Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (19 page)

The audiences frequenting multiplexes are the arbiters of taste, critical to a determination of Hindi films as cool. When asked if it was the people making films or the people watching them that accorded Hindi films their improved status, Vikram Bhatt replied, “It’s because the people who are watching the films that is allowing them to be cool” (Vikram Bhatt, interview, January 2006). Ghai-Puri elaborated that the “youth” demographic—in the Indian context most commonly used to refer to teenagers, college students, and people in their early twenties—was most responsible for Hindi cinema’s improved status. She explained that the
lavish material experience that multiplexes offer has made cinema-going among youth very attractive, hence, cool: “I think that multiplex culture has really brought in that coolness to Hindi movies. I think the coolness factor really comes from the teenagers, school-going, college kids—they always went to the cinema, but I think its becoming cooler now to go to the cinema because of the whole experience they’re getting when they go” (Ghai-Puri, interview, May 2006).

Bhatt elaborated that with the multiplexes and their particular audience profiles, the form and idioms of mainstream cinema were undergoing a transformation. Like Shah Rukh Khan, Bhatt described Indian cinema as a
nautanki
art form replete with melodrama and passion, “You know there was melodrama and there was screaming and ‘Gabbar Singh!
Main aa raha hoon
!’ [Gabbar Singh, I’m coming!] That kind of idiom was there, which is now finished; the audience laughs at that. So the audience wants more subtle, near-natural performances” ( Vikram Bhatt, interview, January 2006). Bhatt asserted that if filmmakers wanted to target younger audiences, then films had to appear “cool” since such audiences “don’t want to see ‘uncool’ things; they don’t want to see over-the-top drama; they don’t want to see the heroines cry; they want more subtle— the whole audience starts to get very edgy and shifty the minute that they know a very emotional scene is going to happen now. Somebody’s dead and the heroine is going to cry—they don’t want to see it. They’re like ‘Okay, just skip this; we understand her pain; let’s get on with it.’ So I think that’s the way it’s changing” (Vikram Bhatt, interview, January 2006). While a decade earlier Shah Rukh Khan credited a younger generation of filmmakers with reforming Hindi cinema from its melodramatic excesses, Bhatt here credits a younger generation of viewers for the same feat. Common to both perspectives is the function of affect and emotion in characterizing Hindi cinema as something either cringe-worthy or praise-worthy and the role of youth in bringing about cinematic change.

“Multiplex cinema” is, however, an ambiguous category in terms of form and content, since during my research I encountered notions of the multiplex film that were at variance with the characterizations presented above. The day I went to visit Tarun Kumar during his film shoot at Kamalistan Studios in January 2005, he was quite anxious, since his latest film,
Awaaz
(Sound), was about to release, and he was nervous about its box-office prospects since it did not boast a hugely popular cast of stars, though it was produced at a high budget.
²⁷
During lunch in his trailer, Kumar brought up the topic of his upcoming release and was particularly annoyed by the fact that another action film was opening on the same
Friday as his; then he reasoned, “Well, you know there are two different audiences actually for these films,
Awaaz
is really a multiplex film, while the other one is more a single-screen film.” Perplexed by his characterization, since
Awaaz
did not appear outside the conventions of mainstream Hindi cinema—it was a fast-paced thriller, about a man’s quest to capture a dreaded criminal, replete with songs and action sequences shot extensively in European locations—I said, “But I thought multiplex films were films like
Jhankaar Beats
and
Mumbai Matinee
”—films that focused on the various emotional and relationship dilemmas of upper middleclass Bombayites. Kumar responded patiently, “No, those are crossover films.
²⁸
Multiplex films are those [that] are more elite. Single-screen films are more massy.” Kumar’s statements revealed the symbolic capital carried by multiplexes within the film industry, mainly due to their association with elite audiences. By asserting that his film was a multiplex film, Kumar was signaling a host of associations that would accord his film status and prestige—the main being that urbane, educated, sophisticated audiences would want to see his film, which implied that his film was urbane, sophisticated, and cool.

An interest in filmmaker subjectivity led me to focus on the notion of coolness that has been so prominent during my fieldwork. This chapter has demonstrated how the discourse about coolness within the Hindi film industry is a discussion about cinematic quality, filmmaker subjectivity, and the social status of audiences. By examining Hindi filmmakers’ discourses of quality and change, this chapter explored how commercial filmmaking is a complex intersubjective endeavor, where audiences comprise the imagined interlocutors with whom filmmakers are in constant dialogue. It illustrated how a driving logic behind the oft-remarked transformation of Hindi filmmaking in the mid-to late 1990s was filmmakers’ desire for legitimation by social elites or individuals who were not regarded as the traditional audiences of Hindi cinema. Filmmakers’ narratives of change also reveal the significance of technologies of distribution, such as video, satellite television, and the multiplex theater, in mediating their subjectivities as cultural producers.

A prominent feature of the discussion about cinematic quality is the sentiment of disdain expressed toward certain films and certain audiences. Although, as “commercial” cultural producers, Hindi filmmakers are frequently identified with their audiences in media and scholarly dis
courses, what this chapter has shown is how filmmakers strive to distance themselves from the bulk of the viewing audience. For many years, a central tension for Hindi filmmakers was the disjuncture between their actual audience and their desired audience, a tension that appears to have been resolved with the arrival of the multiplex theater. Poor, workingclass, or other socially marginal audiences have been consistently scapegoated by filmmakers, both mainstream and alternative, as the root cause for bad cinema and substandard filmmaking. By contrast, middleclass and more socially elite audiences are represented as the catalyst for quality, since they enable, according to filmmakers, the pursuit of high standards and the realization of creative potential. Therefore, just as the urban middle class is represented as instrumental for a globalizing, “shining,” “new” India in state discourses (Fernandes 2006), middle-class audiences are represented as responsible for a modern, fashionable, new cinema in industry discourses. The correspondence between
middle-class identity
and high quality is not merely relegated to a discussion of film form and content, but also to the social world of the Hindi film industry.

The next chapter examines the significance of the middle-class as a normative social category in the film industry’s concern with respectability.

For a few days in March 2005, the Bombay film industry was embroiled in what became known as the “
casting couch
” scandal. India TV, a private television network and a recent entrant on the burgeoning Indian televisual landscape, aired footage one Sunday morning of a Hindi film actor, Shakti Kapoor, soliciting sex from a reporter, who was posing as an aspiring actress, in exchange for helping her to get her first break.
¹
The goal of this undercover “sting” operation—as it was referred to by India TV— was to expose the “casting couch” syndrome within the Bombay film industry and perform a crucial social service: according to the head of the network, “Parents of girls coming in from small towns to Mumbai can now tell their girls to be more careful” (Pherwani 2005).

What was interesting about this whole episode was the contrast between the media’s discussion of it and the film industry’s reaction to it. The press overwhelmingly described the manner in which the whole operation was conducted as entrapment, and the Indian media was dominated by criticism of India TV’s methods and goals, as well as discussions about journalistic ethics, right to privacy, and the boundaries between public and private.
²
While much of the public response was a type of cynical amusement, the film community’s response bordered on the hysterical. The uproar within the film industry was not caused by Kapoor’s attempts to exchange roles for sex, but that in his efforts to persuade the reporter/actress to have sex with him, Kapoor named
three of the top actresses of the film industry and asserted—on national television—that they had sex with top producers and directors, whom he also named, in exchange for roles.
³

The reaction of the industry was swift: the very next day, the Film and TV Producers Guild, an association of the most powerful producers in the industry, called for a ban against Kapoor, and condemned the “slanderous, mischievous, and unsubstantiated aspersions” cast by the actor against leading film personalities, advising its members not to hire Kapoor for any of their productions. In a statement to the press, the Guild also asserted, “The Guild would like to clarify to all concerned that all of its members who represent the cream of the entertainment industry have always stood for the highest moral, ethical, and professional values and have been the fountainhead of the growth of this vibrant industry” (“Call for Ban Against Shakti Kapoor” 2005). Although offering a public apology to all of those he had named, Kapoor maintained in interview after interview that the television channel had framed him. Producers, directors, and actors who were not a part of the Guild came out in support of Kapoor, expressing their solidarity at news conferences. By the end of the week, the Guild had lifted its ban on the actor as well.

That the Hindi film industry was in an uproar over this particular representation of itself as a lewd, lecherous, and hyper-sexualized space yields insights about the type of image that the industry has been trying to cultivate for decades: one that valorizes Indian middle-class norms of respectability and morality, explicitly linking the moral and social status of cinema with the class backgrounds of film personnel and film audiences. Reactions to Kapoor’s statements ranged from “He is maligning the industry and spoiling its name. I think everyone should take action against him for talking about respected people like this,” and “Our film industry is full of professionals who belong to respectable, cultured families,” to “It’s ridiculous to even point a finger at such respectable people. The Johars [the last name of one of the producers named by Kapoor] are the most decent and cultured people I’ve worked with” (Upala and Khan 2005).

In this chapter, I examine the anxiety and desire around the concept of respectability, which manifests itself not only during scandals like the Kapoor’s casting couch one, but in a myriad of everyday ways in the Hindi film industry. As apparent from K. Ahmad Abbas’s letter to Gandhi discussed in chapter one, Hindi filmmakers have been concerned with their social and moral reputations and garnering approval from social, cultural, and political elites for quite some time. When I first arrived in Bom
bay in 1996—nearly a decade prior to the Kapoor scandal—I encountered many declarations on how filmmaking was becoming a respectable profession as a result of the changing social and class backgrounds of recent entrants. This view was frequently expressed in a tautology: “The film industry is becoming a more respectable place because girls and boys from good families are now joining the industry; because the film industry has become more respectable, girls and boys from good families are now joining it.” The frequent pronouncements of respectability emphasized the industry’s tenuous claims to it, as the above scandal demonstrates.

This concern with respectability, which can be traced back to the early days of cinema in India, is a facet of the framework of disdain that characterizes the film industry’s production culture. The roots of moral
and
social stigma for the Hindi film industry are located across three main sites: the origins of its finance; the social origins of its members; and the class location of its audiences. As I discussed briefly in chapter one, the illicit nature of some of the sources of film financing as well as the film industry’s connections to the “black” economy and organized crime has been the object of censure by the state and the media for many decades. Parallel to the state’s anxiety over “black” money was the anxiety expressed by members of the film industry concerning “tainted” women—those from courtesan backgrounds—who became actresses in the earlier eras of cinema in India. Film journals in the 1930s acknowledged the moral stigma associated with cinema, positing that the involvement of women from educated upper-class backgrounds was the key to improving both the cinema and its reputation (Majumdar 2009). Finally, as chapter two’s discussion of trashy films and front-benchers demonstrated, the
gender
and class composition of its audiences also imparted an aura of disrepute to the film industry. The Hindi film industry has been involved in “stigma management” (Goffman 1963) across all three domains for quite some time.
⁴
While official industry status resolved the stigma connected to finance, the multiplex resolves the stigma associated with audiences. Here, I examine how filmmakers deploy the concept of respectability to manage the stigma associated with working in the industry.

Within the film industry, respectability is primarily articulated through the trope of the good family, which has its roots in the emergence of a middle class in nineteenth-century colonial India (Chatterjee 1993; Joshi 2001). Good families are defined by their upper-caste status, middle-class to upper-class position, high levels of formal education, practice of modern professional occupations (medicine, engineering, law, journalism, civil service, teaching), and gendered norms of sexual modesty. Since
actresses have historically borne the burden of the film industry’s moral reputation (Majumdar 2009), respectability also serves as a discursive framework for discussing women’s sexual behavior. Scholars tracing the history of the emergence of social groups identified as the middle class in Europe and South Asia or examining the contemporary formations of
middle-class identity
in both regions have demonstrated how the ideal of respectability is a defining feature in the self-constitution of a middle class.
⁵
Although the elite members of the Hindi film industry occupy an economic position much higher than the “middle” of Indian society, their explicit concerns about respectability reveal the normative power and value of middle-classness within their social world. Thus, for Hindi filmmakers, the disjuncture between class position and social status (Weber 1947: 428) results in efforts to reconcile the two through the display and performance of respectability.

I focus on these displays and performances of respectability, which operate as practices of “face-work” (Goffman 1955) by members of the Hindi film industry.
⁶
The ideas of “face” and “face-work” serve as useful frameworks with which to understand filmmakers’ concerns over and expressions of respectability. Goffman defines face as an “image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes” (1955: 213), and face-work as the actions that are necessary to appear consistent with this image. He points out that particular groups can have a characteristic repertoire of face-saving practices that structures the performance of face-work. Hindi filmmakers, in their efforts to appear respectable, draw on a set of practices, discourses, and tropes that moves their claims to this identity forward. For the remainder of the chapter, I detail the face-work practices of filmmakers. I first briefly relay the history of women’s participation in the film industry, since they have been at the center of the industry’s anxieties around respectability. Then, I describe the gendered dimensions of behavior on film sets and other spaces of production that reveal different norms of comportment and mobility for men and women. Finally, I examine the discursive sites of face-work: filmmakers’ narratives of how they entered the profession; their definitions and valorization of middle-class identity; and their value for formal higher education. While the neoliberal transformations of state and society in India are charged with reorienting the emphasis of middle-class identity (Deshpande 2003; Fernandes 2006; Mazzarella 2003), members of the film industry articulate a notion of respectability that draws on older understandings about middle-class behavior and practice.