Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (42 page)

The “jackpot” quality of box-office outcome lends itself more readily to culturalist explanations than commercial accounts, which lack the necessary explanatory power to make sense of a highly uncertain business environment. For example, the incredible success of HAHK took industry members by surprise, not only because they were skeptical of its success, but also because of the competing sources of entertainment options— from satellite and cable television to home video—available to audiences. Its success was inconceivable from the standpoint of the market conditions at the time. In commercial explanations for box-office outcome the onus falls on filmmakers, since their actions and practices are held accountable, while in culturalist explanations the onus shifts to audiences and their subjectivities.
¹⁰

Finally, commercial explanations for box-office outcome do not possess the same affective power as social and cultural explanations. Throughout the world, films viewed by large numbers of people tend to get labeled as cultural phenomena and seem to generate social and cultural explanations (as well as anxieties) in a variety of spheres—media, scholarly, and everyday life. The Hindi film industry’s theories of spectatorship and its own representation as a mainstream industry are predicated on an affective relationship between cinema and its audiences. The very label “commercial cinema,” which has a system of market relations and consumption embedded in it, is based on the notion that film is an important source of entertainment and pleasure to vast numbers of people. As mentioned above, entertainment and pleasure are understood in terms of the concepts of identification and acceptance, both of which rely on an
affective engagement with films. The only mechanism for filmmakers to discern such engagement is commercial outcome, however, which is why box-office results are interpreted in a sociological fashion. This is apparent in how members of the industry describe, discuss, and classify their audiences.

Tarun Kumar’s confidence that his sexy trailer would ensure that his film was bought by distributors for the Bihar territory demonstrates how the geography of the distribution network for Hindi films produces a social imaginary of difference (Dàvila 2001; Himpele 1996), whereby taste is ascribed onto place, implicitly mapping film-viewing preferences in a vast and culturally diverse country like India onto ethnic and linguistic markers of identity.
¹¹
While Kumar’s comment about Bihar is based more on assumptions about the class composition of audiences in the state, much of the regional classification of audience preference is predicated upon an idea of literal identification: that certain stars or films may fare better in some
territories
than others because of the ethnic and linguistic affinities between stars and audiences. Punkej Kharabanda, who in 1996 was the secretary for a few leading actors and actresses, offered Dharmendra—an actor whose career has spanned over three decades— and his two sons, Sunny and Bobby Deol, as examples: “Any film of theirs in Punjab can never do badly. Punjabis think of them as their own—‘It’s our family;
Sade puttar hai
’ [they’re our sons]” (Kharabanda, interview, 17 April 1996). Although a large number of the actors in the Hindi film industry are of Punjabi origin, this particular family of actors has always been overtly identified as Punjabi in film magazines and other modes of disseminating news and gossip about the film industry.
¹²

In addition to imagining affinity between film stars and their audiences based on shared ethnicity, regional identity, or linguistic community, members of the industry assume that films depicting a specific regional milieu in terms of theme, dress, music, dialect of Hindi, and other markers of ethnicity will be more successful in the regions that they depict. Reviews in the trade press, which always assess a film’s commercial potential, often negatively value a film that appears too rooted in a particular regional milieu, for that would preclude identification from a broad spectrum of viewers. For example, the trade magazine
Film Information
, in its review of the 2001 film
Chandni Bar
, asserted, “The film is too Bombay-centric in the sense that the story is entirely about Bombay’s
dance-bar culture and the underworld.” While praising the director’s efforts in familiarizing himself with the specific milieu, the review declares, “too much emphasis on presenting the truest picture of Bombay’s underbelly rules out universal appeal for the film.” The review went on to predict that the film “has appeal only for Bombay and parts of Maharashtra,” and thereby would do much better business in Bombay than anywhere else.
¹³
The fact that the film was a modest commercial success primarily in Bombay reinforces the reviewer’s projections about the links between regional identity and film consumption.

In my conversations with distributors and trade journalists, entire territories were assigned a singular character based on the commercial performance of films. For example, according to my informants, “modern” films, or those that feature a contemporary urban setting and are less melodramatic, did better in the Bombay territory and the South,
¹⁴
while “social” films—films that focus heavily on family relationships that could be either in an urban or rural setting—did better in the North and the East. Thus within the film industry’s social imaginary, the fact that modern films do better in Bombay and the South signifies those territories as modern, while the sort of films that succeed in the North and the East signifies them as traditional. Although the
Overseas Territory
is generally described as beholden to romantic films, replete with song and dance sequences, sometimes the territory is divided according to preferences that correspond with specific territories in India. For example, distributors have observed that films that do well in the cities of Bombay and Delhi also do very well in the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada, while films that do well in Punjab also do well in the Gulf. One major difference between the territories in India and the Overseas Territories is that not all Hindi films will be distributed overseas. Films made with lesser-known actors or lesser-known directors are less likely to be released in the Overseas Territory, so that it is basically dominated by bigbudget, highly publicized films with popular stars.

In addition to producing ethno-linguistic audience categories, the distribution network generates the scalar residential binary of “city” and “interior” audiences, which corresponds to the division of distribution territories into A, B, and C class centers. Within this binary, the city refers to A-class centers, while the interior is comprised of B-and C-class centers. While each territory and subterritory has its interiors, entire subterritories in central and northern India, such as C.P., C.I., U.P., or Bihar, are regarded as the “interiors” from the perspective of Hindi filmmakers in a cosmopolitan city like Bombay. The interior audience is understood as
poorly educated, culturally conservative, economically marginalized, and socially backward. For example, during the shooting of a scene for the film
Sar Aankhon Par
(Your Wish Is My Command) when the protagonist tells his father that he has an interview at the
Times of India
(a nationally circulated English-language newspaper), the scriptwriter, Sanjay Chhel, suggested to the director, “Gyan-
ji
, I think he should say
akhbaar
[the Urdu word for newspaper] after
Times of India
, because people in the interiors won’t know what it is.” When explaining the poor box-office fate of the film,
1942 A Love Story
, which is set against the backdrop of the Indian independence movement, the head of a leading distribution firm in Bombay articulated the main differences between audiences in cities and the interiors in terms of education, intellectual curiosity, and the rhythms of daily life:

The condescension expressed toward small-town audiences in the above statements is similar to stereotypes of the “heartland” or “middle America” expressed by U.S. media professionals (Zafirau 2009a). I frequently heard the Bombay equivalent of “Will it play in Peoria?” which was “Will this run in Jhumri-Talayya?” In addition to the opposition between city and small-town audiences, the other dichotomy established is that between intelligent movies and action movies, implying that these categories are mutually exclusive.

When I had the chance to meet Lala Damani, a distributor for the Bengal and Bihar subterritories, I asked him about the perceptions I had heard from others that audiences in those regions only wanted to watch action films. Rather than questioning the normative judgments made about the genre, he asserted that viewers in his territories had no alternative, because the other genres of films being produced by the Bombay industry were not of the sort with which they could identify. Quoting a Hindi proverb, which roughly translates to “It’s better to have a
one-eyed uncle than no uncle at all,” Damani pointed out that the blockbuster films of the previous years like HAHK
and
Dilwale Dulhaniya Le
Jayenge
also had done very well in his territories. To reinforce his point about audiences in his region wanting something more than action, Damani told me to watch the film
Nadiya Ke Par
(Across the River) an older film upon which HAHK was based. He pointed out how that even after HAHK’s release, the older film was still doing well in repeat runs, signaling to him that audiences in his territories had more diverse tastes than what was generally attributed to them by Bombay filmmakers. “
Nadiya Ke
Par
has got no action,” Damani said, “but it is still running for five weeks in the repeat run. It means that the people’s taste is not the action picture. Action pictures run for one week only.” The main problem from his point of view was, “The people in Bombay take it for granted that only action pictures run. They don’t have time to sit down and create universally appealing stories” (Damani, interview, October 2000). I will discuss Damani’s tribulations further in the next chapter, as well as the overdetermined status of Bihar in filmmakers’ discourses. It is not happenstance that Tarun Kumar alluded to Bihar in the editing studio when surmising that images that could be potentially offensive and scandalous to women and families would be appealing to viewers in this region. Similar to those addressed in chapter two’s discussion of “front-benchers,” Kumar’s comments arise from assumptions linking gender, social class, and filmic preferences.

Tarun Kumar’s hesitation about mothers and “aunties” illustrates how gender is an important mode
of
classifying audiences. “Ladies audience” is an operative category within the film industry, and until the advent of multiplexes, it was perhaps the only niche audience from the point of view of the industry. Working with a literalist idea of identification, most members of the industry (who are predominantly male) presume that women prefer “heroine-oriented” films—those that have a woman as the central protagonist or main narrative agent. The prevailing belief in the industry is that actresses do not guarantee a good opening at the boxoffice, however. Most filmmakers asserted that heroine-oriented films depended on word-of-mouth to succeed, implying that the audiences who frequented movie theaters in the opening weekend of a film were primarily male. Nonetheless, female audiences are perceived as much harder to please. Scriptwriter Sutanu Gupta expressed his views about what he
thinks women want to see in a film: “You see
yaha pe kya hota hai
[what happens here], if you’re writing an action picture, then the hero kicks one fantastic blow on the villain’s face, people clap. Women don’t: they are not interested. You have to give them a solid story. They’re impressed by story; they’re impressed by characterization; they’re impressed by touching moments, which is more difficult to write” (Gupta, interview, 18 November 1996). Aside from heroine-oriented films, other films thought to appeal to women are those that contain narratives centered around kinship relations and devoid of violence, action, and “vulgarity.” The following excerpt from
Film Information
’s review of
Raja Hindustani
, the highestgrossing film of 1996, provides a glimpse of how women’s film-viewing preferences have been imagined: “These two scenes—the hero’s refusal to sign the divorce papers and the heroine’s refusal to divorce her husband— reaffirm one’s faith in the institution of marriage and are so reassuring that they will be fantastic scoring points to make the ladies audience love—nay adore—the film. The refusals, of the husband first and the wife later, come at moments when one actually expects that they would sign the divorce papers. The shock value coupled with the heart-warming feeling one experiences after these two scenes are enough to bowl the ladies audience over and make them patronise this film in a very big way” (Nahta 1996).

Trying to draw women into theaters was viewed as a desirable challenge by filmmakers, since women were seen as more likely to view films with their families. Komal Nahta stated that films that have been “long runners” were those with “good emotions”
¹⁵
and music, “Because good emotions means ladies will come in, and ladies [coming] in means [that] they will [bring] their children along and their husbands along. Then, you know, it becomes like a whole cycle” (Nahta, interview, September 1996). What is apparent from the review—and from the way that the viewing practices of women are characterized—is that the “ladies audience” essentially refers to married women. From the point of view of filmmakers, unmarried women do not exist as a separate demographic group, and—even if thought about—would get subsumed into other large categories, such as “student,” “youth,” or “family.”

“Family audience” is a significant audience category, which is seen as having similar tastes to the ladies audience, predicated primarily on viewing practices, but not requiring heroine-oriented films. The key characteristic for a film to appeal to family audiences is cross-generational propriety: everyone should be able to watch the film together, which means there should be nothing in the content or treatment that makes it un
comfortable or embarrassing for parents, children, siblings, or other kin to view as a group. It is in this respect that Kumar was concerned about driving away potential viewers with his trailer. Films suitable for family viewing are also described as “wholesome” or “vegetarian,” which denotes their sanitized language and lack of highly suggestive song sequences, bawdy humor, or graphic violence. Nester D’Souza, the manager of the erstwhile Metro Cinema—which turned into a multiplex in 2006—one of the oldest theaters in Bombay, explained the importance of the family audience for his business and how he tried to cater to that segment:

In D’Souza’s statements, it is clear that the family audience refers to a mode of viewing rather than a specific genre of films. His remarks about the balcony and stalls are a reference to the differential pricing of tickets and the spatialization of class hierarchy in the single-screen movie theater.

The ladies, family, Overseas Territory, and (sometimes) city categories make up the larger audience category known as the “classes,” whose other is the “masses.” The masses-classes binary has been the dominant interpretive framework—by filmmakers, the state, the press, scholars, and social elites—for discussing and understanding audiences in India. The elaboration of this framework is rife with assumptions about class and taste, where taste is most notably expressed as distaste for certain aesthetic conventions, narrative styles, and thematic concerns (Bourdieu 1984). Until the early 2000s, the masses were regarded as the primary audience for Hindi cinema. Members of the industry define the masses vaguely in terms of occupation—domestic workers, manual laborers, rickshaw drivers, taxi drivers, factory workers—implicitly gendering them as exclusively male and characterizing them as either illiterate or having had very little formal education. Other terms for the masses are “laboring classes” or “the common man” in English, or “
janta
” (people)
in Hindi. Writer/director Rumi Jaffery, who had written many films for David Dhawan—a director frequently characterized by the film press as “having his finger on the pulse of the masses”—described the theatrical audience for Hindi cinema as comprised primarily of the masses; he asserted the centrality of their viewership for the commercial health of the industry: “The upper class, they watch films at home on video. Our films run because of the masses—the rickshaw-
wallahs
,
tanga-wallahs
[horse-carriage drivers], labor classes. They are our providers. We have to be aware of their tastes, what they want; poor guys, they work so hard all day: they earn 500 rupees and spend 50 of it to see a film, so he should get his money’s worth” (Jaffery, interview, November 1996).

When I asked Jaffery how he comes to learn their tastes, he said that it was difficult and that he tried to talk to people he encountered during the course of his daily routine, such as rickshaw drivers or domestic workers. I noticed that filmmakers frequently used their own personal domestic workers and staff as proxies for the
mass audience
during the collaborative scripting sessions referred to as “story sittings.”
¹⁷
For example, one evening I had accompanied Tarun Kumar to a producer’s home for a story sitting where Kumar, three writers, and the producer were hashing out the details of a screenplay. The film was a sort of madcap adventure comedy, with multiple protagonists, subplots, and plot twists, and at one point in the discussion Kumar said, “We might understand it, but will Asif understand it?” referring to the domestic worker who had just entered the room to serve everyone tea. “After all, he is the one who goes to the cinema to see the film. We’ll watch it on cable at home.” Before the others could answer, Kumar chortled, “I wonder what Aseem-bhai, my driver, would think? Poor guy, he got pretty confused by my last film!”

Jaffery’s claim about the need for working-class audiences to get the most value for their money was a very common refrain in filmmakers’ discussions of the masses and their filmic choices. Such value was defined through the idea of entertainment, which filmmakers characterized mainly in terms of an escape from the harsh realities of everyday life. Citing film viewing as the cheapest and only source of entertainment for the masses, producer/director Aditya Chopra attributed poverty as the reason for the masses’ purported penchant for escapism: “Here, the common man—his ultimate dream is an escapism, is to watch films. He goes for three hours; he sees a world which he probably will never get, or he’ll see women whom he’ll never meet, or he’ll see stuff where he’s never going to go to, and for him that’s it. That’s his ultimate, because you’re dealing to a country of have-nots” (Aditya Chopra, interview, April
1996). One of the most cited elements of escapism are the song and dance sequences, which frequently take place in sylvan locales both in India and abroad. Producer Mukesh Bhatt explained the penchant for foreign locations that became the norm for song sequences from the mid-1990s: “Basically, we are selling dreams. We are making them feel that they are doing something, which they, in normal life, would not be able to do. That’s why we go to these beautiful places, like Switzerland, and all that. It’s the common man’s dream. He can never go to Switzerland, Paris, or Australia. So when he sees the songs in which we show it, with that 20 rupees he’s taken his wife and children to Australia. He’s shown them the Alps” (Mukesh Bhatt, interview, October 1996). Other elements of escapist entertainment, according to filmmakers, include high doses of action, slapstick humor, bombastic dialogues, titillation, and a fast narrative pace. This notion of film-viewing as “escape” is a very common characterization and criticism of popular cinema in India, expressed across a variety of domains—state, journalistic, intellectual, and in everyday parlance among people who comprise the “classes” side of the masses-classes binary.

The classes are defined as the exact opposite of the masses: educated men and women; usually English-speaking; sophisticated; preferring realism; able to handle a slower-paced film; open to innovation in subject matter; and more likely to view films in the comfort of their homes. Screenwriter Anjum Rajabali felt that this segment of the audience was the most underserved by the Hindi film industry. “I feel, in fact, the neglected segment, ironically, of this country is the most privileged segment. . . in terms of entertainment. There’s nothing being made in this country which fulfills their wishes—the educated, so-called, Englishspeaking, urban-based audience” (Rajabali, interview, September 1996). Rajabali surmised that elite audiences therefore patronized Hollywood films and American television out of a lack of Indian options. He conceded that certain films drew such viewers sporadically, “I mean Hindi films? They try to go—
Rangeela-wangeela
,
thoda sa jazz-wazz dedo
[show some style and slickness], they go and sort of see that, but they have been a neglected lot, not the man from Matunga” (Rajabali, interview, September 1996). The “man from Matunga”
¹⁸
was Rajabali’s shorthand reference to how producers and distributors always criticized him for not thinking more explicitly about audiences in terms of the industry’s matrix of region and class—taking into account tastes of the interiors and the masses—when writing his scripts.

While the mechanism for ascertaining overall audience choice was
commercial outcome, the means by which filmmakers gauged specific tastes was centered upon the class-based spatial hierarchies present inside the single-screen movie theater. Producer/director Subhash Ghai’s response to my question about how he kept in touch with audience preferences relied on this spatialization of class hierarchy. “We come to know the box-office collections. You’ve got balcony, stall, upper stall.
Kahi baar
[Sometimes] the balcony is always full and [the] stall is always empty. It means the masses have not understood; the movie is running on the strength of the classes. . . Sometimes the stall is full and balcony is empty, so you come to know the trend—who is appreciating, which class? Ladies? Students? Masses or classes? [The] masses. . . feel very offended by the class production, so somewhere we have to bring optimum balance between the class movie and the mass movie” (Ghai, interview, 9 December 1996). As evident in Ghai’s statements, Tarun Kumar’s comments in the opening anecdote, and the discussions in chapter two about
Lamhe
, the tastes of these sweeping categories are usually represented in opposition— the masses versus the classes. Since the masses were thought to constitute the bulk of the theater-going audience, trade reviews of films were always assessing whether a film was “too classy”—lacking elements that would make a film popular among these broad categories of viewers and hence impede commercial success, which is what Ghai was referring to in his own comments. For example,
Film Information
’s review of Ghai’s 1999 film
Taal
(Rhythm) pronounced, “On the whole,
Taal
is high— very high—on gloss, glamour, grandeur, style, music, but is low on racy screenplay, pacy drama, and mass-appealing ingredients. . . It will appeal to the gentry audience more than the masses and will, therefore, do well in A-class centres. Considering its high price on the one hand and city appeal on the other, it can hope to fetch returns only in Bombay, Maharashtra, Delhi (not U.P.), South, and Overseas. Business in Bengal, Bihar, and Rajasthan in particular and in small centres in general will be dull” (Nahta 1999).

Further conversations with filmmakers revealed how masses-classes was not a neutral binary, but one imbued with value judgments. Such judgment was apparent in Ghai’s discussion of the distinction between comedy and humor, whereby he associated the former with the masses and the latter with the classes. “Humor [differs from] comedy. The gentry like humor, not cheap comedy. [A] man falling, [or a] girl falling on banana and her skirts fall out, those kinds of things, masses may like it but these people do not like it.” In his remarks, Ghai wielded comedy as a pejorative term, using words like “vulgar,” “loud,” and “caricature” as de
scriptors, while humor was described in terms of witty repartee between the protagonists in a film. Ghai was particularly critical of the inclusion of a comic figure or a separate comedy track running parallel to the main narrative, which was a common feature in many mainstream Hindi films from the 1950s to the 1990s. Positioning himself as a filmmaker with taste and distinction, Ghai ended his remarks with, “We don’t need those buffoons, but there are many directors who believe the buffoon has to be there for those buffoon audiences” (Ghai, interview, 9 December 1996).