitated meetings with some of the most successful and prestigious producers in the film industry.

For women to express an intentional, willful desire to be a part of the film world, with its attendant scandal and morally questionable characters, would imply some sort of affinity with this social world, which occupies the opposite moral pole from that of the good family. Chatterjee argues that public visibility and mobility was possible for the respectable middle-class woman because of her embodiment and internalization of all of the qualities associated with the domestic private realm he terms the “spiritual” sphere of everyday life (1989). Actively aiming at becoming a film actress, whose visibility and availability for male fantasy constitutes her as an object of desire, directly counters the qualities associated with the respectable woman. Koirala, Dixit, and Jhulka all came from upper-middle-class and upper-caste backgrounds, and as we saw in Jhulka’s earlier statements, a family’s resistance to its daughter, granddaughter, or niece becoming an actress is a visible marker of its respectability.
²⁷
Good families are those who object to or discourage their female kin from becoming actresses; the trope of family resistance has been a common feature in many actresses’ entry narratives over the decades.

The accidental entry trope was articulated not only by women, however, but also by men. In this instance, the trope served as a form of face-work that was less about managing the moral stigma of working in the industry than managing the intellectual and social disdain expressed
toward popular cinema by social and cultural elites. Amit Khanna started his career in the film industry as a writer. At the time of our initial meeting, in 1996, he was the CEO of the newly formed Plus Channel India, Ltd.—an integrated audio/television/film production company that was dissolved in 2000—and currently is the chairman of
Reliance Big Entertainment
. He related his entry into the film industry as a series of fortuitous circumstances. After regaling me first with his knowledge of early anthropology, specifically James Frazer’s
The Golden Bough
, Khanna described his entry into the world of filmmaking in the early 1970s as “exceptional,” mainly because he came from a background that would normally not have anything to do with Hindi cinema. Asserting that he was one of the few young men at his college in Delhi who was familiar with Hindi films, he nevertheless claimed that, “It was obviously not the kind of career option which a person with my background looked at. I would have probably gone on to study [journalism, joining] the Civil Services or [going] abroad to graduate school” (Khanna, interview, June 1996). After communicating that he was of a highly educated literate background, Khanna described how he ended up in the Hindi film industry: “So the decision to come to films was ssa quirk of circumstances. There was a friend of mine who was with me in college: he owned a cinema theater in Delhi, and his father fell sick and [he] and his brother both had gone off to the U.S. for their [undergraduate education] and they just asked me if I could help them with their theater. That was my first contact with the intricacies of Hindi cinema, and by that time I knew Dev Anand [a famous actor, producer, and director] well and I decided to come to Bombay” (Khanna, interview, June 1996).

Khanna spent a great deal of time detailing how his presence in the world of filmmaking was unanticipated and—as with the story of his friend’s theater—more the result of his helpful nature than any focused intentionality. With his statements about his background and his lack of explanation about how he had gotten to know Dev Anand, with whom he began his career in the film industry, Khanna went to great lengths to portray himself as a cultured, educated, literate individual who countered the dominant stereotypes of the film industry. He was the president of the Film and TV Producers Guild that briefly banned Shakti Kapoor during the
casting couch
scandal; he also has been centrally involved with efforts to represent and recast the industry into a more professional and corporate entity, which I discuss in chapter seven.

The trope of accidental entry was mostly deployed by individuals who were first-generation members of the film industry. This trope oper
ated to display their respectability mainly through a disavowal of any agency regarding becoming a part of the morally questionable and intellectually bereft world of the Hindi film industry. Emphasizing the fortuitous nature of involvement was another way to index their belonging to “good families.” The good family was often synonymous with a middleclass family, and in the following section, I examine how the category of middle class was discussed and indexed within the film industry.

In an interview with the Internet newsmagazine
rediff.com
in February 2007, Shah Rukh Khan was asked about the contrast between his own middle-class upbringing and that of his two children, and whether he worried about the potential negative impact of his wealth and stardom on their lives. In his response, Khan launched into a lengthy discussion where he used the term “
middle class
” numerous times to indicate that despite his fame and wealth, he was essentially “a middle-class boy” from Delhi, concerned about instilling the right values in his children, which included a respect for education. Acknowledging that it was “strange” to be identifying as middle class when “you have a Bmw outside your house, which is one acre big,” Khan nevertheless described himself and his wife as “very middle-class as far as how we deal with things is concerned: how we talk in the house; we don’t have a lavish lifestyle beyond the fact that the peripherals [like his car and home] that come with my filmmaking or film stardom” (Someshwar and Sivaswamy 2007). Stating that he took a strong personal interest in his children’s education, Khan likened his involvement with his children to that of his own father: “I do what my father used to do with me. He was an educated middle-class man of good nature, and polite, so I try and be all that. The only difference is there are too many hoardings [billboards] of mine in the city. That’s the only difference between my father and me” (Someshwar and Sivaswamy 2007).

That one of the biggest movie stars in the world, let alone India, represented himself as middle class, suggests the value of this category within the Hindi film industry. In this particular context, middle class denotes social status rather than economic position. The precise power of the category derives from its ability to signal a whole host of associations that are regarded as the antithesis of the social world of the film industry. While scholars have noted other Indian contexts where the category of middle class is an object of censure or criticism (Mazzarella 2005), in the Hindi film industry, this category is a desired and celebrated one, both in terms of audiences and the family histories of filmmakers. For example, Sha
shi Kapoor, an actor and producer popular from the 1960s to the 1980s and the younger brother of Raj Kapoor, described how his father—who was a popular star—raised him and his siblings in an atmosphere that he referred to as middle class: “He was from a generation where even if you were a film star, even if you were earning well, at that time according to those days, you preferred to have a middle-class atmosphere, middle-class family; so, when we kids were brought up, we were brought up. . . very middle class, not the sons of the stars. . . you see nowadays: there was no car given to us; we went to a middle-class school— Don Bosco High School—and in our street, even though there were lots of film people, there were lots of other people—literary people, business people, professional people, service people, army people. But we were all middle class” (Shashi Kapoor, interview, 8 August 1996). Kapoor represents a middle-class atmosphere by a lack of ostentatious display, minimal consumption, an English-language education, and his membership in a diverse social group and community larger than the film industry.

Kapoor’s statements also present a middle-class social world as the desired norm. Another manifestation of the valorization of middleclassness that I encountered during my fieldwork was its juxtaposition with the term “
filmi
.” For example, Madhuri Dixit deployed this binary when discussing her decision to act in a film, “It was a very difficult decision for me to make because we’re not from a
filmi
background. . . my parents, my relatives—nobody has anything to do with films—and I come from a very middle-class kind of background, so my parents weren’t sure whether they’d like to see me acting in films” (Dixit, interview, 25 November 1996). “
Filmi
” is an Indian English term used pejoratively to describe behavior, fashion, and lifestyles that appear to be overly influenced by, or evocative of, popular Hindi cinema or the film industry.
Filmi
also implies ostentation, flamboyance, crudeness, immorality or amorality, and a disregard for formal education. “Middle class” represents a social or behavioral norm that is
filmi
’s opposite, marked by modesty, thrift, propriety, morality, and a value for education.

The binary opposition of
filmi
and middle class was not only utilized by individuals like Dixit, who strongly identified with being from a middleclass family, but also by second-generation members of the film industry who did not identify with the class position essentially, but with its normative moral authority. While first-generation members of the film industry, who hailed from middle-class backgrounds, had their specific family histories to index their own respectability, filmmakers who grew up within the film industry—as members of its second, third, or fourth
generations—often discursively distanced themselves from the social world of the industry, signified by the term
filmi
, and represented their childhood and formative years as essentially middle class. For example, the producer/director Aditya Chopra, whose father and late uncle were also prominent producers and directors,
²⁸
responded to my question about what it was like to grow up within the industry: