Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (7 page)

It was really through these two clusters of contacts, which included their families and friends, that I made my way through the film industry. In fact, since I had never been to Bombay before, it was only because of these personal contacts that I was able to start meeting members of the film industry as soon as I arrived in Bombay. What I noticed right away was that social networks and kinship determined entry and access at every stage. Film journalists have frequently gone to high school with certain film stars, which is how they are afforded access, or why a particular journalist deals exclusively with a few stars. Being from Bombay, growing up in certain neighborhoods, going to the same schools, or being part of the same club affords an access to the film industry that is not readily available to most Indians from other parts of the country, unless they are part of the social and kin networks of the industry.

While having my initial contacts paved the way for my research, the key to my sustained and continued access to this world is my position as a scholar in the American academy. During my early fieldwork I was able to meet a large number of people because I was carrying out academic research and receiving a PhD for ostensibly studying about films and filmmakers. People always asked in a slightly incredulous tone: “You mean you can get a PhD in this in America? ” For a form of popular culture that had always been criticized as vulgar and low-brow by the English-language press and English-speaking elites, and for a social group whose dominant image was that of being uncouth, uneducated, and unintelligent, being the object of an academic researcher’s study granted the cultural legitimacy and symbolic capital craved by many filmmakers. Many people told me the reason they were granting me interviews was because I was writing a thesis—or a book—with academic rather than journalistic intent. I discuss the valorization of formal education in chapter three of
this book, which sheds further light on why a twenty-something graduate student in anthropology from New York was able to meet some of the biggest celebrities in India, even the world.

The final factor shaping my fieldwork, particularly regarding access, has to do with being a woman, but not necessarily in the conventional understandings about gender and fieldwork, where women have had more access to women’s worlds and men to male spaces and male worlds. The Hindi film industry is extremely patriarchal and male-dominated, and the sites and spaces of production until the early 2000s were highly masculine. Paradoxically, being a woman helped me gain access, as I piqued curiosity and interest, often standing out as being one of the few—and sometimes the only—women on a film set. My curiosity value was enhanced by the fact that I had traveled from New York to study the industry, rather than having tried to join it as an actress. Contrary to common understandings about the gendered dimensions of fieldwork, I actually had a harder time meeting women, specifically the actresses.

While being a woman in this predominantly male world also had its disadvantages, primarily regarding issues of sexual harassment, it afforded me a perspective on the gender politics of the film industry and the concerns around respectability, which are intrinsically gendered. For example, my own ease of mobility through the sites of production and sociality within the industry led to assumptions and speculations by some filmmakers and journalists about my intentions and personal scruples; the fact that I was a married graduate student from the United States did not solve, but actually exacerbated, these judgments. For example, a middle-aged screenwriter called me a “bad penny ” when he saw me at an actress’s birthday party, while a film journalist present at the same party informed me bluntly that I had come to Bombay to “party rather than do research. ” A photographer at whose studio I spent many days observing photo shoots for film magazines would continuously chide me, “You’re not really married; you’re just wearing that
mangalsutra
to fool us. ”
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When I expressed my frustration with such comments, attitudes, and unwelcome advances to a young director whom I had befriended, pointing out that I was always very modestly dressed and behaved, he said that no matter how I dressed or behaved, the fact that I had “left my husband for a year to do research of all places among film people ”

would lead to judgments about my “character. ” That my behavior did not conform to accepted conventions of how a respectable married woman should behave, sheds light on filmmakers’ own perceptions about the film industry as a morally hazardous space.

This book is comprised of nine chapters that detail the
production culture of
the Hindi film industry, focusing on filmmakers’ drive for social distinction and efforts to manage uncertainty, which have contributed to the gentrification of the film industry and Hindi cinema, enabling them to become “Bollywood. ” These chapters are organized along three main themes: the social status of films and filmmakers; the social and material practices of filmmaking; and the social, material, and discursive practices of audience-making. Chapters one through three establish the wider social and historical context of Hindi filmmaking, dealing explicitly with issues of cultural legitimacy and social respectability connected to the social world of Hindi filmmakers and the politico-historical field of film production. Chapters four through seven address the practices of film production and filmmakers’ efforts to make sense of and manage uncertainty. Chapters eight and nine examine the ways that audiences are imagined, discussed, and classified by the Hindi film industry as an essential manifestation of the sentiment of disdain and as an attempt to manage uncertainty.

Chapter one examines the Indian state’s attitudes and
policies toward
the cinematic medium and its relationship with the Hindi film industry over time, revealing the complicated place of cinema in the politics of national prestige, nation-building, and modernization. This chapter provides the context to understand Bombay filmmakers’ own self-positioning and quest for cultural legitimacy, which I discuss in subsequent chapters. It details the shift in official attitudes from a Nehruviandevelopmentalist paradigm, in which film was solely valued for its pedagogical and communicative potential, to the contemporary neoliberal juncture, where prolific filmmaking traditions are regarded as examples of native ingenuity and a source of economic growth.

By examining filmmakers’ narratives about the changes occurring in Hindi cinema and filmmaking from the mid-1990s, in chapter two I identify the sentiment of disdain that permeates the industry’s production culture. This chapter focuses on the discourse of progress, most frequently articulated as “coolness, ” demonstrating the connections between the sentiment of disdain, the category of coolness, the process of gentrification, and the construction of Hindi filmmakers’ subjectivities. I argue that filmmaking is an intersubjective enterprise, in which both
audiences and technology serve to mediate filmmakers’ presentation of their selves.

Chapter three extends an examination of the sentiment of disdain into the social world of filmmakers by focusing on the tremendous concern around the notion of respectability, which has been a longstanding anxiety, dating back to the early days of cinema in India. Here I describe how members of the film industry define, display, and perform respectability, relying primarily upon the trope of the “good family. ” By examining the gendered dimensions of behavior on film sets, filmmakers’ narratives about how they joined the industry, and their valorization of formal, higher education, this chapter reveals the normative power of a particular idea of middle-classness within the social world of the industry.

Chapter four delves into the everyday life of Hindi film production, but it is distinct from the other chapters in terms of style and presentation. It offers a “thick description ” of an average day on a
Hindi film set
and is written in a narrative style, incorporating dialogue and conversations. My goal with such a rendering is twofold: to make the quotidian life of film production palpable for readers, and to convey how one can discern valuable social and cultural insights through participant-observation on a film set. Although written in a narrative and descriptive style, this chapter is no less analytical than the others, for it is governed by specific decisions of what to include and exclude. Each character and conversation has been chosen and constructed to convey specific points about the structure and working style of the film industry. This detailed ethnographic sketch provides the context to understand chapters five through seven. Chapters five and six analyze in-depth key issues raised by the ethnographic material, demonstrating how disdain operates to forge difference. For example, chapter five details the decentralized and fragmented nature of filmmaking, along with the longstanding anxiety about the proliferation of producers in India, which leads Hindi filmmakers to indulge in a particular sort of boundary-work around the figure of the illegitimate producer, most commonly referred to as the “proposal-maker. ” Chapter five also focuses on the structure, organization, and social relations of the Hindi film industry, revealing the central roles played by distributors, social networks, kinship, and stars in the political economy and production practices of the industry.

Chapter six discusses the work culture of the Hindi film industry, which for decades has been the object of much disparagement, derisive
humor, and disdain. It details the informality, orality, flexibility, and thrift that are dominant characteristics of the industry’s work culture. Most of the attributes of the Hindi film industry’s improvisational and resourceful working style are not valued within filmmakers’ discourses and representations, however. Instead, the dominant tone is one of criticism, reproach, and disdain. In addition to describing these sentiments, the chapter discusses filmmakers’ efforts to assert their difference from a generic norm—ranging from discourses about behavior to a fetishization of technology.

Chapter seven examines the myriad ways that Hindi filmmakers try to manage the uncertainty endemic to the filmmaking process. Rituals such as
mahurats
, and a reliance on stars and songs, are specific practices that Hindi filmmakers undertake to reduce the risk of commercial failure.

Despite their best efforts, commercial success evades filmmakers most of the time, and this chapter discusses how filmmakers make sense of box-office failure by developing “production fictions, ” explanations that attempt to impose meaning and structure upon the unpredictability of box-office outcomes. A dominant production fiction has been that the industry’s commercial fortunes are intimately connected to its structure and work culture, with the implication that if those changed, the industry’s overall rates of success would improve; therefore, the chapter describes the structural changes referred to as “
corporatization
, ” which ensued in 2003, and the way they interact with the industry’s production fictions.

Chapter eight discusses how Hindi filmmakers imagine and classify their audiences: representations derived from culturalist interpretations of box-office outcome. The binary opposition of the “masses/classes ” has been the primary mode for filmmakers to make sense of the vastly diverse audiences for Hindi cinema. The underlying assumption behind this binary is that the masses and classes are fundamentally different, and their tastes and world-views are completely incommensurable. Despite this incommensurability, Hindi filmmakers, for much of the industry’s history, strove to make films that would appeal across these divides. Such films are referred to as “universal hits ” and this chapter relates the difficulties, articulated by filmmakers, of achieving that form of success.

Chapter nine analyzes the changing status of the universal hit within the Hindi film industry, with the growing significance of overseas markets and the advent of the multiplex movie theater. It describes the trans
formation in attitudes about the necessity of universal hits and locates them in the changing structures of production, distribution, and exhibition characterizing Hindi filmmaking since 2000. The altered status of the universal hit indexes a shift from the masses to the classes as the imagined target audience for Hindi cinema. This chapter thus reveals how the gentrification of the Hindi film industry is most apparent and visible in the realm of its audience imaginaries and exhibition practices. The valorization of socially elite audiences has less to do with profit and more to do with Hindi filmmakers’ concerns about cultural legitimacy and symbolic capital.

Given that Hindi films have highly visible public lives and that many of my informants are well-known celebrities, who are used to having their words and images circulate globally, I have not followed standard anthropological convention of assigning pseudonyms. Instead, I have adopted a mixed approach that is attuned to the specificities of my interactions with filmmakers. I use real names when quoting from formal, tape-recorded interviews, or when relaying observations from public events or public spaces; I use pseudonyms whenever I describe observations, interactions, and conversations where my informants had some reasonable expectation of privacy or when they would not be cognizant that the anthropologist amidst them would treat their statements as a form of data. In certain instances when quoting from a formal interview, I refrain from naming the speaker entirely when he or she has requested that particular statements not be attributed. In such cases, I have identified speakers by the occupational role they perform within the industry. Additionally, certain last names in the Hindi film industry, such as Chopra, Khan, Kapoor, and Khanna, are very common. Unless a kin relationship is indicated, readers should not assume that individuals who share the same last name are related.

Film titles that appear in this book, unless specified, are the titles of actual films. In some instances I have changed a film’s title in order to maintain the confidentiality of a speaker when the circumstances required. Hindi film titles mainly appear in the urban landscape and onscreen in their Romanized transliterated form with their own particular orthography, which I have maintained, rather than converting them
to the scholarly standards of transliteration with its specific diacritical marks.

Finally, for the sake of consistency I have followed the dominant trade practice of tabulating commercial outcome from the point of view of the distributor, even though I call into question the assumptions that govern the interpretation of commercial outcome. For a host of reasons that are discussed in chapter nine, exact, accurate, or consistent figures and statistics about commercial outcome are notoriously hard to come by in the Hindi film industry. This is a feature of the industry that has been described with some frustration by transnational accounting and consulting firms—like A.T. Kearney, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, kpmg, et al.— which have been preparing hyperbolic annual reports of the potential of the film and entertainment industry in India since 2000. For example, Pricewaterhouse Cooper’s 2006 report,
The Indian Entertainment and
Media Industry: Unravelling the Potential
, states in its preface that “since much of the industry does not have an organised body, lack of a centralised tracking agency that could provide us with accurate figures was the biggest challenge before us to compile figures and determine the size of each segment. This challenge was exacerbated by the fact that most companies in the industry do not have their financial information in the public domain ” (Pricewaterhouse Coopers 2006a).
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Informants told me that even the trade magazines were, at the most, 80–85 percent accurate in their accounting of box-office outcome. Additionally, the fragmented structure of the industry means that commercial success itself is a relative concept, dependent upon which point in the value chain of filmmaking one occupied—production, distribution, or exhibition. For these reasons, I refrain from circulating numbers related to box-office receipts, for numbers are highly subjective entities in the Hindi film industry.