Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (52 page)

Peepli Live
presents a satirical perspective on the Indian news media, government bureaucracy, and electoral politics; it comments upon the growing social and economic inequality between urban and rural India. The narrative centers around two brothers who are poor farmers, and the media and political circus triggered by the younger brother’s decision to commit suicide, so that his family can collect government-mandated compensation to pay back the mortgage on their ancestral land and save it from being seized by the bank.
Love Sex aur Dhokha
(LSD) is a digital film that contains three loosely related vignettes within it, each pertaining to one of the topics in the title, and each representing a different mode of seeing associated with specific technologies: the highly mobile video camera, the stationary surveillance camera, and the restricted view of the hidden camera. Inspired by a variety of salacious and brutal news stories—the casting couch scandal in Bollywood; clips of secretly recorded sex circulating on cell phones and the Internet; the murders of young couples who attempted to marry across the social divisions of caste, class, or religion—LSD paints a very dark portrait of kinship and
gender relations in urban North India. Like
Peepli Live
, it presents a jaundiced view of the broadcast media, specifically television, in India.

While industry members attributed LSD’s success to the titillating appeal of its title and topic, its low budget and low price to distributors played an important factor in enabling distributors to double their investment.
Peepli Live
’s success, on the other hand, was attributed overwhelmingly to the marketing savvy of its producer, superstar Aamir Khan. Khan seemed to spare no effort to promote the film, which resulted in a high amount of visibility and media attention paid to the film. During a roundtable discussion titled “New Directions in South Asian Cinema,” held in conjunction with the Engendered I-View Film Festival in New York City in September 2010, the overall consensus among the Indian filmmakers present was that
Peepli Live
’s success in the overseas market, which in their view was more conservative and star-struck in its film-viewing preferences, was solely due to Aamir Khan’s association with the film. According to producer/director/composer Vishal Bharadwaj, “For the NRI, overseas market, if you didn’t have Aamir Khan promoting it, it wouldn’t have done that kind of business.”

Although
Peepli Live
disrupted some of the film industry’s dominant production and audience fictions—namely that films set in, or about, rural India were not viable at the box-office, because urban elite audiences, the “classes,” were not interested in rural issues and poorer audiences, the “masses,” would not see films that resembled too closely their harsh lives—its success did not necessarily revise these fictions. Instead, the film’s commercial performance was explained through the prominent production and audience fictions that a male star and a strong story are necessary for box-office success. Through my many years of research, the star-centric nature of the Hindi film industry has not changed; in fact, even the leading male stars have not changed. When I began my research in 1996, the top box-office draws were Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, and Salman Khan, and in 2011, these three actors continue to be the most popular, successful, and powerful stars in the industry.

Boundary-work is another feature of the industry’s production culture that has remained persistent, especially in relation to discussions of work culture. Abhishek Chaubey, an upcoming director whose first film
Ishqiya
(Romantic, 2010) was critically acclaimed but not commercially successful, drew a distinction between the “old Bollywood” and the “new Bollywood” when discussing his observations of the industry’s working style and his own filmmaking practice during our interview in New York, where he had arrived to screen
Ishqiya
as part of the I-View Film Fes
tival. “Old” and “new” were not temporal boundaries in Chaubey’s remarks, but evaluative ones, where the new signified greater organization, professionalism, and rationality in the production process. Stating that he spoke for “the 50 percent of Bollywood that functioned in the new manner,” Chaubey argued that the changing social and class backgrounds of filmmakers also played a role in constituting the new Bollywood. He pointed to his own middle-class background, college degree, and parents’ professional and occupational backgrounds—a bank manager and a schoolteacher—as providing him with the cultural capital to navigate the industry. Describing his first forays into the film industry around 2000, Chaubey said, “Around the time I came, before that, a boy like me from a service background,
pade-likhe log
[educated folk] hardly came into the industry; when I come in—I’m a English lit student—I could have been an MBA. Compared to the guys who came in say, ’88, who were from. . . different economic strata, we had it slightly easier because we were more worldly aware, had more education. . . It is because of people like us that the industry is also seeing a change—we, from our disparate backgrounds, with education, and a lot of self-respect: because you can’t take us for a ride” (Chaubey, interview, September 2010). Although Chaubey presented himself and his peers as atypical, his statements fit into a broader discourse—discussed in this book and dating back to the 1930s—that links cinematic quality with the class position of its producers.

Finally, the desire for global recognition and distinction continues with each subsequent generation of Hindi filmmakers. However, the ground against which this desire is framed appears to have shifted from wanting to showcase Indian exceptionalism (Aditya Chopra in 1996) to demonstrating one’s ability to transcend the nation-bound categories of global distribution and exhibition.
¹⁶
This is apparent in Abhishek Chaubey’s closing thoughts during our interview, “I think in this generation of filmmakers, there is an aspiration to reach out, to be as well known as— not the Indian Scorsese—but
the
Scorsese. I think the new generation of filmmakers—we consider ourselves as not only people from India, but also people of the world. We’d want our films to be seen and appreciated everywhere” (Chaubey, interview, September 2010). This desire for global circulation and recognition will continue to shape and transform Hindi filmmaking in the years to come.

1
. For the millions of fans of Hindi cinema around the world, Khan requires no introduction. The first time I met him in 1996, his position as a bankable star had been established by four solid box-office successes between 1993 and 1995:
Baazigar
,
Darr
,
Karan Arjun
, and
Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge
.

2
. Although Bombay was officially renamed its Marathi equivalent “Mumbai” in 1995, and the print and broadcast media use the new name, the city is still referred to by its former name in daily parlance by the vast majority of Indians, especially filmmakers. The name change was effected by the Shiv Sena—a Hindu and Marathi chauvinist political party—soon after they came to power in Maharashtra in 1995, as an attempt to alter the diverse and cosmopolitan character of the city. My choice to use “Bombay” rather than “Mumbai” throughout the book reflects common usage, but is also driven by a distaste for the nativist politics represented by the name change and the continuing efforts to enforce the change, which experienced a resurgence in 2009, when an even more extreme offshoot, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (mns) went on the rampage against public figures using Bombay rather than Mumbai. The mns disrupted the screenings of the Hindi film
Wake Up Sid
in October 2009 because the characters referred to the city as Bombay rather than Mumbai. Some theaters even canceled screenings of the film for fear of damage to their property. The film’s producer, Karan Johar, had to issue an apology and promise to change those portions of the audio. For more about the cultural politics of the naming of Bombay/Mumbai see Ganti (1998) and Hansen (2001).

3
. In his biography,
King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of
Indian Cinema
(Chopra 2007), commissioned and published by Warner Books, the author hails him as the new face and persona of a new type of Hindi cinema. The book was positively reviewed in the
New York Times Book Review
, in which the reviewer pointed out that the larger significance of the book was that “a major American publishing house is bringing out a biography of a major foreign star, largely unknown in the United States” (Taylor 2007).

4
. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led coalition government, from 1999 to 2004, had an important role to play in promoting an image of India as an emerging economic power with its “India Shining” advertising campaign prior to the 2004 general elections. At the center of this representational transformation was the Bric Report, prepared by Goldman Sachs in 2003, which predicted that by 2050, India, along with Brazil, Russia, and China, will challenge the G7 and U.S. econo- mies, because of the sheer market size and dynamism of its economy. For more, see Vicziany (2005).

5
. Infra dig is a colloquial abbreviation of the Latin phrase
infra dignitatem
, which means “beneath one’s dignity.” The online edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary
states that the source of the expression is obscure, but dates its usage in English to the mid-nineteenth century. Although not commonly used in American English, the phrase is quite prevalent in the Indian English-language press when discussing popular cinema.

6
. As the term “producer” is a specific occupational category within the film industry, to avoid confusion, I use the term “filmmaker” broadly to refer to members of the industry—producers, directors, actors, writers, distributors—who possess the power to make creative or financial decisions.

7
. While a moment of prior liberalization occurred under Rajiv Gandhi in the mid-1980s, in the popular press, 1991 has been represented as a much more watershed moment, probably because it was more perceptible, mainly because of the appearance of satellite television.

8
. See Ganti (1994) for a discussion of the dominant themes in the discourse about Hindi cinema. Indian novelist Khushwant Singh best encapsulates the derision in an article appearing in the
New York Times Magazine
in 1976, “India’s movie industry makes the worst films in the world—and the Indians love them” (Singh 1976: 42). This sentiment was not unique to Hindi cinema, but also a feature of the discourse surrounding Tamil cinema discussed by Dickey (1993).

9
.
Hindi filmmakers
are increasingly circulating in the Euro-American academy, either as invited speakers—Aamir Khan at Cambridge in 2005; Karan Johar at nyu and Harvard in 2007; Rohan Sippy at Princeton in 2005—or as recipients of honorary degrees: Yash Chopra from the School of Oriental and African Studies, England, in 2010; Shah Rukh Khan from the University of Berfordshire, England, in 2009; Akshay Kumar from the University of Windsor, Canada, in 2008; Amitabh Bachchan from De Montfort University, England, in 2006. Premier cultural institutions such as Paris’s Pompidou Center (“Did You Say ‘Bollywood’? A Retrospective of Popular Indian Cinema” in 2004), London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (Cinema India: The Art of Bollywood in 2002) and New York’s Lincoln Center (Amitabh Bachchan: The Biggest Film Star in the World in 2005) have all had programming featuring popular Hindi cinema. Since the premiere of
Devdas
at Cannes in 2002, many high-profile mainstream Hindi films have premiered at international festivals:
Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna
at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2006;
Om Shanti Om
at the Venice Film Festival in 2007;
My Name Is
Khan
at the Berlin Film Festival in 2009.

10
. See Binford 1983, 1987, 1989; Das Gupta 1991; Jain 1991; Khanna and Dutt 1992; Nandy 1981, 1987; Prasad 1998; Saari 1985; Thomas 1985, 1995; Valicha 1988.

11
. While earlier films went to some effort to depict how the protagonist fell into a life of crime, usually arising out of dire circumstances and sheer desperation—for example,
Awara
[Vagabond] (1951),
Gunga Jumna
(1961),
Deewar
[Wall] (1975)— contemporary films are more matter-of-fact and do not offer elaborate moral justifications or rationalizations—for example,
Satya
[Truth] (1998),
Company
(2002),
Kaminey
[Scoundrels] (2009). Whereas in older films, characters turned to a life of crime for basic survival when all other avenues of employment were exhausted, films from the late 1990s onward represent organized crime as a pragmatic employment choice for poor and working-class men.

12
. Kapur and Pendakur (2007) makes a similar point about how the city of Bombay has disappeared from Hindi films.

13
. Wartime shortages in basic goods and commodities led to a thriving black market, and by 1944 war profiteers increasingly laundered their illegal earnings by investing in film production. As a result, budgets skyrocketed, as did stars’ salaries, which studios were unable to match, and gradually the studios went out of business by the mid-to late 1950s.

14
. Sometimes what remained was the spatial and physical infrastructure, which continued to be utilized by independent producers. Examples include Filmistan Studios, located in Goregaon, and Filmalaya, located in Andheri.

15
. Producer/director Mehboob Khan established Mehboob Studios in Bandra; actor/ director/producer Raj Kapoor established R. K. Studios in Chembur; actor/director/ producer V. Shantaram established Rajkamal Kala Mandir in Parel; and producer/ director Kamal Amrohi established Kamalistan in Andheri.

16
. Kajri Jain, in her work on the calendar art industry (2007), encountered similar sentiments regarding the “masses.”

17
. Even though the Indian media dates the multiplex era to 1997, when the first one was built in Delhi—many years passed before others were built, and the first one in Bombay was not built until 2001. Multiplexes have differentiated rates of admission but this is not based on any implicit sociological reasoning like the single-screens, where the cheapest seats enabled film viewing to become a mass phenomenon. The multiplex’s differentiated ticket prices are instead based on an economistic logic of audience demand, where prices can vary based on film, time of day, day of week, and proximity to the initial release date. I discuss multiplexes in greater detail in chapters one, two, and eight.

18
. The ban’s impact was quite far-reaching. For example, the Eagle Theater, which showed Hindi films in Jackson Heights, a neighborhood with a large number of South Asian businesses located in the borough of Queens in New York City, had to shut down during that period.

19
. See Allor 1996; Anderson 1996; Ang 1991; Bennett 1996; Blumler 1996; Ohmann 1996; Traube 1996.

20
. There appear to be multiple origin stories of how this term got coined. Madhav Prasad (2003) states that the neologism “Tollywood,” to refer to Calcutta’s film production center—located in its suburb of Tollygunge—was first coined by an American sound engineer working in Calcutta in 1932. He points out that the Bengali film industry was nicknamed “Tollywood” by a specific English-language magazine in Calcutta and speculates that could be the etymology of “Bollywood.” The
Oxford English Dictionary
cites the first attestation of the term in British mystery writer H. R. F. Keating’s 1976 novel,
Filmi Filmi, Inspector Ghote
. Keating wrote a series of novels set in Bombay featuring an Indian detective, Inspector Ghote. In the above-mentioned novel, Ghote has to investigate the murder of a famous Hindi film actor. The way “Bollywood” appears in the novel references my more common understanding of the origin of the term: that it was coined by the English-language film magazines and fanzines like
Stardust
to refer to the Hindi film world in a tongue-in-cheek manner. For example, in the early part of the novel, Ghote interviews one of Bombay’s prominent gossip columnists, and she uses the term “Bollywood.” When Ghote professes ignorance of this term, she replies, “‘Do you not read at all Inspector?’ She demanded. ‘The Bombay film set-up is called Bollywood in simply every film magazine’ ” (Keating 1976: 45).

21
. For example, see the Press Trust of India article, “Calling Us
Bollywood
Is Derogatory.”

22
. This informal experiment was done on July 11, 2009. The exact figures for Amazon .com: Bollywood, 4,030 results; Indian cinema, 1,616; Hindi cinema, 486; Bombay film industry, 265; Hindi film industry, 186. The exact figures for Google: Bollywood, (more than) 62,000,000 results; Indian cinema, 15,300,000; Hindi cinema, 3,380,000; Bombay film industry, 15,200,000; Hindi film industry, 17,300,000.

23
. Other examples of the increasing legibility of the category within the United States include the growing popularity of “Bollywood workout” dvds and dance classes at gyms across the country, cited by the American Council on Exercise as a major growth area for gyms and dance studios. The Associated Press carried a story on February 19, 2009, “Bollywood-style dance classes drawing big crowds,” which was syndicated in a number of U.S. newspapers, detailing this newest trend in exercise (Wyatt 2009). More unusual are the Bollywood contests sponsored by insurance companies like State Farm and Esurance in 2009. The March 2010 issue of
Time-Out Kids
nyc (Tidwell 2010) listed the top Bollywood dance classes in New York City.

24
. Examples of this tendency include the Independent Film Channel’s website’s “Bollywood Starter Kit” labeling the first feature film made in India in 1913 as a “Bollywood” film. Vasudevan (2008) calls to task certain U.K.-based scholars for their uncritical and anachronistic deployment of the term.

25
. Although filmmaking in India is a private enterprise, in order to have a theatrical release, films have to be cleared and rated by the state’s
Central Board of Film Certification
, more commonly referred to as the Censor Board, which was a practice initiated by the British in 1918 to protect the image of the colonizer, where perceived threats to the reputation of white women and any allusion to self-governance, the Indian nationalist movement, or Indian independence were heavily censored by the colonial authorities.

26
. See Ganti (2002) for a discussion of how Hindi filmmakers adapt Hollywood films—a process referred to as “Indianization.”

27
. Members of the Indian diaspora settled in Africa, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific—locations that index colonial migrations of peoples from the subcontinent— are usually referred to as pios—person of Indian origin. nri is a legal status defined by the Indian state under the Foreign Exchange Management Act, 1999 and also applies to Indian citizens living outside of India.

28
. Bachchan comes from a social background marked by a high degree of cultural and symbolic capital. His father, Harivanshrai Bachchan, was a highly respected and noted Hindi poet. After graduating from college with a bachelor of science degree, Bachchan took up a job as a manager in a shipping firm in Calcutta. Bachchan was close friends with the late former prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi.

29
. See Deshpande 2003; Fernandes 2006; Mazzarella 2003; Oza 2006; Wyatt 2005.

30
. See Assayag and Fuller 2006; Derne 2008; Fernandes 2006; Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase 2009; Lukose 2009; Sharma 2008.

31
. See Chakravarty 1993; Pendakur 1989; Rajadhyaksha 1992; Vasudevan 1990.

32
. See Hjort and Petrie (2007) and Miller et al. (2001) for a representation, discussion, and critique of such narratives.

33
. The more apt comparison would have been to a start-up company financed with venture capital.

34
. For example, in a special edition of the American news program
Nightline
, on
January 14, 2005, titled “Bollywood 101,”
Time
magazine’s film critic Richard Corliss asserts, “It’s best to think of Bollywood films now and forever as Hollywood films of the ’30s and ’40s” (ABC NEWS 2005).

35
. See Binford 1983, 1987; Das Gupta 1981; Rangoonwalla 1983; Sarkar 1975; Vasudev 1986; Vasudev and Lenglet 1983.