Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (5 page)

In May 2007, I was contacted by the assistant managing editor of Southwest Airlines’ in-flight magazine,
Spirit
, who asked if I would be interested in being their “expert ” and write a brief “Beginner’s Guide to
Bollywood
” for their November issue. “Bollywood ”—derived by combining Bombay with Hollywood—was originally a tongue-in-cheek term coined by the English-language press in India to refer to the Hindi film industry.
²⁰
Although dating back to the late 1970s, “Bollywood ” gained currency primarily in the late 1990s, with the increased circulation, presence, and recognition of Hindi films in North America, the United Kingdom, and Western Europe, and officially entered the English lexicon in 2001, when the
Oxford English Dictionary
included the term. During my first stint of fieldwork in 1996, the term Bollywood was not a part of the everyday parlance of Hindi filmmakers, having been used mainly by journalists writing for general or trade publications. By the time I carried out my last phase of fieldwork in 2006, however, I felt it was imperative to ask my informants their thoughts about the term, as many prominent stars and directors had publicly expressed their displeasure with it.
²¹
I encountered a wide spectrum of reactions to the term: acceptance; resignation; indifference; ambivalence; and antipathy.

That Bollywood has become the dominant global term to refer to the Hindi film industry, mainstream Hindi cinema, and even erroneously to all of the diverse filmmaking traditions in India, becomes apparent from
the two institutions acknowledged as pioneers in the organization and dissemination of information in our contemporary world: Amazon.com and Google. “Bollywood ” as a search term on either site yields four times more results than “Indian cinema ” and ten to twenty times more results than “Hindi cinema. ”
²²
The fact that the editorial team of a publication for a regionally focused budget American airline such as Southwest thought an article about “Bollywood ” would be interesting and relevant for its passengers, signaled to me that the term had entered the American mainstream.
²³

Bollywood is a contested and controversial term nonetheless, both within the Indian film-studies community and the Hindi film industry. Film scholars are justifiably upset by the indiscriminate use of the term by the media—and even by other scholars—to refer to all filmmaking both past and present within India.
²⁴
An exasperating feature of the global use of the term is the way that Bollywood has become synonymous with any film either produced in India or by diasporic Indians and set in India; MiraNair’s
Monsoon Wedding
, GurinderChadha’s
Bride and
Prejudice
, and DeepaMehta’s
Earth
have all been referred to in this vein. Global media usage of the term “Bollywood ” usually demonstrates a complete ignorance that feature films are produced in over twenty languages in India every year and that vibrant and prolific film industries exist in the cities of Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore, Trivandrum, and Calcutta.

This ignorance is demonstrated most perceptibly through pronouncements about the sheer size of Bollywood—”largest film industry in the world ”—based on the aggregate number of films produced annually in India. While the total number of feature films produced in India is quite high (1,288 in 2009), Hindi films comprise a much smaller proportion— about 20 percent—of that total. The annual film production statistics reflect the total number of films certified for exhibition by the
Central Board of Film Certification
, which is different from the total number of films actually released theatrically.
²⁵
For example, in 2009, whereas a total of 235 Hindi films were certified, 132 films were released theatrically; out of which even a smaller number could be regarded as “Bollywood ” films in terms of their star cast, directors, and narrative/aesthetic style. Neither is Bollywood synonymous with Indian cinema, Hindi cinema, nor with the Indian film industry. In fact, there is no such entity as the “Indian film industry ” in terms of nationally integrated structures of financing, production, distribution, and exhibition, even if there is some overlap and circulation of personnel between the six main film industries in India. The “Indian film industry ” is a rhetorical trope mostly used in state, media,
and corporate discourses to signal the sheer scale of filmmaking in India and demonstrate India’s exceptionalism in the global media landscape.

Within the Hindi film industry, while some are indifferent or resigned to the use of the term Bollywood, others are upset by the term because they feel it is essentializing and condescending; represents a kitschy, tacky cinema; or implies that Hindi cinema is a cheap derivative of Hollywood. A comparison to Hollywood is inevitable with a term like Bollywood, which is why many members of the industry profess not to like it. Yet even prior to the coinage of the neologism, comparisons between Hollywood and the Bombay film industry by the Indian press have a long history, dating back to the late 1920s. NeepaMajumdar, in her work on stardom in Indian cinema from the early sound era to the immediate post-Independence era, discusses how the Indian film press created Hollywood epithets for Indian stars, such as “the Indian Douglas Fairbanks ” for Master Vithal or “the Indian Mary Pickford ” for Ermeline (2009: 54–55). Majumdar points out that such comparisons were also criticized by some explicitly nationalist film magazines and resented by the stars themselves; for example, the star who was referred to as the “Indian Douglas Fairbanks ” wrote in a popular film journal that he hated the epithet and that “such names go against our national pride ” (in Majumdar 2009: 55).

The Hindi film industry has always defined itself in relation to Hollywood and not any other national cinema. During my fieldwork I observed Hindi filmmakers frequently discussing Hollywood—either by praising it, criticizing it, or comparing themselves to it. Hollywood is a constant symbolic, metaphoric, and narrative presence in the Bombay industry,
²⁶
and since 2006, with its tentative entry into Hindi film production, a material presence as well; therefore, I find Hindi filmmakers’ criticisms of the term Bollywood as demeaning or condescending somewhat disingenuous. Furthermore, as evident from FirozNadiadwala’s comments earlier in the chapter, Hindi filmmakers express a great deal of disdain themselves for their own industry.

I contend that Bollywood does not inherently imply a cheap imitation of Hollywood; if Hollywood is an icon of global popular culture and box-office muscle, “Bollywood ” signifies that the Hindi film industry is at the same level—or capable of being at the same level—of global dominance. This is why “-ollywood ” has become a very generative and productive morpheme to refer to other centers of media production—such as “Nollywood ” for the Nigerian film industry—that index their aspirations for global popularity. The wide use of the term Bollywood by Indian
media professionals represents an assertion of sovereignty and cultural autonomy in the global media landscape. Global circulation is not the determining factor, however, in the Hindi film industry’s transformation into Bollywood, as Hindi films have had a global market for decades. Since the 1950s, Hindi cinema, along with its stars and music, has been popular in sites as diverse as Nigeria, Greece, Egypt, Indonesia, and the former Soviet Union, but these histories of consumption and circulation precede the coinage and concept of Bollywood. Though some have argued that “Bollywood ” is an empty signifier (Prasad 2003), ahistorical and essentializing (Vasudevan 2008), or a culture industry that is distinct from the cinema (Rajadhyaksha 2003), I use the term to index a particular moment in the Hindi film industry’s history, a transformation in its filmmaking practices, and a shift in how it imagines its audiences.

The historicity of the term “Bollywood, ” its indication of a particular style of filmmaking, and its implication in the global circulation of Hindi films, have been addressed by scholars of Indian cinema (Prasad 2003; Rajadhyaksha 2003; Vasudevan 2008). Central to their critical engagements with Bollywood is the figure of the nri or non-resident Indian, the appellation most commonly used by the Indian state and media to refer to members of the Indian diaspora settled in North America, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia.
²⁷
While the growing economic significance of diasporic audiences has been an important feature of the Hindi film industry’s makeover into Bollywood, the conscious pursuit of socially elite audiences domestically is also a critical factor in the industry’s transformation. Finally, a dimension that has been completely overlooked by an insightful discussion, centering mainly on narrative form, film history, and political theory, is that of filmmakers’ own subjectivities and attempts to accrue
symbolic capital
and cultural legitimacy. I argue that the “Bollywoodization ” of Hindi cinema—to use Rajadhyaksha’s coinage (2003)—which has been attributed overwhelmingly to diasporic audiences and overseas markets, is also closely tied to Hindi filmmakers’ desires to legitimate their filmmaking and their aspirations to be accepted among social and cultural elites.

AmitabhBachchan’s statements about how cinema was not regarded as a promising profession in India and that “children from good homes were not encouraged to go anywhere near it ” articulates the peculiar sense
of social marginality that members of the Hindi film industry have felt over the years. Despite the fact that Bachchan’s own social class, family background, and level of education mark him as someone from a “good home ”—a phrase that along with its other more common variant, “good family, ” indexes an amalgam of caste and class status, educational level, occupational identity, and gendered norms of behavioral comportment and propriety—in his remarks we encounter the disdain that filmmakers perceive is directed toward them by those from good homes and good families.
²⁸
In spite of their fame and fortune, I found that Hindi filmmakers were extremely concerned with appearing “respectable, ” and I examine how this idea is understood, expressed, and enacted within the industry. Beverly Skeggs, in her
ethnography
about white working-class women in England, points out that “respectability is usually the concern of those who are not seen to have it. . . It is rarely recognized as an issue by those who are positioned with it, who are normalized by it, and who do not have to prove it ” (1997: 1). Members of the Hindi film industry have been trying to prove their respectability for decades, and in this book I describe how these efforts are not just about the social backgrounds of filmmakers, but also closely connected to the social class of audiences.

The phenomenon of mainstream Hindi cinema and its makers accruing respectability shares some commonalities with other performance traditions in India that underwent similar social transformations in the colonial era. Scholars have traced the
history of
how dance forms, such as
Bharatanatyam
, and musical genres of the North (Hindustani) and of the South (Carnatic), earned the exalted status of the “classical ” and came to denote a national cultural heritage. These performance traditions acquired prestige and respectability through the efforts of upper-caste, middle-class reformers who criticized the traditional exponents, such as
devadasis
(temple dancers) or
tawa’ifs
(
courtesans
), for being disreputable and unworthy of these art forms, and encouraged middle-class men and women to learn and perform these traditions (Bakhle 2005; Meduri 1988; Weidman 2006).

The case of filmmaking, however, is also different from classical music and dance in a few important ways: the social class of audiences, nationalist agendas, and cultural politics. The disrepute associated with classical music and dance in the nineteenth century only had to do with the performers and not its patrons, who were traditionally from the aristocracy and nobility. In the case of cinema, though it began as an elite activity in India, it became quickly popular across various social strata by the 1920s, and by the 1940s, film was regarded as a form of mass entertainment.
While music and dance were reformed under the guise of a national tradition at various points of the Indian nationalist movement, film was never accorded any such importance either by leaders of the nationalist struggle or the newly independent Indian nation-state.

SumitaChakravarty discusses how filmmaking was perceived by the national leadership as having escaped the effects of colonialism, which they felt had marginalized performers and producers of other artistic traditions. She describes the dominant attitudes toward cinema in the aftermath of Independence: “As a decolonizing nation, India now felt threatened from within, victimized by the very forces of modernization it had rushed to embrace. What space would traditional culture (pre-British, premodern) occupy in the new milieu? How could the tide of film mania be stemmed? How could the ‘excesses’ of the film industry be curbed? Who were the real guardians of the “public interest ”? These were some of the questions that were repeatedly raised in official circles, by citizens’ groups, by artists, and critics ” (1993: 58). Not only was film regarded as a threat to other performance traditions, filmmaking was also not accorded any economic importance by the Nehruviandevelopmentalist state. Respectability for Hindi filmmakers and cultural legitimacy for commercial filmmaking only became possible when the developmentalist state was reconfigured into a neoliberal one, privileging doctrines of free markets, free trade, and consumerism. Under this new regime, the mass media’s significance is gauged by its economic rather than its pedagogical potential, a shift characterized by RaviVasudevan as the “displacement of nation as art form by nation as brand ” (2008).

Scholars have noted the transformations in the national politicoeconomic imaginary after the
economic liberalization
policies instituted by the Indian state in 1991.
²⁹
As LeelaFernandes notes, “while earlier state socialist ideologies tended to depict workers or rural villagers as the archetypical objects of development, such ideologies now compete with mainstream national political discourses that increasingly portray urban middle-class consumers as the representative citizens of liberalizing India ” (2006: xv). What I am characterizing as the gentrification of Hindi cinema is part of a broader socio-historical conjuncture where urban middle classes are celebrated in state and media discourses as the main agents, as well as markers of modernity and development in India. Just as the urban middle-class consumer represents the idealized citizen in a neoliberal and globalizing India, the urban middle-class film-viewer represents the ideal audience member for an industry concerned with issues of prestige, respect, and global circulation.

While the impact of
neoliberalism
has been examined in India primarily with respect to those who have become more insecure or dispossessed by these policies, in this book, I examine a story that goes against the grain, one that may even appear counterintuitive. The growing scholarship about the changes wrought in India by the adoption of neoliberal economic policies frequently asserts, in passing, that elites have benefited, before moving on to a discussion of the social and economic consequences of liberalization on non-elites.
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In contrast, this book examines the ways that certain sectors of the Hindi film industry have benefited from neoliberal economic policies, which was neither expected nor anticipated by scholars or filmmakers in the mid-1990s. In fact, Hindi filmmakers and scholars have continually predicted the decline of the film industry due to the entrance of technologies such as video, cable, and
satellite television
, or because of changes in state policy about media imports and foreign investment in media.
³¹

This story of “success ”—which I qualify with the quotation marks since the idea of success is dependent on particular structural positions within the industry—is of a different nature than that experienced by the Bombay advertising world as examined by William Mazzarella (2003), where the entrance of multinational consumer-goods companies led to new opportunities for Indian advertisers and marketing professionals to position themselves as vital cultural experts and mediators for these global firms. The Hindi film industry has benefited directly from certain changes in state policy, the expansion of the televisual landscape, and the growth of diasporic markets. Globalization—shorthand referring to transnational flows of capital, images, and people (Appadurai 1996)— and neoliberalism—another shorthand to signify the establishment and dismantling of governmental structures to enable those flows (Harvey 2005)—have strengthened the Hindi film industry and made it a more dominant media institution within and outside India. Such a trajectory differs from the standard narratives offered about the impact of
globalization
and neoliberalism on media industries outside of the United States, which usually equate these processes with the ascendancy of media corporations based or identified with the United States, to the disadvantage of national media institutions.
³²

Another presumed logic that the example of the Hindi film industry disrupts has to do with the nature of capitalism, more specifically “late capitalism ” and the regime of flexible accumulation (Harvey 1990). Flexibility, fragmentation, decentralization, and their associated occupational and employment insecurities that are cited as characteristics of a global,
late capitalist order, have actually been the defining features of the Hindi film industry since the end of the Second World War. Although Indian and international journalists have relied on the Fordist metaphors of the factory and the assembly line to represent the Hindi film industry, the structure and workings of the industry are the exact opposite: each Hindi film is made by a team of independent contractors or freelancers.
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The rise of neoliberal policies in India has coincided with—and is contributing to—a greater consolidation and integration of the Hindi film industry, rather than its fragmentation, flexibility, and decentralization. At the same time, the relationship between the film industry and the state has been crucially reconfigured. For decades, the Indian state, operating within a Nehruvian developmentalist paradigm, did not support the Hindi film industry and its forms of filmmaking, which are oriented toward popular entertainment. Instead, state policies treated and taxed commercial filmmaking as something akin to a vice. Since the late 1990s, the Indian state has been lauding the Hindi film industry and appears to be ideologically and materially invested in the project of commercial filmmaking more than ever before.

A discussion of neoliberalism in the Indian context cannot be complete without a discussion of developmentalism. AkhilGupta argues that development discourse, which locates a particular set of nation-states as temporally “behind ” the West, is not just about the economic position of a nation-state relative to others, but more significantly has “created the ‘underdeveloped’ as a subject and ‘underdevelopment’ as a form of identity in the postcolonial world ” (1998: 11). The postcolonial nature of the Indian state and society allows us to examine the logics of developmentalism and neoliberalism within the same frame. Although the current Indian state replaced a Nehruvian-style development agenda with a neoliberal one—preliminarily in 1985 and more aggressively since 1991—it has not abandoned its obsession with “catching up ” with the West. While the methods may have changed, a teleological ideology of modernization still undergirds state economic and social policy. The discussions of filmmaking in India are rife with the allochronism (Fabian 2002)—the false sense of a contemporary society being part of an earlier era—associated with developmentalist logics, whereby the changes besetting the industry, which I have characterized as gentrification, are frequently hailed by commentators in teleological language: “coming of age ”; “growing up ”; or “maturing. ” Filmmaking in India is often described globally in a developmentalist idiom as well. For example, American film critics frequently describe contemporary Hindi cinema as akin to older Hollywood films so
that a teleological narrative is produced whereby classical Hollywood is Indian cinema’s present, while contemporary Hollywood is its future.
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During my fieldwork, I observed Hindi filmmakers constantly coming to terms with and contesting the connotations of “backwardness ” and inferiority implicit in the label “developing. ” RajjatBarjatya, one of the producers of the most successful films in Indian cinema, the 1994 blockbuster
Hum AapkeHainKoun!
, when discussing the decision to make the film with the latest sound technologies, articulated the introduction of optical and digital sound technologies in India in a very obvious developmentalist narrative: “Revolution is taking place at a very, very fast rate in India: optical stereo in the U.S. was prevalent for almost fifteen years and since the last two years, they have been going ahead with digital, but in India, we introduced optical stereo just one and half years back and already people are switching over to digital. What I’m saying is that maybe we’ve taken a long time to catch up with the West, but we’re almost there. We have caught up with them in a very, very short span of time ” (Barjatya, interview, April 1996). In addition to illustrating how the technological properties of cinema become a sign of modernity, Barjatya’s statements about “catching up with the West ” demonstrate the experience of modernity that AkhilGupta has termed the “postcolonial condition ” (1998). Gupta argues that to be a national subject in a “developing ” country like India is to “occupy an overdetermined subject position interpellated by discourses of the nation
and
by the discourses of development to which that nation is subjected ” (1998: 41). Although Gupta’s research focused on poor farmers in north India, in Barjatya’s description of the technological “revolution ” taking place in India and his use of the United States as the benchmark of modernity, we see how even urban elites are interpellated by the discourses of nation and development. In this book, I detail how developmentalist logics operate within the field of Hindi film production—with respect to both filmmakers’ own subjectivities and representations of the industry and in their representations of audiences and their subjectivities.