Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (9 page)

Ideologies of Development and Modernization

The above statement, made during Prasad’s speech of welcome at the 1979 Symposium on Cinema in Developing Countries held in Delhi, best encapsulates official attitudes toward the medium of cinema for much of India’s post-Independence period. Cinema has been a consistent feature in discussions about development and modernization in India, and Hindi filmmakers have been interpellated as partners in these projects for decades. Much of the discourse about film in India communicates that it is a very powerful tool that can either be used for the greater good, or be very dangerous if in the wrong hands. It then becomes the state’s responsibility to ensure the production of films that engender positive or beneficial effects, as well as prohibiting those that can be damaging. Examples of the state’s prescriptive role include the system of national awards for films instituted in 1954, while its proscriptive role is primarily enacted through the institution of film censorship, which has been carried over from the colonial period.
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As a result of the high rates of illiteracy and the unparalleled popularity of films and film stars in India, the state has viewed film as a pedagogical tool in its modernization agenda. Illiteracy, or the lack of a formal education, signals to government functionaries that vast portions of the populace, who are referred to as the “masses,” are easily influenced— or incited by—onscreen images. Since the masses are perceived as very malleable—and in need of proper molding—elected officials and bureaucrats throughout the decades have been exhorting filmmakers to make “socially relevant” films to “uplift” the masses. For example, in the Silver Jubilee Souvenir Program, published by the Film Federation of India on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Indian sound films in 1956, a section titled “Blessings and Greetings” contains statements
made by a variety of state leaders on the role of cinema in Indian society. The Chief Minister of Bombay
¹⁵
asserted, “A film, as we know, is the most powerful medium of our age, which not only influences but moulds the cultural outlook of the people. The film industry, therefore, can play an important role in carrying the message of peace and progress to the masses. I am glad to see that some producers have realized this, but it is necessary for the industry as a whole to come forward and help the people and the State in this matter” (FFI 1956: v). The Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh
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described in greater detail the possibilities and problems of film in India, “Films not only provide the most popular form of entertainment in modern times but they are proving also a most powerful and effective medium of education and cultural advancement. They have immense possibilities of doing good as well as harm to Society. . . The responsibility for reforming the public taste is of the producers and is a public duty which carries its own reward. Pandering to what is vulgar in human nature will degrade all of us” (FFI 1956: vi). Both leaders echo earlier statements by Nehru and Naidu where entertainment is subservient to education, and filmmakers bear the burden of some manner of social reform. The Indian state’s concern with socially relevant cinema is connected to its “hypodermic-needle” understanding of media effects and influence.
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In this simplistic top-down causal view of media influence, cinema—and audio-visual media in general—can directly influence behavior and shape attitudes and subjectivities.
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The Supreme Court of India, in a 1989 judgment about film censorship, asserted this point of view unequivocally, “A film motivates thought and action and assures a high degree of attention and retention as compared to the printed word. The combination of act and speech, sight and sound, in semi darkness of the theatre, with elimination of all distracting ideas, will have a strong impact on the minds of the viewers and can affect emotions; therefore, it has as much potential for evil as it has for good and has an equal potential to instill or cultivate violent or good behavior. It cannot be equated with other modes of communication. Censorship by prior restraint is, therefore, not only desirable but also necessary”;
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therefore, a film is judged according to the perceived positive or negative effects its main theme may precipitate in viewers, and thus in society. This perspective provides the continued justification for film censorship as well as institutions such as the Films Division—the state-funded documentary filmmaking institution.

Thus, a striking characteristic of the state-generated discourse about cinema is the intense ambivalence—a complex mixture of pride, disdain,
hope, and fear—expressed toward films and filmmaking, which arises from the multivalent nature of the medium: film is a product of science and technology, a mode of communication, an art form, a source of entertainment, and a commercial activity. This ambivalence is a result of the postcolonial nature of the Indian state and its particular relationship to modernity—a relationship that has been defined primarily by the apparatus and discourse of development, which has positioned “Third World” nation-states like India as “behind” the West (Gupta 1998: 10).

Itty Abraham, in his work on India’s nuclear program, describes the postcolonial condition as marked by a specific experience of
time
, which he characterizes as “time-in-waiting.” This condition is one in which the future can be seen in the present, through the examples of advanced industrialized nation-states, combined with a simultaneous awareness of one’s own lagging development. Consequently, postcolonial time “drives state action in an endless search for ‘modernization’ and ‘development,’ which leads to an anxiety about world rankings and never ‘catching up’ while constantly projecting the moment when it may happen” (Abraham 1998: 19).

This obsession with rankings, superlatives, and coeval temporality has also been a feature of the state-generated discourse about cinema. Since the motion picture is a technology, “a true product of the modern age” (Chhabria 1996: 1), two features about cinema in India are used to represent the modern nature of the Indian nation-state: first, the sheer volume of films produced yearly affords India the distinction of being the “world’s largest” producer, surpassing even that preeminent example of modernity, the United States; second, the
history of
cinema in India as contemporaneous with the history of cinema in the world—“India is among the earliest countries in the world to have adopted cinema” (Karanth 1980: 1)—counters connotations of technological incompetence, cultural domination, and backwardness that saddle terms, such as “Third World,” or “developing,” which historically located India in the international political and economic order. The date of the first screening of motion pictures in India, July 7, 1896, becomes an important signifier of India’s participation in the modern world, since “Indian audiences had their introduction to projected motion pictures in the same year as British, Russian, and American audiences, barely six months after the first ‘Cinematographe’ show at the Grand Café in Paris” (Karanth 1980: 1).

While both the simultaneity of the filmic experience and the existence of large-scale film industries have been represented as an index of modernity and cultural sovereignty, over the years the dominant tone about the
Hindi film industry and filmmaking has been that most films produced in India are escapist, frivolous, formulaic, for “mere entertainment”: not sufficiently “meaningful” or “artistic.” For example, in 1998, at the International Film Festival of India (iffi), the minister of information and broadcasting, S. Jaipal Reddy, stated that while India is the largest filmproducing country in the world, filmmakers should focus more on quality than quantity. He expressed his hope that interacting with the best filmmakers from all over the world, at venues such as the iffi, “would help us to make better films” (Gupta 1998). Since Nehru, what has been operating in state discourses toward cinema, especially with respect to the relationship between entertainment and quality, is the “logic of deferrence” (Krishna 1999), where entertainment has been viewed as something that a postcolonial, “developing,” nation-state like India cannot afford.
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In an attempt to foster “good” cinema and counter the dominant mode of filmmaking—as represented by the Bombay industry—in 1960 the state established the Film Finance Corporation, which became (in 1980) the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC). These state institutions were responsible for financing films of “high artistic content” (Dayal 1983) and “serious” filmmakers, defined primarily by their rejection of the aesthetic, generic, and production conventions of Bombay cinema, becoming known as the “New Indian” cinema.
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Films falling under this category—also referred to as “parallel” or “art” cinema—were characterized by their social realist aesthetic, smaller budgets, location shooting, absence of song and dance sequences, use of lesser-known actors, and a naturalistic style of acting (against the big budgets, elaborate sets, songs, superstars, and melodramatics of mainstream Hindi cinema).
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The state’s constant criticism and efforts to promote an alternative cinematic form have resulted in a dismissive and disparaging attitude on the part of filmmakers. In 1996, during my first phase of fieldwork, the most common characterization made by filmmakers of the state’s attitude toward the film industry was the term “step-motherly,” with its connotations of abuse and neglect. Veteran producer B. R. Chopra described the relationship between the film industry and the state as one-sided, opportunistic, and extractive: “You find that the government is interfering with us quite a bit, putting restrictions on us, and taking away the biggest slice of our earnings. The whole picture industry, whatever they’ve done, they’ve done all by themselves, without the aid of the government. According to me the film industry has not been able to get the favor of the government, except when it serves the government’s purpose. . . The only thing they’ve done is to develop the parallel cinema and to help it.
That’s all, but they’ve not done anything for the common man’s cinema” (B. R. Chopra, interview, 14 August 1996). Chopra is referring to the most common rhetorical division of the film-going audience in India— as posed by members of the film industry, journalists, bureaucrats, and intellectuals—that the “common man,” also referred to as the “masses,” watches commercial films, while the elite audiences of the “classes” watch the art or parallel films. I will be discussing how the audience is imagined within this masses-classes binary in greater detail in chapter eight.

Subhash Ghai, one of the top producer/directors of the Bombay industry spoke with me at length about the relationship between the state and the film industry. He characterized the state’s attitude toward the industry as a combination of fascination and distance, with leaders who are aware of the popularity of films and their influence over people’s lives, but are unwilling to learn about the particularities of the industry. The reason that the state has not attempted to know or study the industry, according to Ghai, is because of the general distaste for cinema. He described the condescension that state officials have toward cinema, which he felt was based on their age and class: “They’re all senior people who think that film or entertainment is not a serious man’s business. All these
buddas
[old fogies], politicians, government officials, they think ‘Cinema—ha ha ha—my servant goes, but I stop him from going to the cinema.’ ”

Ghai asserted that politicians articulate the importance of cinema periodically during election campaigns because they realize the “pull” of cinema and its ability to “mobilize voters.” He also claimed that political leaders were aware of the key cultural and nation-building role played by films, “When they think about national integration, when they get their calls from Indian embassies from all over the world, that cinema is holding our culture over there. Cinema is a representative of Indian culture abroad.” According to Ghai, however, once in power, officials put aside the film industry’s concerns, “They are again back to their normal, ‘Oh, cinema is not a serious man’s business.’ ”

Criticizing the Indian state’s attitudes toward filmmaking as shortsighted, Ghai brought up the United States as a counterexample where the state has encouraged and recognized the value of entertainment as an industry. He argued that American films have enabled the United States to dominate the world culturally, even leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. “They’re totally ignorant about the problems of the film industry, not realizing that [in] America, [the] entertainment industry is the second biggest industry after aerospace industry, exporting $600 bil
lion, right? America became Big Brother because of the entertainment industry. . . because they’ve patronized the entertainment industry, so the best of talent from Europe and everywhere came to America and made America, and America fascinated every country and now it broke Russia. I would say Michael Jackson and Robert De Niro—they broke Russia. It is a threat to France; it is a threat to Japan; what is the threat? Bill Clinton? No: movies. Movies have such an impact on other nations, because children grow up with movies. Children grow with three things: with their school; with their parents; and. . . movies” (Ghai, interview, 10 December 1996). According to Ghai, the reason that the Indian state has not realized the potential of filmmaking as an industry, economic activity, and global cultural and ideological force is because, “these oldies never saw cinema; they were never in touch with cinema” (Ghai, interview, 10 December 1996). Despite his flippant tone, Ghai’s comments about political leaders’ antipathy toward cinema correspond with the history of statements about the medium. Gandhi apparently saw only one film in his life (Jeffrey 2006; Kaul 1998).