Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (6 page)

As mentioned earlier, mainstream Hindi cinema had been the object of derision and trenchant criticism for many years, and much of the early writings on Hindi cinema reflected this derision in their dismissive attitude toward mainstream filmmaking.
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Seminal work on popular Hindi
cinema by scholars such as Sumita Chakravarty (1993), Ashish Rajadhyaksha (1986), Rosie Thomas (1985), and Ravi Vasudevan (1989) addressed issues of film history, state policy, genre, aesthetic formations, narrative style, and national identity, establishing the foundation for what has become a highly dynamic field of study. This book joins a growing body of scholarship on Indian cinema that draws upon earlier questions and concerns about history, the nation, genre, representation, and narrative form,
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but has expanded the focus to include issues of circulation, consumption, exhibition, music, fan cultures, stardom, visual culture, political economy, and globalization.
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With a focus on the
production culture
and social world of the Hindi film industry, this book is also a part of the growing anthropological literature about media forms and practices that seeks to demystify the mass media as it goes beyond the media-text to identify the diverse cultural, social, and historical contexts of media production, circulation, and consumption.
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An anthropological approach to studying the mass media distinguishes itself from other approaches by its focus on people and their social relations, as opposed to a focus only on media texts or technology (Ginsburg 1994). Anthropologists are centrally concerned with the “making of meaning and the social relations within which this occurs ” (Myers 2002: 7). Based on my interest in practice, experience, meaning-making, and social life, I have examined filmmaking and filmmakers in much greater detail than specific films. This focus does not preclude a discussion of specific films; rather than regarding films as texts, however, I regard them as social and discursive objects that come to possess their meaning through practice and social life (Myers 2002), which leads me to concentrate on how filmmakers interpret, discuss, and assign social as well as cultural significance to particular films.

Much of the impetus to study media anthropologically emerged initially from an interest in examining audiences and their consumption of mass media, such as film or television, which expanded and complicated our understandings of the circulation and reception of media forms.
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An anthropological focus on media production developed somewhat later, although a very robust tradition of studying production cultures in the United States has existed in sociology, communication studies, and media studies for some time.
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An ethnographic approach to media production is important for deepening our understanding of production and of producers, in this specific case, of Hindi filmmakers who have been either mostly ignored in the scholarship on Indian cinema or have been regarded as isomorphic with the films they produce. In this book, I view
Hindi filmmakers as agents grounded in specific social, historical, and interpretive locations, with their activity of film production as a “social process engaged in the mediation of culture ” (Ginsburg 1995: 70). I focus on what Barry Dornfeld, in his work on American public television producers, describes as “the abundance of acts of evaluation and interpretation that cultural producers engage in as a necessary and formative dimension of their productive work and as a self-defining activity in other dimensions of their lives ” (1998: 16). This book explores how filmmakers’ subjectivities, social relations, and world-views are constituted and mediated by their experiences of filmmaking.

In a site like the Hindi film industry, where negotiations are highly personalized and oral, ethnography grounds the study of media in a specific time and space and offers insights into the processes, possibilities, and constraints of filmmaking that are not apparent from an analysis of the film text. A focus on the process of production allows us to look beyond the instances of “success ”—those films that do get completed and distributed in some manner—since many films do not progress beyond a conceptualization stage, and some are abandoned halfway. Such “failures ” (Ganti 2002) also add to our knowledge, offering productive insights and possibilities for theorizing about cinema and other media forms. Additionally, in a context of financial secrecy and the willful absence of record keeping, which marked the Hindi film industry for much of its history, ethnography offers insights into the production process that exhortations to simply “follow the money ”—to trace the broad contours of capital investment and ownership—could not achieve.
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An ethnographic approach to media production is also important, both for understanding how media are produced in different cultural settings, and for countering the ethnocentrism of much of the scholarship on culture industries and mass culture, which are mainly based on the study of North American and Western European media institutions and corporate capitalism. Although the Hindi film industry—like Hollywood—is a commercially driven, blockbuster-oriented industry, its structures of financing and distribution, sites of power, organization of labor, and overall
work culture
are quite distinct. In contrast to Hollywood, the Hindi film industry is highly decentralized, has been financed primarily by entrepreneurial capital, organized along social and kin networks, and until the early 2000s was governed by oral rather than written contracts.

While this book’s focus is on Hindi filmmakers, readers will notice a great emphasis upon “the audience, ” specifically upon how filmmakers imagine, represent, and discuss film audiences. Not only has scholarship
on media production amply demonstrated that audiences are always prefigured in the production process,
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a strand of mass communications research has focused on “
audience-making
, ” which refers to how media industries actually produce their audiences through a variety of institutional mechanisms (measurement, segmentation, and regulation), so as to reconstitute actual viewers into collectivities that carry economic or social value within a particular media system (Ettema and Whitney 1994). I examine the Hindi film industry’s audience-making practices, which are based on the measurement of theatrical commercial outcome interpreted according to the geographic and spatial logics of film distribution and exhibition.

The figure of the audience is central to understanding the nature of Hindi film production. The very label “commercial cinema, ” which is used to describe the dominant form of filmmaking, has the market, that is, the audience implicated within it. At every level, the scholarly or popular discussion about Hindi cinema is a discussion about the audience explicitly or implicitly; these are broadly of three types: textually based scholarship that chooses to ignore the figure of the audience because it is too problematic, or masks it into the esoteric language of the psychoanalytically imagined “spectator ”; ideological analyses, which ostensibly are about films as texts but implicitly construct a figure of the audience, since ideology needs a recipient; or work that justifies the study of commercial cinema by the term “popular, ” drawing strength from the fact that many people watch these films.

The history of Hindi cinema is frequently represented as a narrative of change mediated through the figure of the audience. Many accounts uncritically espouse the view that Hindi cinema underwent drastic changes aesthetically, thematically, and stylistically because of the changed class composition of audiences.
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The common narrative found in most general histories of Indian cinema articulates a decline in cinematic standards and quality after the Second World War, usually attributed to the postwar changes in film financing and audience composition. I discuss the narratives of “improvement ” regarding cinematic standards and quality that were a dominant feature of the discourse surrounding filmmaking during my fieldwork. These narratives are essentially of gentrification, where cinematic quality and standards are connected to middle-class audiences.

The attitudes toward audiences that I detail in this book offer a different perspective from some anthropological theorizing about media consumption. For example, Dornfeld (1998) argues that a dichotomy be
tween production and reception—or producers and audiences—is untenable, since both partake in processes of production and reception, understood in terms of the generation of interpretations and the engagement in acts of evaluation. Such assertions about the artifice of this divide are based on theorizing from contexts in which producers and audiences are part of the same social and interpretive world (Dornfeld 1998). However, whenever media producers have produced content for large-scale audiences characteristic of American commercial television or Hollywood, there is a strong tendency to deride, stereotype, essentialize, or “paedocratize, ” because of the fundamental inability to directly observe and know one’s audience.
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Additionally, in cases like the Hindi film industry, the Hindi television industry (Matzner 2010), the Tamil film industry (Dickey 1993), or the Egyptian television industry (Abu-Lughod 2005), where a vast social distance exists between producers and the majority of their audiences, and where producers do not imagine their audiences to be like them at all, then the production/reception divide is an important dichotomy that reveals how social difference is produced, managed, and experienced. This book analyzes how commercial cinema production is based on an articulation of difference, specifically a relationship of “othering, ” between producers and audiences.

Examining Hindi filmmakers’ discussions of their audiences reveals a parallel discourse about the social and aesthetic impact of different media technologies, such as video, satellite television, and the multiplex theater upon cinema in India. Anthropologists have pointed to the importance of examining the distinctive material and sensory properties of media technologies as a necessary component of the ethnography of media (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002). Ethnographic studies have illustrated how media and communication technologies (and their use) shape and are shaped by the practices of daily life, patterns of social relations, and specific experiences of modernity.
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Although an in-depth analysis of the physical and sensory properties of video, satellite television, or multiplex theaters is beyond the scope of this book, I discuss these media technologies in terms of the meaning and value invested in them by Hindi filmmakers. I demonstrate how video, satellite television, and multiplexes are differentially implicated in filmmakers’ discussions of their own subjectivities and filmmaking practices. In filmmakers’ discourses, video is the villain that precipitated the decline in standards and quality, while the multiplex is the hero that has initiated a new era of opportunity and possibility for filmmaking; satellite television occupies a more ambivalent position between the two. The judgmental character
izations of these technologies derive from the metonymic relationship established by filmmakers between the social class of audiences and the specific viewing practices engendered by these technologies. For example, the advent of video is viewed negatively, not only because of issues of
piracy
and loss of revenue, but also because it represents for filmmakers the retreat of middle-class audiences from the space of the cinema, while the multiplex represents their return. Therefore, a discussion of how new technologies of dissemination and practices of exhibition have reconfigured the relationship between Hindi filmmakers and their audiences demonstrates how media technologies can “impose new social relations ” (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002: 19).

An anthropological emphasis on media technologies also provides a necessary counter to universalist narratives of technological determinism (Larkin 2008; Miller and Horst 2006; Pinney 1997; Pinney and Peterson 2003). The case examined in this book is the multiplex movie theater. While the multiplex in the United States is synonymous with mainstream blockbuster cinema, aggressively oriented toward broad audiences and mass appeal, in India the multiplex signifies exactly the opposite. In India, the multiplex is credited with fomenting and supporting an alternative cinematic practice more akin to art-house cinemas in the United States; accordingly, the multiplex is associated with niche audiences and social exclusivity. The discourse about “multiplex cinema ” detailed in this book illustrates the significance of exhibition practices and distribution arrangements to the narrative and aesthetic content of cinema. The narratives of change in filmmaking practice attributed by both filmmakers and the Indian press to technologies such as video, satellite television, and multiplexes demonstrate how cinema must also be analyzed and understood through the technologies of its dissemination.

What sort of site is the Hindi film industry for ethnographic research? At one level it seems abstract, diffuse, and unmanageably large in scale, but my focus on those groups with the creative or financial power to make decisions that shape the films—producers, directors, actors and actresses, writers, distributors, exhibitors—and those who shape the discourse about films, filmmaking, and filmmakers—journalists—provided the boundaries for my fieldwork. This fieldwork, carried out in Bombay for twelve months in 1996, with shorter follow-up visits in 2000, 2005, and 2006, was a combination of participant-observation and direct inter
views. As a testament to the increasingly globalized nature of the Hindi film industry, the Bombay portion of my fieldwork was supplemented by additional fieldwork in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania in 2001, and intermittently in New York between 2005 and 2009.

The bulk of my time in 1996 was spent observing the production process at various sites in the capacity as a guest, and later as a directorial assistant for two different films (
Dil to PagalHai
[The Heart Is Crazy] and
Ghulam
[Slave]), which allowed me to observe the pre-production process as well. In addition to observing how films were produced, I also observed both how “stars ” were “produced ” by watching elaborate photo sessions orchestrated for the glossy English-language film magazines, and the interactions between film journalists and actors. By attending a number of events (or rituals) of the film industry, such as premieres,
mahurats
(ceremonies which announce the start of a new production), music releases, and award ceremonies like the
Filmfare
Awards, I was able to observe how the industry reinforced, and occasionally celebrated, its discrete identity.

I also carried out formal, taped interviews in English and Hindi with more than a 100 members of the film industry and the film press, from both the trade and gossip magazines. The interviews served as opportunities to clarify and delve further into issues that I had observed at the production sites, and as occasions to gather information about topics that were unobtainable through observation. The interviews also provided the space for industry members to add to and critique the discourse generated by the print media about Hindi cinema and the film industry. My third research strategy involved collecting contemporary written discourse (in Hindi and English) about films and the industry produced by the trade press, mainstream print media, and government institutions, such as the National Film Archive and the National Film Development Corporation, in order to map out the larger discursive terrain about cinema in India.

The expansion of the Internet and electronic communication has enabled me to stay in touch with some of my informants through email and social networking sites such as Facebook. The proliferation of websites having to do with “Bollywood ”—Internet news magazines focusing on South Asia, and Hindi producers’ own websites—are now another source of discourse about Hindi films and the film industry. Finally, I have kept abreast of the issues and discussions featured in the trade press by subscribing to
Film Information
, a weekly trade magazine published in Bombay since the early 1970s.
Film Information
is one of the oldest of four
trade magazines published in English in Bombay that focuses on the business side of the industry: assessing commercial outcome; detailing business deals; providing news of films under production; announcing the release dates of films; and reviewing films with an eye to their commercial prospects.

Even with a focus on those members with financial or creative decision-making power, the Hindi film industry can still appear as a formidable site for ethnographic research, given the sheer scale of filmmaking in Bombay. If one concentrates on those filmmakers who have the most prestige and command the most financial and symbolic capital within the film industry, however—the “
A-list
” producers, directors, and actors—then the size of the industry shrinks considerably. Despite hyperbolic media representations about the sheer magnitude of the filmmaking enterprise in Bombay, based on annual production statistics, the proportion of films made by individuals from the A-list has never been more than a third of the total number of films produced and distributed between 1995 and 2006.

Although the A-list comprises a small percentage of the overall Hindi film industry, films from these makers are the ones that tend to generate box-office profits for distributors, which serves as the benchmark for commercial success since distributors have been the main investors in—and bearers of financial risk for—films during most of the industry’s history. While a standard criticism within the industry is the oft lamented success-to-failure—or hit-to-flop—ratio, which over the course of my fieldwork peaked as high as 24 percent hits in 1997, and dropped to as low as 7 percent in 2009, the percentage of hits within the A-list is often twice or thrice that of the overall industry—47 percent of the films made by these filmmakers were commercially successful in 1997, compared to 17 percent in 2009.
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My informants were primarily either from this elite stratum of the film industry or those who were aspiring for that status. My fieldwork was centered on the actors, producers, directors, and writers who possessed various degrees of celebrity within and outside the industry—the very same individuals who were also the focus of journalistic attention.

It is important to convey the absences and limitations of my fieldwork. Certain occupational roles in the film industry are more amenable to the “deep hanging out ” that marks the ethnographic enterprise, which played a role in how my research took shape. On a film set, actors, directors, assistant directors, and producers have the most down time, while
everyone around them is busy going about their specific duties and tasks. I was the least obtrusive on a set, where I was often the only—or one of a few—women, if I situated myself with the producer, director, or actors, who were often sitting and chatting while waiting for the lighting to be set up. Given that I was in my mid-twenties when I began my fieldwork, I developed a rapport most readily with assistant directors, actors, and young directors, who were around my same age and welcomed me easily into their social world.

Other than my observations of the activities on a film set or film shoot, I did not carry out any research with the vast array of workers— carpenters, camera attendants, light-men, make-up artists, hair-dressers, and sundry others—who in American film parlance are referred to as “below-the-line ” and are the vital life-blood of the labor that goes into the production of a film. When taking these categories of film workers into account, the Hindi film industry once again becomes quite vast in size and scale, as there are thousands of such workers in Bombay. My research also did not focus on those members of the industry who are referred to as “technicians ” by Hindi filmmakers—cinematographers, editors, choreographers, composers, musicians, sound engineers, art directors
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— although I had many opportunities to observe these various individuals at work on sets, in editing suites, recording studios, and dubbing studios. There are a multitude of projects to be done about the Hindi film industry from an ethnographic perspective, and recently anthropologists have begun to pay attention to more specific features of Hindi film production, such as costume design (Wilkinson-Weber 2005, 2006) and film music (Booth 2008), adding valuable perspectives on below-theline workers.

One evening in April 1996, on my way to Filmalaya Studios, where I was going to observe a film shoot, I noticed an unusual sight on the side of S.V. Road in Andheri (a northwestern suburb of Bombay) while sitting in an auto-rickshaw waiting for the red light to turn to green: a white man and a white woman dressed in shorts, T-shirts, sneakers, and carrying large backpacks. Given that this part of suburban Bombay was not a common destination for European or American tourists, the pair stood out among the busy throngs of people going about their evening routines. When I got to the studio, much to my surprise, the backpacker couple was seated comfortably in chairs observing the slightly frenetic proceedings prior to the shoot. The film’s producer and executive producer were dart
ing about nervously, for they had invited a number of journalists to witness the shoot that evening; a song that had been billed as “historic ” for it featured cameos by a number of yesteryear stars, including the hit star pair of the 1960s, Asha Parekh and Shammi Kapoor, who were sharing the screen after a gap of nearly 30 years. One major point of tension between the two producers was that there were not enough chairs on the set for the actors, distributors, and financiers who would be present.

Meanwhile, the two backpackers, who were occupying valuable real estate in the form of the chairs, were not questioned as to their identity and business on the set. Everyone assumed that they were someone’s guests. When the woman backpacker, who was taking photographs, asked me who AshaParekh was, I finally asked the couple politely who they were. Imagine my surprise when they informed me that they were tourists from Sweden who had come to Bombay on a holiday and did not want to leave Bombay without seeing “Bollywood ”! They were no one’s guests; neither did they know anyone associated with the film, nor did they know anything about the film. They were basically able to wander on to this set because of the color of their skin. I was incredulous and thought how the reverse could never happen—I would never be able to casually stroll on to a sound stage or studio lot in Los Angeles.

Many months later, in November, when I was observing a different film shoot taking place in a classroom of a local community college in Andheri, two young Indian men who had traveled from Delhi to try to get a glimpse of the glamour of the Bombay film world had wandered onto this set, hoping to meet their favorite star, Aamir Khan. Since I appeared to be involved with the production—sitting next to the director and conversing with other members of the crew—these two men approached me and asked if it would be possible to watch the shoot. By this point in my research I had come to the conclusion that film sets in Bombay were quasipublic spaces, since they were frequently peopled by a myriad of visitors and onlookers, and I told them that if they sat quietly and stayed out of the camera’s field, it should be no problem. Unlike the situation with the Swedish tourists, members of this crew did question the two men and commanded them to leave the set.

I relay these anecdotes not only to represent the permeable boundaries of a film set—which enables tourists, curious observers, fans, and anthropologists to wander in—but also to communicate how access to the Hindi film industry is shaped by racial and class privilege. Although being an upper middle-class diasporic South Asian female academic from New York definitely paved my access to the film industry, these social
categories were frequently trumped by the privilege of white skin. For example, one afternoon in May 1996, I was waiting to meet a producer in his office. It had taken me several tries to get an appointment. Although the time for my appointment came and went, I waited, aware of the alternative temporality that characterized film business. I looked up from my magazine to see two white European or American individuals being ushered upstairs to the producer’s office. When I inquired with the receptionist about why those two had been sent upstairs, reminding her that I had been waiting for a couple of hours, she replied in a matter-off-act way, “Well, you know those journalists came all the way from Chicago to meet Shiv-
ji
. ” Thus, within the hierarchy of who is able to gain access to the Bombay film world, being South Asian and from New York defers to being white and from Chicago (or probably anywhere, actually).

Despite being displaced by white journalists, I was on the whole pretty successful in gaining access to the A-list of the film industry. My access to this elite social world was determined by a number of factors: my own social, class, and national location; my occupational trajectory; and my gender. The ease and rapidity with which I was able to gain access to the elite of the Hindi film industry was a result of contacts emerging from my own social networks as a diasporic South Asian living in New York City. I could not have cultivated these particular networks if I had remained in India. Though my own family in India would be identified as solidly middle class, with every member of my parents’ generation having attended college and mostly pursuing careers in engineering or medicine, being from the southern state of AndhraPradesh and residing mainly in the cities of Calcutta and Hyderabad, the chances of me encountering individuals with close contacts to the Bombay film world, who would facilitate this sort of ethnographic research, would have been very remote.

My fieldwork was primarily enabled by two main sets of contacts— one set located in the film industry itself and the other located in the larger social world of filmmakers. My preliminary contacts within the film world were two daughters of a Hindi film screenwriter, both of whom I had met when I was living in Philadelphia as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. The younger of the two was a feature writer for the prominent English-language news magazine
India Today
, who mainly wrote about Hindi films and the film industry. She had a master of journalism degree from Northwestern University, after which she moved to Philadelphia to live with her sister and worked at
Harper’s Bazaar
in New York. The older sister was then an aspiring director (she’s had sev
eral films released since), who had trained at Temple Film School, directing television serials in 1996 and being mentored by a leading Hindi film director. Their mother had been a screenwriter for Hindi films since the mid-’80s. My other main contact was a personal friend from Bombay who I had met in New York, as a result of both of our husbands being faculty in the same department at NYU’s Stern School of Business. She had grown up in Bandra, a northwestern suburb of Bombay, with actors, directors, producers, and screenwriters as neighbors, and had gone to school with some actors as well. Her mother-in-law was actually on the Central Board of Film Certification located in Bombay, one of the ten boards that certifies films for exhibition. Her father-in-law had been an accountant and her brother-in-law a travel agent to some filmmakers.