Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (23 page)

Chopra’s remarks represent a form of face-work in that he distances his parents and himself from the social world of the film industry. By asserting that his upbringing was different, his parents did not socialize with other filmmakers, and that his friends were “normal people,” Chopra constructs
filmi
as an undesirable state and represents his “outsider” status as a marker of respectability.

Akin to the trope of accidental entry expressed by first-generation filmmakers, many individuals whose parents were filmmakers explained to me that their parents had consciously kept them away from the film world. For example, actor/producer/director Aamir Khan asserted, “My father has been a producer and my uncle has been a director/producer for the last thirty years, and so in that sense it’s true that we have been born into a film family and been involved with films, but our parents kept us away really from the film line so I didn’t really attend shootings and I didn’t really experience much of the film line as a child. Even at home, the way our family has brought us up, they kept us away from the film line and we really didn’t know that our parents were involved with films [or that] films were anything special or anything different” (Aamir Khan, interview, March 1996). Khan not only distanced himself from the film industry, but also from the films themselves by relating how his parents restricted his film-viewing when he was a child: “I wasn’t allowed to watch films. . . till the age of about fifteen, I had barely watched any films at all” (Aamir Khan, interview, March 1996). Such assertions appear as examples of face-work, however, since Khan, as a child, played a small role
in his uncle’s 1973 film
Yaadon ki Baraat
(The Procession of Memories), and in later parts of our interview he reminisced about childhood memories of film composers and writers working at his home: “Music directors used to come home and to my uncle’s house or my father’s house and they used to have the music sittings at home, and the story sittings at home. So I used to love to sit with my folks and hear the stories that they were listening to. The scripts they were working on, and the music sessions they would have; it used to be fun to watch the music director composing and singing a tune” (Aamir Khan, interview, March 1996). As I discuss in chapter six, filmmakers’ homes are important sites of production, and members of the film industry, including Khan, specifically attribute an advantage to those who have grown up within the industry.

It was really in response to my opening question about growing up within the film industry that members of the second generation, like Aditya Chopra
and
Aamir Khan, articulated the most distance from its social world. In contrast to my other questions about films and filmmaking, this one in particular appeared to touch on deep-rooted anxieties about the moral and social stigma attached to the Hindi film industry, which derived from its history of connections with the—also stigmatized—hereditary performance traditions. Representing one’s childhood as distant from the socially aberrant world of the film industry by virtue of judicious parents, who essentially embodied middle-class values and took care to shield their children from the implicitly corrupt world of the industry, established filmmakers’ own families as good ones. If first-generation filmmakers disavowed their active agency in initiating their film career as a way to showcase their respectability, second-and third-generation filmmakers did so by disavowing any active interest or participation in the social world of the film industry.

A further instance of this disavowal was the ambivalence first-generation filmmakers expressed toward their profession, along with their efforts to provide their children with the means to pursue an alternate career, which mostly took the form of valorizing formal higher education. In the next section, I address how formal higher education operates as an important measure and index of respectability for the Hindi film industry.

Given the multiple avenues for entering the film industry, members of the industry represent a wide range of schooling and educational backgrounds— from obtaining master’s degrees to not even finishing high
school. Since the two years after tenth grade, which in other parts of India would be regarded as high school, is institutionally separate and termed “college” in Bombay, many filmmakers talk about going to “college,” which actually translates into being educated through the twelfth grade. The distinction to be noted is the term “graduation,” which communicates that an individual has gone to college in a more American sense of the term and received a bachelor’s degree. While there is no educational norm, higher education is definitely valorized and respected within the industry, and those who have college degrees tend to foreground this aspect of their background. For example, during our interview, Shah Rukh Khan made it known that he had gone to an elite private high school in Delhi, had “done his graduation,” that is, earned a bachelor’s degree. He also mentioned a master’s degree. At the
mahurat
(a ritual undertaken by a producer to mark the start of a new film project) of the film
Prem
Aggan
(Love’s Fire), actor/producer/director Sanjay Khan informed the gathered audience that his nephew Fardeen, who was being introduced in the film, and had graduated from the University of Massachusetts. “Fardeen could have gotten a good, well-paying job—earning 50 to 60
lakhs
[5–6 million rupees] a year—with a multinational corporation, but he opted instead to express himself onscreen.”

Khan’s announcement of his nephew’s American college degree and the subsequent representation of his decision to pursue acting as one choice out of many possible corporate career options is another example of face-work in practice, since the dominant stereotype of actors, especially of “star sons,” is that they are poorly educated and by implication, not very intelligent. For example, a producer described the majority of actors as “illiterate” or “semi-literate” and responded to my question about the changes he had observed in the industry: “We haven’t really moved from Meena Kumari to Manisha Koirala. Meena Kumari was an illiterate, so is Manisha Koirala. Except Manisha Koirala speaks better. Madhubala dropped out and never went to college—nor did Madhuri Dixit. So what has changed? Akshay Kumar, Saif Ali Khan, Anil Kapoor: nobody has changed.” Screenwriter Sachin Bhaumick continuously punctuated his comments about various members of the film industry by listing their educational qualifications. He was critical of filmmakers who did not try to educate their children, characterizing stars’ sons as taking the easy route to money and fame: “This is the one industry [in which] you don’t need very much education to earn a lot of money” (Bhaumick, interview, October 1996).

Sanjay Dutt, in his recollections of how he became an actor, reinforces
Bhaumick’s point about the insignificance of formal education. Dutt, whose parents, Nargis and Sunil Dutt, were very highly esteemed actors in the 1950s and 1960s, stated that his parents always wanted him to study and “go through college as a normal child,” even offering to send him to the United States. Dutt characterized himself as a “big fool” for not taking them up on their offer: “I’m not the studying type, so that’s the reason I came into films. I said, ‘I don’t want to study.’ I told my father, ‘Please, you’re wasting your money, your time. I don’t study. I can’t study.’ So he says, ‘What do you want to do then?’ I said, ‘I want to be an actor.’ So they got angry and upset about it, but eventually when they thought about it: it made sense, so then he started putting me into training and I started getting into it slowly” (Dutt, interview, May 1996).
²⁹
While Dutt pointed to his disinterest in academic pursuit as a precipitating factor in his film career, Manisha Koirala cited achievement in the academic realm as an explicit reason for why she did
not
want her younger brother, Siddharth, to become an actor: “I never studied in a great school. He studied in one of the best schools in India. . . and I was thinking, if he goes to Oxford or to Cambridge, he can get into something more serious. I’m not saying filmmaking is not serious, but it’s not a great profession for life, not in India. . . and especially an actor’s job” (Koirala, interview, 23 May 1996). In each of these comments a college education is intrinsically valued, despite its lack of relevance for a successful career in acting. Rather than questioning the necessity of formal higher education for acting, filmmakers devalue and denigrate acting because it does not require a college degree. That fame and wealth is possible without the middleclass accoutrement of a college education is more a source of anxiety and stigma for filmmakers than it is a basis of liberation from dominant social norms about education.

This anxiety was most marked among film families, and many secondgeneration filmmakers described how their parents were ambivalent about them entering the industry and insistent on them pursuing higher education. Dutt’s recounting of his parents’ initial disappointment over his career choice was echoed by many other second-generation filmmakers. Producer/director Rakesh Roshan, whose father was a prominent music director (composer) in the 1950s and 1960s related: “I knew as a child that I always wanted to become an actor, and my father was very against it. He wanted me to study first” (Roshan, interview, May 1996). Roshan described how he used to skip school to go see movies and that when his father came to learn of his truancy, he was packed off to boarding school. Aamir Khan recalled his family’s opposition when he ex
pressed an interest in becoming an actor: “My parents were very against it. They didn’t want me to be in the films. Their reason was that they felt it’s a line with no stability, and they didn’t want me to go into something unstable, where one day you’re successful and the other day you’re not . . . so they were worried about my future in that sense. They would [have preferred] that I worked hard at my studies. . . and probably become a doctor or an engineer—something more stable” (Aamir Khan, interview, March 1996). According to Khan, when he chose not to pursue a college education, his family and friends were shocked, since “it was a very big deal, if you’re not a graduate.” He stated that everyone in his social world pressured him to go to college, for otherwise he would appear to be “uneducated.” Aditya Chopra asserted, “I wanted to make films, but my mom said, ‘No, you have to finish your B.Com. [bachelor of commerce]. You have that degree.’ It [didn’t] make sense to me till now, why I’ve got that degree. But I did five years of college from Sydenham, which is the best commerce college we have in Bombay” (Aditya Chopra, interview, April 1996). This valorization of formal higher education by first-generation members of the film industry, who did not have many years of formal schooling, can be understood as a response to the dominant stereotypes of Hindi filmmakers—as uneducated, uncouth, and unrefined—that appeared in a variety of discourses generated by the state, English-language press, middle-class audiences, and other filmmakers. The ambivalence about filmmaking as a career and the great regard expressed for higher education is another manner in which Hindi filmmakers assert their respectability in line with dominant middle-class norms about education and occupation.

Although Aditya Chopra felt his college degree was irrelevant to his goals of becoming a filmmaker, his mother (Pamela) explained at great length the role of formal education in improving the quality of filmmaking and raising the
social status of
the film industry. During our interview, she declared that a “more educated group of people” were working in the industry and compared it to the past: “Let’s face it. Maybe, thirty–forty years ago, the people who were acting—or even the music directors, or even the other technicians—they were not educated people. They were people who learnt on the job. It was like learning a trade. . . and some of them came from quite dubious backgrounds. A lot of the heroines—some of the heroes—they were not very comfortable in polite society. . . They didn’t have anything to say for themselves. They could not express their feelings or their achievements or their aspirations or their aims. . . They were not trained to do that” (Pamela Chopra, 26 March 1996). In Chopra’s
statements, education is defined only in terms of formal schooling and is opposed to the experiential, practical learning characterizing work in the film industry. The lack of formal education coupled with the disreputable social backgrounds of actors and actresses, alluded to by Chopra, resulted in an industry characterized by inarticulate and by implication, unintelligent, individuals. This scenario was changing for the better, according to her, and the key was a more formal professionalized training: “There are people who are actually trained for it. People who’ve
had
, who’ve either been to the Film Institute, or who have studied filmmaking and now; they treat it like a career. So as that has changed, a better class of people has come into the industry, so naturally the perception of the industry has also changed, among those people who don’t belong to it” (Pamela Chopra, interview, 26 March 1996). Interestingly when Chopra made these remarks in 1996, there were not that many individuals who were formally trained in filmmaking working in the industry, and the most common method of training was—and continues to be—either apprenticeship or growing up within the industry. What is important in Chopra’s statements is the connection made between formal training, the social class of filmmakers, and the improved status of the film industry. Formal education—either second-generation filmmakers attending college or filmmaking institutionalized as a type of objectified, codified knowledge—is regarded as the route to social respectability and by implication, cinematic quality.