Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (3 page)

“Yeah, I think this question is a little too late now, because it will change I think, by the time your book comes out.”

I was interviewing Shah Rukh Khan—one of the most successful stars of the prolific and box-office–oriented Hindi-language film industry based in Bombay—for my dissertation research in 1996.
¹
We were at Mehboob Studios, located in Bombay’s western suburb of Bandra,
²
where Khan was shooting for the film
Duplicate
; my first question concerned the condescension and distaste expressed toward popular Hindi cinema by Indian elites and the English-language media. Khan continued, “I believe this attitude will change, and I can say that with a lot of conviction, because I would also blame myself for being in that category say four or five years ago. I would also think it was not fashionable to like Hindi films.” Little did I realize at the time how prescient his statements would be. Although my book took much longer than Khan ever would have anticipated, he was absolutely right in his predictions about the transformation of attitudes toward popular Hindi cinema—from contempt to celebration—with Khan himself being an important figure in these changes.
³
Hailed by his biographer as “the face of a glittering new India” and “a modernday god” (Chopra 2007: 11), Khan’s celebrity has extended globally across a variety of domains: from the financial—being the first Indian actor to ring the opening bell of the NASDAQ stock exchange in February 2010—to the scholarly—being the subject
of an international conference, “Shah Rukh Khan and Global
Bollywood
,” held at the University of Vienna in October 2010.

That Khan represents a “glittering new India” is indicative of the other transformation that has taken place over the course of my research: the change in global representations and perceptions of India—from a “Third World” country to the “next great economic superpower” (Elliott 2006).
⁴
The
Hindi film industry
, now better known as “Bollywood,” has been an important accoutrement of India’s resignification in the global arena, one that is deployed both by the Indian state and the corporate sector in efforts to brand the country as an economic powerhouse in arenas such as the annual World Economic Forum held at Davos, Switzerland. Bollywood is a presence at Davos mainly through its music and its stars; in 2009, AmitabhBachchan, one of the biggest stars of Indian cinema, was awarded the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award for “outstanding excellence in the field of culture” (Upala 2009). Bachchan reflected about the honor on his blog, “I took pride in the fact that an honor such as the Crystal Award was bestowed on me, an Indian from the world of escapist commercial cinema, a cinema which 50–60 years ago was not such a bright profession to be in. Children from good homes were not encouraged to go anywhere near it: an activity that was considered infra dig.
⁵
But look how this very escapist cinema had progressed through the years, where today in an International forum of some eminence, I was able to stand and represent my fraternity and my country in a most humbling recognition” (in Lavin 2009).

This book is an examination of the very narrative of progress,
respectability
, and arrival to which Bachchan alludes in his remarks. It is the story of how the Hindi film industry became “Bollywood”: a globally recognized and circulating brand of filmmaking from India, which is often posited by the international media as the only serious contender to Hollywood in terms of global popularity and influence. As an anthropologist, my central focus is on the social world of
Hindi filmmakers
, their filmmaking practices, and their ideologies of production.
⁶
I examine the ensuing changes in the field of Hindi film production (Bourdieu 1993), especially those related to the cultural and social status of films and filmmakers— as well as the political economy of filmmaking—and locate them in Hindi filmmakers’ own efforts to accrue
symbolic capital
, social respectability, and professional distinction. These efforts have been enabled by the neoliberal restructuring of the Indian state and economy— intensified from 1991, after the imf mandated structural adjustment policies—resulting in a dramatically altered media landscape, marked
first by the entry of
satellite television
and then by the emergence of the multiplex theater.
⁷
I argue that the Hindi film industry’s metamorphosis into Bollywood would not have been possible without the rise of neoliberal economic ideals in India. By tracing the transformations of the Hindi film industry for over a decade—one marked by tremendous social and economic change in India—this book provides ethnographic insight into the impact of neoliberalism on cultural production in a postcolonial setting.

When I first began my research about the social world and production practices of the Hindi film industry more than a decade ago, the dominant discourse about mainstream Hindi cinema—generated by Indian political, intellectual, social, and media elites—derided it as an intellectually vacuous, aesthetically deficient, and culturally inauthentic form.
⁸
Although the images, sounds, and styles of Hindi cinema had been a ubiquitous part of the urban landscape in India for decades (with the exception of the four southern states, which have popular filmmaking traditions in their own respective languages), popular Hindi films were frequently criticized or dismissed as an “escape for the masses”—as in Bachchan’s remarks about “escapist commercial cinema”—in the mainstream press, government documents, and well-appointed elite drawing rooms. For example, when I was introduced as someone studying the film industry for my PhD during a dinner party in Bandra hosted by my upstairs neighbor about ten days before my interview with Khan, one of the host’s friends launched into a diatribe about the absurdity of Hindi cinema, exclaiming, “What is there to study? All they do is run around trees! I mean how is it possible that such bad films get made? I don’t understand how people can stand to watch them, and what does it say about the mentality of the common Indian that he likes such nonsense!” Even those who were more sympathetic to my research, like journalists and others working within the media world of Bombay, expressed their scorn for the film world by asserting that I should only meet the handful of people (according to them) in the industry with the requisite intelligence and education to understand my project, and therefore able to help me.

Now as I write this introduction in 2010, these disdainful attitudes toward my research belong to another era. One of the most notable changes since the onset of the millennium, which Khan had predicted, is the way Hindi cinema, along with the film industry more broadly, has acquired greater cultural legitimacy from the perspective of the state, the English-language media, and English-educated/speaking elites in India. Hindi cinema and Bombay filmmakers are circulating through, and
being celebrated in, a variety of sites redolent with cultural and symbolic capital—from prestigious international film festivals like Cannes and Toronto, to elite academic institutions such as Harvard and Cambridge.
⁹
This enhanced status of Hindi cinema arises from an interconnected set of processes: the increasing academic interest and study of popular Hindi cinema by scholars located or trained in the Anglo-American academy; the avid consumption of these films by the South Asian diaspora; the increasing recognition and celebration of Hindi films in Western cultural spaces; and the emergence of new global markets for Hindi cinema. Underlying these processes is a less explored dimension, however: Hindi filmmakers’ own drive for distinction and greater social acceptance, which is the focus of this book.

The rising cultural legitimacy of popular Hindi cinema is a result of what I argue is an ongoing process of the “gentrification” of Hindi cinema and the Hindi film industry. Gentrification, which in its most basic definition means to renovate or convert an area to conform to middle-class taste (
OED
2006), is an apt metaphor to describe the changes occurring in the Hindi film industry, which has been concerned with respectability and middle-class acceptance since the 1930s. Conventional accounts of popular Hindi cinema had described it as a cultural form concerned with mass appeal and representing the sensibilities of the slum (Nandy 1998). Despite the close identification on the part of scholars and journalists between Hindi cinema and the working poor, or “masses,” of Indian society,
¹⁰
what I had observed during a decade of fieldwork, from 1996 to 2006, was that members of the Hindi film industry consistently distanced themselves from such audiences, having identified with and sought acceptance, approval, and respect from more elite segments of Indian society. I characterize this desire for respectability and elite approval as the Hindi film industry’s drive to gentrify itself, its audiences, and its film culture. Just as urban gentrification is marked by a vocabulary of progress, renovation, and beautification, which is predicated upon exacerbating social difference through the displacement of poor and workingclass residents from urban centers, the gentrification of Hindi cinema is articulated through a discourse of quality, improvement, and innovation that is often based upon the displacement of the poor and working class from the spaces of production and consumption.

The results of this gentrification are evident in three main ways. First, since the mid-1990s, in the films themselves—both in their narrative content and mise-en-scène—there has been a growing concern with wealthy protagonists and the near-complete erasure of the working class, urban
poor, and rural dwellers once prominent as protagonists/heroes in Hindi films. When films do focus on non-elites, they still represent an elitist perspective in that the protagonists are frequently rendered as gangsters or as part of some sort of criminal milieu, rather than being the unmarked everyman protagonist of earlier eras of Hindi cinema.
¹¹
Additionally, more and more films are being shot in North America, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Europe rather than in India; thus India itself is increasingly erased from the films.
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Second, a prominent discourse of respectability, connected to the class and educational background of filmmakers, as well as a newly emergent discourse of corporatization and professional management, serve as further modes of gatekeeping. Additionally, the film industry has become progressively more insular and exclusionary, so that it is very difficult for people without any family or social connections to get a break. Finally, regarding the sites of circulation and exhibition, a new geography of distribution has emerged, one that prizes metropolitan and overseas markets and marginalizes equally populous but provincial markets. Furthermore, the multiplex phenomenon is increasingly transforming cinema-going into an elite pastime within India. My discussion and explanation of these processes are based upon over a decade of ethnographic research, as well as filmmakers’ statements and reflections about films and filmmaking over that period, rather than upon in-depth formal or textual analyses of particular films.

The third noticeable transformation of the Hindi film industry, since the late 1990s, has been the efforts by filmmakers and business leaders to rationalize the production, distribution, and exhibition process, most commonly referred to as the “corporatization” of the industry. Historically, filmmaking in India has been very fragmented and decentralized, with hundreds of independent financiers, producers, distributors, and exhibitors, who have never been vertically or horizontally integrated in the manner of the major Hollywood studios or multinational entertainment conglomerates. Although a studio system with contracted actors, writers, and directors existed in the 1920s and 1930s in India, a handful of studios did not monopolize the film business as they had in Hollywood. The majority of Indian studios also did not control distribution and exhibition like their Hollywood counterparts. The lack of integration between production, distribution, and exhibition accounted for the high mortality rate of studios; a series of commercial failures, or even one major disaster, frequently led to bankruptcy. Additionally, film historians attribute the influx of wartime profits during the Second World War as the single most important factor in the rapid decline of studios, with the rise of the
independent producer as the characteristic feature of Indian filmmaking (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 1980; Binford 1989).
¹³
What is referred to as the “studio era,” was actually a short chapter in the
history of
Indian cinema (Shoesmith 1987).
¹⁴
Entities referred to as “studios” in Bombay in the post-Independence period, such as R.K. Studios or Mehboob Studios, were actually production companies set up by prominent stars or directors who turned to producing and procured real estate to create an autonomous production space.
¹⁵

Dramatic changes in the structure of the Hindi film industry have been under way since 2000, when the Indian state recognized filmmaking as a legitimate industrial activity. The entry of the Indian corporate sector into filmmaking—either through the creation of media subsidiaries (Reliance Industries’ Big Entertainment), or the transformation of independent production companies into public limited companies (Mukta Arts)—is leading to a greater level of integration between production, distribution, and exhibition than had existed prior to this period. Rationalization is related to the issues of cultural legitimacy and respectability, since much of the discourse around these changes, generated by the general media and the film industry, is articulated through a vocabulary of professionalism and modernization.

I argue that these processes of gentrification and rationalization attempt to resolve the dilemmas posed by the central features of the
production culture
(Caldwell 2008) of the Hindi film industry: the immense disdain that filmmakers express for both the industry and their audiences, as well as the tremendous uncertainty that characterizes the filmmaking process. This book examines in detail these features of the Hindi film industry’s production culture, focusing on filmmakers’ quests for social respectability and professional distinction, as well as on their continuous manufacture of knowledge and axioms that try to make sense of the unpredictability of filmmaking. By focusing on the social world of Hindi filmmakers, and their processes of production, I demonstrate how commercially oriented cultural production is a site of social practice and a domain of meaning-making. Through a study of the Hindi film industry’s production culture, we gain insights into how the mass media are implicated in the production of social difference, the imagining of the nation, the objectification of culture, and the constitution of modernity in contemporary India.