Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (45 page)

These discussions, about box-office failures and what films should not be made, illustrate a variety of issues about the Hindi film industry. They reveal how talking about the commercial prospects of a film, or analyzing the commercial performance of a film, is the primary method for transmitting knowledge about audiences and socializing novices into dominant ideologies about audience subjectivities, behavior, tastes, and desires circulating within the industry. Screenwriter Anjum Rajabali, who had just started his career a few years prior to my initial fieldwork, related his frustration with how the discussion about commercial outcome became received knowledge within the industry. He brought up
Lamhe
, as an example to illustrate what he felt was the superficial manner in which industry members interpreted commercial outcome:

Rajabali was unusual among his peers for his desire to probe deeper into the issue of audience response.
²⁷
The axiom that is still left unquestioned, however, is that box-office outcome signifies an audience mandate or ver
dict over a film, illustrating how this understanding of commercial outcome operates as “doxa” (Bourdieu 1977)—that which is completely naturalized and taken for granted—within the film industry. The categories of hit and flop are an outcome of disrupted expectations: high expectations often result in flops, while low expectations often result in hits. In the case of
Lamhe
, distributors would have bought it at a very high price since producer/director Yash Chopra’s previous film,
Chandni
, was declared a blockbuster two years earlier. Given that
Lamhe
had the same actress and music team as the previous film, as well as one of the bankable actors of the time, expectations were high.

As Rajabali recounted his colleagues’ warnings about
Lamhe
, such discussions also demonstrate how commercial outcome operates on filmmakers as a disciplinary mechanism—as a way of curbing any flights of fancy and bringing them back to the “reality,” or in Mehboob Khan’s term, the “roots” of their audiences. The fact that the producer of
Lajwanti
was confident about its commercial prospects reveals the unpredictability and uncertainty that is at the heart of film production. Not only do the anecdotes about the various films make explicit how commercial outcome is interpreted as a direct, unmediated reflection of social reality, it also demonstrates how for filmmakers commercial outcome
produces
the very social reality of their audiences.

I contend that a significant feature of the film industry’s discourse about audiences and box-office outcome is an “erasure of the economic” when interpreting commercial outcome. By economic, I am not referring to Sachin Bhaumick’s use of poverty as an explanation for the lack of identification with certain themes. What I mean is the absence of attention to exhibition conditions (decrepit cinemas, not enough cinemas), regional economic variation, state taxation, diverse rates of admission, and the role of distributors’ pricing decisions. Economic discourses do not possess the same affective or explanatory power as culturalist discourses, which are flexible enough to continuously generate explanations and offer ways of making sense of the unpredictability intrinsic to the film industry’s
production culture
.

This chapter elaborated Hindi filmmakers’ representations of their audiences, including the variety of ways that filmmakers imagined their audiences constraining their filmmaking practice. What is clear is that when I began my research in 1996, filmmakers were highly aware that groups
designated as “the masses” comprised their primary viewing audience. The challenges posed by cultural diversity, morality, and social conditions were not applicable to segments of the audience identified as “the classes.” Despite the essentialism, criticism, and paternalism expressed toward the masses, Hindi filmmakers sought to make films largely with these audiences in mind. In filmmakers’ discussions about the significance of universal appeal, we see a concern for trying either to bridge or transcend the divisions that separate the various audience categories. Statements about the necessity of finding the “essence of being Indian” (Aditya Chopra) reveal how the discourse about super or universal hits is imbricated with the discourse of the nation as an Andersonian imagined community (Anderson 1983). Although the audience is divided into binary oppositions of classes/masses and city/interior, producers, in their quest for a “super-hit” picture, try to encode into their films what they see as some shared cultural norms, common to everyone in India. That quest for the super-hit is thus a quest for some shared identity, which expresses itself periodically through the phenomenon of the “universal hit.”

In the next chapter, I describe how by the turn of the millennium, the variegated business of films in different distribution territories was interpreted by trade analysts as a sign of the increasing assertion of discrete taste cultures and attendant difficulty of making a universal hit. Ideas about the importance of bridging divides, universal hits, and the masses as the primary audience for cinema were all radically transformed after 2000. Events that had been lauded as necessary and important for the health of the film industry, such as industry status, corporatization, and the advent of the multiplex, have all played an important role in changing the Hindi film industry’s relationship to its audiences.

In January 2006, I met Tarun Kumar while he was vacationing in New York City. During dinner, I asked him about the changes that had taken place in filmmaking over the last five years. His immediate response was that audiences had changed drastically. The incommensurability of audience taste that had seemed so inherent and vexing to him seemed to have been resolved: “It’s now the gentry—the people with cars—who come to see movies.” Kumar elaborated that, whereas in the past such people were only a small proportion of the film-going audience, with the entry of multiplexes over the last couple of years, the “gentry” had become the main audience for Hindi cinema: “Films are now either being made for masses and classes, or only for the classes. Films were earlier made for either the masses and the classes, or if your subject did not go that way then you would say, let’s stick with the masses, but now it’s gone the other way around.”

Kumar’s statements exemplify one of the main changes characterizing the post-millennium Hindi film industry. His trajectory as a filmmaker who did not want to disappoint the servants, to now only caring about the gentry audience, represents a momentous departure from how Hindi filmmakers had articulated their relationship to audiences when I first began my fieldwork. It is in the realm of
audience imaginaries
that the gentrification of the Hindi film industry is most pronounced. The nature of this shift is most perceptible in the changing significance accorded, within the
industry, to the category of commercial success known as the “universal hit,” which refers to a film that is understood to have had broad audience appeal, based on its uniform box-office performance throughout India.

Although in 1996 filmmakers had complained about the difficulties of attaining a universal hit, they nevertheless strived to create films of broad appeal. A decade later, the discourse within the industry about universal hits had changed from being regarded as indispensable to the economic well-being of the industry to a fortuitous happenstance that cannot be planned. Although the proportion of films being designated a universal hit has not altered over the course of my research—every year since 1995 there have been one or two films that have been wildly successful from the perspective of distributors—filmmakers’ representations of this category have changed. In this chapter, I detail the transformations in attitudes about the necessity and significance of universal hits, situating these changes in the shifting structures of production, distribution, and exhibition characterizing Hindi filmmaking since 2000. The changing significance of this category indexes particular moments in the history of capital formation and political economy within the film industry. The structural changes taking place in the film industry introduced in chapter seven and the growing significance of multiplex theaters, which I discuss in this chapter, have produced new definitions of success that enable filmmakers to restrict their imagined audience, yet still earn capital— both financial and symbolic—within the industry. I use the phrase “imagined audience” to mark the distinction between filmmakers’ discursive constructions of the vast film-going public, and socially and historically located viewers who are infinitely more complex than filmmakers’ characterizations.

Although filmmakers offer a market-based argument for targeting a particular fraction of the (imagined) audience, changing audience imaginaries are as much about
symbolic capital
and cultural legitimacy as they are about simple profit. As the discussions surrounding coolness in chapter two demonstrated, the reputation and status of Hindi cinema and the film industry are integrally connected to the social status and class location of its audiences. Restricting one’s imagined audience to the middle and upper classes, referred to as the “gentry” or the “classes” by filmmakers, resolves the dilemmas of disdain and uncertainty arising from Hindi cinema’s longstanding identification with poor and working-class audiences. In fact, the shift from targeting mass to targeting niche audiences is celebrated by filmmakers, journalists, and economic analysts as a sign of the maturation and modernization of filmmaking within India.

The first part of this chapter describes the drastic transformation in audience imaginaries that I encountered between 1996 and 2000. This transformation is evident in who comprised the main audience for Hindi cinema. Central to these changes was the territorially divergent box-office outcome of films in conjunction with the growing significance of South Asian diasporic audiences, along with new sources of revenue for producers. The issue of widely heterogeneous audiences, with incommensurable tastes that has always been at the heart of Hindi filmmakers’ audience imaginaries—which filmmakers tried to transcend in the past—becomes a more entrenched division with the arrival of the multiplex movie theater. The second part of the chapter examines the impact that multiplexes have had on filmmakers’ relationships to their audiences and their ideas of commercial success. This chapter locates these reconfigured relationships within the structural reorganization of the film industry, revealing how the idea of the audience is not only implicated in the micro-practices of production, but also within the material properties of exhibition and the larger political economy of filmmaking.

The January 1, 2000, issue of
Film Information
opened with an editorial asking, “Is the Film Industry Y2K OK?” a reflection on the Hindi film industry’s performance in 1999, which pondered whether the film industry was ready for the new millennium. Two phenomena of the previous year—both of which centrally involved the question of audiences—were cited as portending trouble for the industry’s future: the absence of a universal hit, and the growing attention paid to the Overseas Territory. While the film
Hum Saath Saath Hain
(We Are All in This Together) was categorized by the trade journal as “the blockbuster of the year,” it was not deemed a universal hit, because its net earnings were not uniform throughout India. “Time was when, in 1977, there were not one or two, but three mega hits in a single year. Time is in 1999 when there’s no film qualifying for the title of ‘universal blockbuster’ ” (“Is the Film Industry” 2000). The other related trend, which the editorial characterized as “dangerous,” was making films primarily with the Overseas Territory in mind. This apprehension arose over the incidences of certain Hindi films becoming hits in the United States and the United Kingdom while earning much less, or even flopping, in India. Positing the difference between audiences abroad and those within India as that between style and sub
stance, the editorial asserted, “The films of such Overseas-conscious filmmakers are tops in style. While style is fine, it cannot be so at the cost of substance.” The editorial ended by exhorting filmmakers to work harder to make films that would be widely appealing to audiences across India and the world.

During fieldwork in Bombay in 2000, I perceived both of the abovementioned trends in my discussions with filmmakers, who characterized the main changes in filmmaking in terms of audience composition. Whereas earlier someone like Rahul Agrawal lamented that he and others like him only comprised a small percentage of the film-going audience, it appeared now that socially elite viewers comprised the majority audience for Hindi cinema. I was struck by the stark contrast in attitudes exhibited by the very same people whom I had observed and interviewed four years earlier. For example, screenwriter Anjum Rajabali, who had asserted in 1996 that educated, English-speaking, urban viewers were the most neglected segment of the Hindi film audience, told me in 2000 that no one was thinking about “front-benchers” or working-class
audiences
anymore in their filmmaking.

When I asked producer/director Subhash Ghai his sense of the main changes that had occurred in filmmaking between 1996 and 2000, he asserted that Hindi cinema had transformed from being a form that exhibited and appealed to “rural” sensibilities to one that was “urban and global.” This evocation of “the rural” was a new feature of filmmakers’ discourses about audiences, one that I had not observed in 1996. Throughout this chapter, however, readers will encounter the trope of “rural India” or “rural audiences” in filmmakers’ statements, despite the fact that cinema-going is overwhelmingly an urban phenomenon in India. Akin to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s discussion of the “peasant” as an overdetermined signifier of all that was not modern or bourgeois in the nationalist historiography of India (2000: 11), “the rural” in filmmakers’ discourses refers less to some sociological reality than as a trope to signify social worlds and markets that are regarded by filmmakers as backward, traditional, outmoded, and unprofitable. Ghai defined rural sensibilities—a characterization that he used to describe the urban wealthy as well—as an indifference to production values and quality, with an overriding interest in melodrama, good music, and three-hour-long running times. He felt that contemporary Hindi films were being made about topics and characters befitting what he referred to as the “global Indian,” rather than the “local Indian.” One reason for these changes was satellite television, which functioned as a type of pedagogical device, training viewers to ap
preciate technical quality and inculcating media literacy. The other reason centered on the changes in the class composition of the theatrical audience:

Like filmmakers’ statements discussed in chapter two, in Ghai’s statements, we see how the class composition of the audience is explicitly linked to the improvement in cinema. Ghai’s reference to the prohibitive costs of film viewing demonstrates cinema’s significance in the new realms of elite leisure and consumption brought about by the postliberalized Indian economy. Additionally, Ghai’s categorizations and representations about audiences would have been based primarily on the commercial outcome of his past couple of films,
Pardes
(Foreign Land, 1997) and
Taal
, which did not enjoy the same pan-Indian success as his earlier films.

The other main change regarding audiences was the increased attention paid by filmmakers to the
Overseas Territory
. The distinct preferences of this territory—understood in terms of South Asian diasporic audiences in North America and the United Kingdom, rather than audiences in other parts of the world—became a source of discussion and debate after the sharply divergent commercial performance of Subhash Ghai’s
Taal
, which witnessed unprecedented success in markets outside of India, but did not fare even half as well in India. The film, released in August 1999, was hugely successful in the United States and United Kingdom, becoming the first Hindi film to debut at number 20 in
Variety’s
weekly listing of the 60 highest grossing films in the United States.
¹
When I met him in Bombay about a year after
Taal
’s release, I asked Ghai whether he had anticipated its success in the Overseas Territory. He replied, “I could never imagine that
Taal
will be such a big hit abroad.” Based on what he
felt was the overriding sensibility and tone of the film, Ghai made sense of its divergent commercial performance in terms of the classes/masses audience binary, whereby audiences overseas were wholly classes, while audiences in India were, by implication, wholly masses. Ghai explained that the film worked overseas, albeit unexpectedly, because it was a “very mature and sensible love story,” where the protagonists were open and frank in terms of their feelings and desires, rather than a clichéd narrative full of melodrama, violence, and stock villains, which, he implied, worked better in India. He stated that overseas audiences “appreciated the content and the technical finesse.”

With the ongoing devaluation of the Indian rupee in the late 1990s, the fact that audiences abroad bought tickets in dollars or pounds— revealing the very circumscribed notion of overseas markets on the part of Hindi filmmakers—meant that markets like the United States or United Kindgom were seen as disproportionately lucrative in comparison to India. Comparing ticket prices in India to those in the United States, Ghai pointed out, “The quantum of the audience may be less, but the quantum of the money is much more. Ten years back, only 10 percent of the revenue was from the overseas market, but now it is 60 percent” (Ghai, interview, October 2000). He went on to assert that a film’s maximum revenue potential in India—the money that a filmmaker could get for selling distribution rights—was only half of that of the Overseas Territory. When I asked Ghai whether the increased significance of overseas markets meant that audiences in India were being ignored, he denied it, stating that a filmmakers’ duty was to care about all audiences: “to make everyone happy from the class to the mass.” He immediately stated that it was difficult to live up to this obligation, however: “We make one section happy, the other gets annoyed, so there are two things which you look into. . . First, your own growth, because you can’t make everybody happy. Somewhere some section is left out, but at least you’re making some section happy and yourself happy. . . You should make a film [that] you believe in, and you want to enjoy, and you really feel that is your growth” (Ghai, interview, October 2000). Ghai’s statements reveal an ambivalence about trying to appeal to a broad spectrum of audiences—an evident tension latent in filmmakers’ discussions about the difficulty of creating universally appealing films. With the changing economics of filmmaking in the early 2000s, however, filmmakers were better able to justify how they resolved this ambivalence.

Although Ghai’s claims about the size and strength of the Overseas Territory were somewhat premature in 2000, his assertions about the
significance and value of the territory were hotly debated in the trade press. As many distributors in India were not even able to recover their investment in
Taal
, a week after its release
Film Information
ran an editorial titled “Overseas Market: Is Its Bigness Eclipsing Home Market?” It asserted, “The Overseas bug seems to have bitten some of the bigger film makers. Not just in terms of shooting their films abroad. But in making films which cater to the tastes of audiences in foreign lands more than to Indian audiences” (“Overseas Market” 1999). The dominant characterization of overseas audiences was that they were excessively star-struck, hesitant regarding unknown actors or directors, only interested in love stories, and terribly nostalgic for a sanitized and romanticized portrayal of Indian extended families and Hindu weddings, rituals, and festivals.
²
This profile of the diasporic audience, like all of the other profiles discussed thus far, was based on the commercial outcome of Hindi films in the United States and United Kingdom. Detailing the growing business of the Overseas Territory, the
Film Information
editorial went on to quote an unnamed filmmaker, “Our under-production monies mostly come from the Overseas distributor and the music company holding the audio rights. If we make a musical for the Overseas market, are we wrong?” and then criticized this claim by stating, “But it is also a fact that while these makers make films for the Overseas market, they don’t charge their Indian territorial distributors any less. Having thus taken heavy mgs from the all-India circuits, isn’t it necessary to also keep the interest of the all-India distributors in mind? Bihar is not what Overseas is, but if the Bihar distributor is paying through his nose, he expects the film to have something for his circuit too” (“Overseas Market” 1999). In addition to illustrating how distributors were in one sense the main audiences for film producers, the editorial’s main criticism leveled at the Overseas Territory was that it was skewing the prices at which producers sold their films’ rights to distributors. Within the minimum guarantee (mg)
system
, producers basically tried to raise the finance capital, and perhaps even make a pre-release profit for their filmmaking, by selling the distribution rights to their films. The prices for the various subterritories are set as a proportion referred to as ratios—based on the expectation of a film’s potential business—of the price of a major territory, usually Bombay. For example, the ratio of a subterritory like Bihar is set at 50 percent, so that if the rights for Bombay were sold for 10 million rupees, then Bihar would be sold for 5 million rupees. The editorial objected to the fact that the high prices some producers received from the Overseas Territory were being used to determine the prices of the other
territories. According to subterritory distributors, however, these prices were not commensurate with the limited business that such overseasoriented films generated in their territories.

Lala Damani, the distributor for the Bengal and Bihar subterritories, complained to me about how the existing ratios generally overestimated the potential business of most films in his territories. “What I found is that for the super-hit films, the Bihar territory’s ratio, which was supposed to be 50 percent, is hardly 20 percent” (Damani, interview, October 2000). Referring to the film
Fiza
, which he had just released, Damani estimated that the revenues earned in the Overseas Territory would be five to six times more than what he would earn in his own territory. Periodically throughout the interview he lamented how it had become very difficult for him to distribute films, since all of the big-budget high-profile films had flopped in his territories. Calling his territories “peculiar,” Damani recounted how films that were successful in Bombay and other major territories over the past three years usually turned out to be losing propositions for him. When I asked him why he thought such films failed in his territories, he responded with his own taxonomy of audience taste: “What I analyzed is that there [are now] two tastes in Hindi pictures: one is the producers making the pictures for the Overseas, Bombay City and its suburbs, Delhi city, and South—meaning Bangalore and Hyderabad. These territories have got one taste; the rest of India—it has got some other taste” (Damani, interview, 20 October 2000). Damani’s assertion of a bifurcation of taste, which lumped the major urban centers of India with overseas audiences, was a common refrain among members of the film industry in 2000, and continues to be a recurring trope in the industry’s discourse about its audiences.

Although Damani conjectured that the majority of India had cinematic tastes in opposition to the Metro and Overseas minority, most of the producers I spoke to isolated the state of Bihar (one of Damani’s subterritories) as the ultimate figure of backwardness, representing its tastes as aberrant. During my interview with producer Vashu Bhagnani, I asked him about Damani’s assertion that producers were only making films for urban and overseas audiences. He responded by affirming the opposition Damani posited between overseas audiences and those in the interiors, and then went on to describe what he felt was the problem with audiences in territories like Bihar. Referring to the fact that films of A-list producer/directors such as Yash Chopra and Subhash Ghai have successful runs all over the world, except in Bihar, Bhagnani claimed, “The audi
ences in those centers are not used to seeing such sophisticated films. They want a run-of-the-mill, clichéd film with violence, blood, and gore, which appeals to baser instincts.
³
This sort of film doesn’t work anywhere in the world, but we have places in Bihar where even today that stuff runs. Films that don’t run in the rest of world, run in Bihar” (Bhagnani, interview, October 2000). Having rendered Bihar as completely abnormal in terms of its tastes in cinema, Bhagnani explained how the territory did not generate any profits either. He surmised that the cinemagoing population comprised a small proportion of the highly populated state, and contrasted it with New York, where an even smaller proportion of Hindi film viewers generated much greater revenues for filmmakers: “We’re getting so much money from them, so why should we think about Bihar?” Confirming Damani’s claims, Bhagnani stated that producers did not think about territories like Bihar when making their films, for they saw no potential for growth in the interior, in contrast to the overseas and Bombay markets, which were both perceived as high-growth territories. Bhagnani summed up his disdain by stating as a matter of fact, “Good filmmaking is when you earn both money and respect. You earn neither from Bihar” (Bhagnani, interview, October 2000). This concern with respect is a key motivating factor for Hindi filmmaking practice.