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No Longer a Frivolous Singing and Dancing Nation of Movie-Makers: The Hindi Film Industry and Its Quest for Global Distinction

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08949468.2012.688473

1545-5920

Tejaswini Ganti,

South Asian Studies and Conflicts

Abstract This article discusses the unexpected trajectories of media production under the conditions of neoliberalism in India. Focusing on the Hindi-language film industry (better known as "Bollywood"), the article describes how the rise of neoliberal economic ideals in state policy has produced conditions within the film industry that make it possible for concerns about prestige, symbolic capital, and global distinction to take precedence over ideologies of comparative advantage and branding that are more commonly associated with neoliberalism. It illustrates how Hindi filmmakers regard their cinema's cultural distinctiveness as alienating and limiting rather than as an asset within the larger global cultural economy. The article argues that the contemporary moment of Hindi filmmaking is marked by efforts to erase, rather than highlight, the signs of cultural difference in order to circulate and accrue distinction globally. However, the article relates the challenges faced by Hindi filmmakers in trying to fashion a "global" and culturally unmarked cinema. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the filmmakers from Bombay quoted here, for allowing me to observe them at work and taking the time to answer numerous questions. I also thank Vipul Agrawal, Sonia Das, Ayala Fader, Faye Ginsburg, Brian Larkin, Fred Myers, Anne Rademacher, Sri Rupa Roy, Shalini Shankar, Aradhana Sharma and Karen Strassler for their feedback and comments on earlier versions of this article. Notes See http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=111129218899178andv=wallandref=ts (accessed August 26, 2010). Recent examples of such films include Rang De Basanti (Color Me Springtime, 2006), Cheeni Kum (Lacking Sugar, 2007), Jannat (Heaven, 2008), New York (2009), Wake Up Sid (2009), Kurbaan (Sacrifice, 2009), Paa (2009), Kites (2010), Raajneeti (Politics, 2010), My Name Is Khan (2010), Aisha (2010), Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai (2010), Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (You Only Live Once, 2011), Delhi Belly (2011), and The Dirty Picture (2011). Gopal and Moorti note in the introduction to Global Bollywood, "Frequently remarked upon by insiders and always remarkable to outsiders, song-dance occupies the constitutive limit of Bollywood cinema" [2008: 1]. For example, Amol Palekar submitted a song-less version of his film Dayraa (The Square Circle) to the London Film Festival in 1996. The song-less version of Prakash Jha's Mrityudand (Death Sentence) was screened during the Human Rights Film Festival (June 1998, New York); the producer-director Yash Chopra removed most of the songs from Lamhe (Moments) when he released a dubbed English version on video for the United Kingdom. Perhaps the most ironic instance was the song-less version of Ram Gopal Varma's Satya (1998) being screened at New York University's "Dancing in the Rain"—a symposium about Indian and Egyptian musicals, held in 1999. Unlike the U.S. government, which from early in the 20th century treated filmmaking as a business and helped Hollywood distribute its films globally, the Indian state did not accord filmmaking very much economic significance—even though shortly after Independence India became the second largest film-producing country in the world. "Audience imaginary" is my way of marking the distinction between filmmakers' discursive constructions of the vast film-going public and socially and historically located viewers who are infinitely more complex than filmmakers' characterizations. Scholars have long argued that producers generate "audience fictions" to manage the inherent unpredictability of audience response, and these fictions are an integral part of the media production process [Allor Citation1996; Anderson Citation1996; Ang Citation1991; Bennett Citation1996; Blumler Citation1996; Ohmann Citation1996b; Traube Citation1996]. Not only has scholarship on media production amply demonstrated that audiences are always prefigured in the production process [Ang Citation1991; Cantor Citation1988; Crawford and Hafsteinsson Citation1993; Davila Citation2001; Dornfeld Citation1998; Espinosa Citation1982; Gans Citation1957; Kapsis Citation1986; Mazzarella 2003; Ohmann Citation1996a; Zafirau Citation2009a, Citation2009b]; 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 Citation1994]. For a detailed examination of 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, see Ganti [Citation2000, Citation2012]. For an account of how Hindi filmmakers imagine their audiences in the context of specific production practices such as remaking Hollywood films see Ganti [Citation2002]. Other scholars who have discussed Indian filmmakers' audience imaginaries include Grimaud [Citation2006], Thomas [Citation1995], and L. Srinivas [Citation2005]. Examples include Bhoot (Ghost, 2003), Chak De India (2007), Bheja Fry (2007), A Wednesday (2008), Love Sex aur Dhokha (2009). Nautanki is a form of traditional musical theater originating and performed in northern India, in the present states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. When Hindi filmmakers term a film a "musical," they are referring to one that is explicitly about music/musicians/performers in some way. The mere existence of songs does not automatically make a film a "musical" within the genre distinctions of popular Hindi cinema. By this time, HMV was no longer a subsidiary of the multinational company but part of the Goenka group of companies, an Indian industrialist/business family. Everyone still referred to the music company as HMV, and the cassettes and CDs would still have the HMV logo along with the RPG logo of the Goenka group. In comparison, the most successful non-film pop album, Made in India, by the Hindi pop star Alisha Chinoy had sold 2.2 million units [Chaya Citation1996: 39]. For a film album to be considered profitable it had to sell at least 1 million units. The screenwriter relayed his experience but asked me to keep the details of the film in confidence, as he did not want the director to learn of his feelings; so the name of the film, director and writer are pseudonyms. Foreign governments aim for the "Bollywood Effect"—a reference to the dramatic increases in tourist arrivals from India that are registered after several Hindi films have been shot in a particular region. It is a term that is used in official tourist promotion policy documents in Britain, Australia and other countries that are trying to court Hindi filmmakers to shoot in their countries. Members of the industry define the masses vaguely in terms of occupation—such as domestic workers, manual laborers, motor rickshaw drivers, taxi-drivers, factory workers—and implicitly gender them as exclusively male, and characterize them as either illiterate or having had very little formal education. For years, in media, state and scholarly discourses, the masses were posited as the root cause of Hindi cinema's narrative, thematic and aesthetic deficiencies, and I discovered that the majority of filmmakers I met professed similar views. For more about Hindi filmmakers' and their understandings of the "masses," see Ganti [Citation2000, Citation2009, Citation2012]. The first Oscar nomination that India had ever received was for the 1957 Hindi film, Mother India, which like Lagaan was also a product of the mainstream Hindi film industry. The other Indian film that had been nominated was Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay (1988), which was not a product of the Hindi film industry at all. Lagaan contained six songs, a 222-minute running-time, clear-cut heroes and villains, and starred Aamir Khan, one of the most popular actors of the Hindi film industry. However, these non-lip-synch songs are by no means "background" or unobtrusive in the manner that Beeman [Citation1988] discusses the use of music in American cinema. Non-lip-synch songs in contemporary Hindi films continue to be prominent in the soundscape of a film, often expressing the psychological state of a character or the emotional tenor of a particular situation. For more on the masses-classes binary in Hindi filmmakers' understandings of their audiences, see Ganti [Citation2000, Citation2012]. Neither film contained a lip-synch song sequence characteristic of mainstream Hindi cinema. In Monsoon Wedding the sequence takes place at one of the pre-wedding celebrations and involves a young couple dancing and periodically lip-synching to a song that is from the Hindi film, Biwi No. 1. The song was not created for Monsoon Wedding and because the sequence takes place during the sangeet function of a Punjabi wedding—an occasion normally marked by a great deal of singing and dancing (often to popular film songs)—the song sequence does not represent a sharp departure from the film's overall realist codes. In the case of Slumdog Millionaire, the "Jai-Ho" song appears at the very end of the film right before the closing credits and the dance sequence there operates as a sort of clichéd reference to the stereotype of Bollywood cinema, where large groups of people suddenly appear and start dancing, in this example in a railroad station. Reliance Big Pictures, the film's co-producer and worldwide distributor, had a prior relationship with Ratner as part of its major injection of capital into Hollywood filmmaking. This motivation probably stems from the fact that Hrithik Roshan possesses considerable dancing skills and is regarded as one of the best dancers in the Hindi film industry. The film grossed $959,329 from 207 screens for the weekend of 21–23 May 2010. The website Box Office Mojo mentions that Kites reached its 10th place position because the top four films that weekend were dominating the box-office, while My Name Is Khanwhich grossed more money its opening weekend came in at 13th. http://boxofficemojo.com/ weekend/chart/?yr = 2010andwknd = 21andp.htm (accessed May 31, 2011.). The film earned $31,191 from 40 screens during its opening weekend for an abysmally low per-screen average of $780, debuting at number 53 in the May 28–31, 2010, weekend's box-office collections. http://boxofficemojo.com/weekend/chart/?yr=2010andwknd=22aandp=.htm (accessed May 31, 2011). Film Information (Mumbai): May 22, 2010: 7; May 29, 2010: 13. Additional informationNotes on contributorsTejaswini Ganti TEJASWINI GANTI is an Associate Professor in Anthropology and its Program in Culture and Media, at New York University. She has done research on the social world and practices of the Hindi film industry since 1996, and is the author of Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry [Duke University Press 2012] and Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema [Routledge 2004; 2nd edn. forthcoming].