A review of Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry, Tejaswini Ganti, Duke University Press, 2012.
Imagine you are a foreign graduate student doing fieldwork in Hollywood and that you get to sit in a two-hour long interview with a major film star like Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp. This is precisely what happened to Tejaswini Ganti in the course of her graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania when she was researching the local film industry in Mumbai, now better known as Bollywood. And it happened not only once: she sat in interviews with legendary actors such as Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Shashi Kapoor, Sanjay Dutt, Amrish Puri, actress Ayesha Jhulka, as well as top producers and directors Aditya Chopra, Rakesh Roshan, and Subhash Ghai. What made this access possible? Why was a twenty-something PhD student in anthropology from New York able to meet some of the biggest celebrities in India? And what does it reveal about Bollywood? Obviously, this is not the kind of access a graduate student normally gets. Privileged access is usually granted to journalists, media critics, fellow producers, and other insiders. They observe the film industry for a reason: they are part of the larger media system, and they play a critical role in informing the public, evaluating new releases, building the legend of movie stars, and contributing to box-office success. As an anthropologist, Tejaswini Ganti’s approach to the Hindi film industry is different. As she states in her introduction, “my central focus is on the social world of Hindi filmmakers, their filmmaking practices, and their ideologies of production.” Her book explores “how filmmakers’ subjectivities, social relations, and world-views are constituted and mediated by their experiences of filmmaking.” As such, she produces little value for the marketization of Bollywood movies: her book may be read only by film students and fellow academics, and is not geared towards the general public. As befits a PhD dissertation, her prose is heavy with theoretical references. She draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of symbolic capital and his arguments about class, taste, and the practice of distinction. She uses Erving Goffman’s concept of face-work to describe the quest for respectability and avoidance of stigma in a social world associated with black money, shady operators, and tainted women. She steeps herself in industry statistics of production budgets, commercial outcomes, annual results, and box-office receipts, only to note that these figures are heavily biased and do not give an accurate picture of the movie industry in Mumbai.
Getting access
Part of Tejaswini Ganti’s success in getting access to the A-list of the Hindi film industry stems from her position of extraneity. As an “upper middle-class diasporic South Asian female academic from New York,” she didn’t benefit from “the privilege of white skin”—white European or American visitors could get access to the studios or film shoots in a way that no ethnic Indian outsider could—but she was obviously coming from outside and was not involved in power games or media strategies. For her initial contacts, she used the snowballing technique: personal friends in Philadelphia who had ties with the industry in Mumbai provided initial recommendations and helped her make her way through the personal networks and kinship relations that determine entry and access at every stage. Two different directors offered her the chance to join the team of directors assistants for two films, fulfilling the need for participant observation that remains a sine qua non in anthropology studies. People were genuinely puzzled by her academic interest in such a mundane topic (“You mean you can get a PhD in this in America?”) and eager to grant an interview to an outsider who had no stake in the game. Being a woman also helped: she “piqued curiosity and interest, often standing out as being one of the few—and sometimes only—women on a film act.” As she notes, she “did not seem to fit in any of the expected roles for women—actress, dancer, journalist, hair dresser, costume designer, or choreographer—visible at various production sites.” Contrary to common understanding about the gendered dimension of fieldwork, she actually had a harder time meeting women, specifically the actresses. She also experienced her share of sexual harassment, but as a young married woman with a strong will and a sharp wit she was able to handle unwelcome advances and derogatory remarks. Last but not least, dedicating an academic study to Bollywood provided a certain cachet and prestige to an industry that was desperately in need of social recognition. Actors and filmmakers strived not only for commercial success, but also for critical acclaim and cultural appraisal. A high-brow academic study by an American scholar gave respectability to the Hindi film industry “which for decades had been the object of much disparagement, derisive humor, and disdain.”
She also came at a critical juncture in the history of the Hindi film industry. She carried out her fieldwork for twelve months in 1996 and completed her dissertation in 2000, a period associated with the neoliberal turn in India’s political economy. She made shorter follow-up visits in 2005 and 2006, and her book was published by Duke University Press in 2012, at a time when neoliberalism was in full swing and the nationalist right was ascending. The Hindi film industry’s metamorphosis into Bollywood would not have been possible without the rise of neoliberal economic ideals in India. Along with the rest of the economy, the movie industry experienced a shift from public to private, from production to distribution, from domestic audiences to global markets, and from entertainment for the masses to gentrified leisure. The role of the state changed accordingly. At the time of independence, most leaders viewed the cinema as “low” and “vulgar” entertainment, popular with the uneducated “masses.” Gandhi declared many times that he had never seen a single film, comparing cinema with other “vices” such as satta (betting), gambling, and horseracing. Unlike Gandhi, Nehru was not averse to the cinema, but was critical of the kind of films being made at the time. He exhorted filmmakers to make “socially relevant” films to “uplift” the masses an to use cinema as a modernization tool in line with the developmentalist objectives of the state. He created a cultural bureaucracy to maximize the educational potential of movies, with institutions such as Doordarshan, the public service broadcaster, and the Films Division, the state-funded documentary film producer. Prohibitive policies such as censorship and taxation as well as bans on theater construction limited the development of commercial cinema, even though India soon became the most prolific film producing country in the world. How to explain the shift in attitudes toward mainstream cinema, from being a heavily criticized and maligned form of media to one which the state actually celebrated, touting as an example of India’s success in the international arena? There was, first, a rediscovery of cinema as national heritage, starting with the public celebrations of the cinema centenary in 1996. Cinema was also rehabilitated as an economic venture: large corporations such as the Birla Group, Tata Group, Sahara, Reliance, and others began to invest in the sector, displacing the shady operators that had associated Indian cinema with organized crime and money laundering. Multiplex construction replaced the old movie houses that had catered to the tastes and low budgets of the rural masses. Local authority started to offer tax breaks for films shot in their territory, while government agencies began to promote the export of Indian films to foreign markets. Formerly seen as a tool for social change, cinema was now envisaged as an engine of economic growth.
The gentrification of cinema
The result of this neoliberal turn was a gentrification of cinema. This transformation was reflected in the attitudes towards cinema, the ideology of industry players, the economic structure of the sector, and the content of movies themselves. One of the facts that surprised the author the she began her fieldwork in 1996 was the frequent criticism voiced by Hindi filmmakers concerning the industry’s work culture, production practices, and quality of filmmaking, as well as the disdain with which they viewed audiences. In discussions with filmmakers, the 1980s emerged as a particularly dreadful period of filmmaking, in contrast with both earlier and later periods of Hindi cinema. The arrival of VCR recorders and the advent of cable TV was hollowing out the market for theater moviegoing from both ends, resulting in a decline in cinematic quality. The upper classes completely skipped domestic cinema, the middle class increasingly turned to television and video recording, and working class audiences had access to video parlors where a simple hall with a television and a VCR replaced large-screen theaters. Filmmakers had no choice but to cater to the base instincts of the public, resulting in trashy movies with clichéd plots and dialogues, excessive violence, explicit sex, and vulgar choreography. The young ethnographer saw a marked evolution in her return visits to the field after 2000: while the Indian state recognized filmmaking as a legitimate cultural activity, filmmakers themselves began to feel pride in their work and became accepted into social and cultural elites. For Tejaswini Ganti, respectability 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. Urban middle classes were celebrated in state and media discourse as the main agents of social change as well as markers of modernity and development in India. A few blockbusters created a box-office bonanza and ushered in a new era for Bollywood movies. Released in 1995, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, better known by the initialism DDLJ, featured two young lovers (played by Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol) born and raised in Britain who elope in beautiful sceneries shot in Switzerland before facing the conflicting interests of their families in India. Love stories with extremely wealthy and often transnational characters began to replace former plots that often focused on class conflict, social injustice, and youthful rebellion. As the author notes, “through their valorization of patriarchy, the Hindu joint family, filial duty, feminine sexual modesty, and upper class privilege, the family films of the mid- to late 1990s were much more conservative than films from earlier eras; however, their visual, narrative, and performative style made them appear modern and ‘cool’.”
More than the content of films themselves, the material conditions of film-viewing and filmmaking were quoted as the main impetus for elite and middle-class audiences to return to cinema halls. The 1990s saw the advent of the era of the multiplex: with their smaller seating capacities, location in urban centers, and much higher ticket prices, multiplex theaters transformed the cinematic experience and allowed filmmakers to produce movies that would not have been commercially viable in the previous system. “What the multiplex has done today is release the producer from having to cater to the lowest common denominator,” says veteran actress Shabana Azmi. Indian middle-class norms of respectability and morality were embraced by the cinematic profession who sought to redeem its image formerly associated with organized crime, loose morals, and vulgar audiences. Girls from “good families” began to enter the industry as actresses, dancers, or assistants, their chastity protected by chaperones and new norms of decency on film sets: “while actresses frequently had to wear sexy, revealing clothing in certain sequences, once they were off camera their body language changed, going to great pains to cover themselves and create a zone of modesty and privacy in the very male and very public space of the set.” Male actors and directors also “performed respectability” and accomplished “face-work” by emphasizing their higher education credentials and middle-class lifestyle that cast them apart from “filmi” behavior—with the Indian English term filmi implying ostentation, flamboyance, crudeness, and amorality. Many individuals whose parents were filmmakers explained to the author that their parents had consciously kept them away from the film world. But many actors and directors were second-generation professionals who entered the industry through family connections and kinship networks. In Bollywood, cinema remains a family business, and while the Hindi film industry is very diverse in terms of linguistic, regional, religious, and caste origins of its members, the unifying characteristic of the contemporary industry is its quasi-dynastic structure. Getting a foothold into the profession requires connections, patience, and, at least in the stereotypical view associated with female actresses, a reliance on the “casting couch.”
An ethnography of Bollywood
This is why the kind of unmediated access, direct observation, and participatory experience that Tejaswini Ganti was able to accumulate makes Producing Bollywood a truly exceptional piece of scholarship. The author provides a “thick description” of an average day on an Hindi film set, rendering conversations, power relations, and social hierarchies. She emphasizes the prevalence of face-to-face relations, the significance of kinship as a source of talent, and the highly oral style of working. She depicts the presence of Hindi rituals, which have become incorporated into production routines, as well as the tremendous diversity—regional, linguistic, and religious—of members of the film industry. The movie industry is often analyzed through the lenses of Hollywood norms and practices: her ethnography of Bollywood aims at dislodging Hollywood from its default position by describing a different work culture based on improvisation, on-the-job training, and oral contracts. Films, deals, and commitments are made on the basis of face-to-face communication and discussion between key players, rather than via professional mediators or written materials. Actors, directors, writers, or musicians do not have any formal gatekeepers or agents as proxies for attaining work. If a producers wants a particular star for a film, he speaks directly with him. Heroines are usually chosen after the male star, director, and music director have been finalized for a film project, and are frequently regarded as interchangeable. Spending time on a Hindi film set, it is hard to miss the stark contrast between stars and everyone else around them, especially the way stars are accorded a great deal more basic comfort than the rest of the cast and crew. Chorus dancers and extras—referred to as “junior artists”—often do not have access to makeup rooms or even bathrooms. At any given point in time, only about five or six actors are deemed top stars by the industry, based on their box-office draw and performance. This makes the kind of access that the junior ethnographer enjoyed all the more exceptional.
Cinema is a risky business, and managing the uncertainty endemic to the filmmaking process is a key part of how the movie industry operates. Hindi filmmakers aim to reduce the risks and uncertainties involved with filmmaking in a variety of ways, from the most apparently superstitious practices—from conducting a ritual prayer to Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god regarded as the remover of obstacles, to breaking a coconut to celebrate the first shoot of the day—to more perceptible forms of risk reduction, such as always working with the same team of people or remaking commercially successful films from the Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam film industries. Although the driving force within the Mumbai industry is box-office success, it is a difficult goal, achieved by few and pursued by many. The reported probability of a Hindi film achieving success at the box-office ranges from 10 to 15 percent every year. The entry of the Indian corporate sector in the twenty-first century has infused the industry with much-needed capital and management skills. Many of the new companies have integrated production and distribution, which reduces uncertainties around the latter. Measures such as film insurance, coproductions, product placement, and marketing partnerships with high-profile consumer brands have also mitigated some of the financial uncertainties of filmmaking. The gentrification of cinema and the growth of multiplexes have helped to reduce the perception of uncertainty associated with filmmaking by reducing the reliance on mass audiences and single-screen cinemas. With their high ticket prices, social exclusivity, and material comforts, multiplexes have significantly transformed the economics of filmmaking. So has the growing importance of international audiences, with the South Asian diaspora providing one of the most profitable markets for Bollywood filmmakers. Diasporic audiences, especially in North America and the United Kingdom, are perceived as more predictable than domestic audiences. Not only has the multiplex and the gentrification of cinema created new modes of sociability and reordered public space, but it has also reshaped filmmakers’ audience imaginaries. Filmmakers still strive to produce the “universal hit,” a movie that can please “both aunties and servants,” but at the same time they complain that audiences are not “mature” enough to accept more risqué stories or artistically ambitious productions. This definition of the public as divided between “the masses and the classes” operates as a form of doxa—that which is completely naturalized and taken for granted—within the film industry.
The role of the state
The Hindi film industry offers a living proof example that competing against Hollywood’s dominance does not require huge barriers on imported films nor the provision of massive subsidies to domestic movies. In the movie industry as in other sectors, the role of the government is to set the broad economic environment promoting a sound and stable legal regime that is required by film companies. On this basis, film companies develop their business strategies, in particular they take the high risks inherent with this industry. A healthy domestic market requires that films from all origins compete on a level playing field to attract the largest number of domestic moviegoers. But very often the intervention of governments in the film industry goes beyond the provision of a level playing field. Public support such as subsidies, import restrictions, screen quotas, tax relief schemes, and specialized financial funds holds a preeminent place in the film policies of many countries. A generous film subsidy policy or certain import quotas can inflate the number of domestic films produced; but they rarely nurture a sustainable industry and often translate into a decline in film quality and viewers’ experience. In India, the government took the opposite direction to regulating the sector. Instead of subsidizing the industry, economic policies have treated cinema as a source of tax revenue rather than as an engine of growth. The main bulk of taxation is collected by individual state governments through the entertainment tax, which is a sales tax imposed on box-office receipts, ranging from 20 to 75 percent. India’s cinema industry has faced other regulatory hurdles, such as restrictions on screen construction that have hindered the expansion of cinemas, especially in smaller towns and cities. Even after being accorded official status as a private industry in 2001, moviemakers had tremendous difficulty in obtaining institutionalized funding, except for those already established companies that don’t need the capital and that can capitalize on lower bank interest rates compared to private financiers. The influx of capital from established financial institutions and business groups also brought in much needed management skills and planning capabilities. As a result, Bollywood has outperformed most of its competitors across a range of key dimensions (number of films produced, box office revenues, etc.) with much lower level of subsidies than the other countries and—above all from a cultural perspective—with an increase in quality and popular appeal of movies when compared to an earlier period or to foreign productions. Put that to the credit of neoliberalism.
I am interested in the history of anthropology. But there is a great disconnect in the way this history gets told. It stops at the point when it really should start. Anthropology is rich with disciplinary ancestors and founding fathers. Bronisław Malinowski and Franz Boas laid solid foundations for the discipline, teaching their contemporaries that no society, including their own, was the end point of human social evolution. The discipline has a few founding queens as well: Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, who both studied under Boas, contributed to a fundamental reimagining of human diversity that allowed for the turn toward greater tolerance and inclusion in postwar America. History books go in great detail in discussing their contribution to the field and how a few great debates shaped the discipline. They highlight a Golden Age of anthropology in which the discipline was relevant, not only for other academic specialties, but for addressing the pressing concerns of the day. As of today, an anthropology major will give prospective students a valuable perspective on matters like diversity and multiculturalism, race and gender, globalization and political conflict, religions and secular beliefs, and much more. But history books all stop when the party gets started. They never mention the controversies and paradigm shifts that form the bedrock of contemporary research. The references they quote are absolutely of no use in writing current anthropology. Bibliographies of recently published articles rarely, if ever, mention publications antedating the 1990s. It seems as if the discipline reinvented itself at some point and discarded its former self.
In Dreadful Desires, Charlie Yi Zhang advocates “a new approach” and “a different perspective” on love and neoliberalism in contemporary China. As he describes it, “My study integrates the discursive with the ethnographic and combines grave scrutiny of political economies and empirical data with upbeat examinations of popular cultures.” His grave and upbeat essay documents how a neoliberal market logic permeates expressions of love and aspirations for a good life, and how a fiercely competitive conjugal market, polarized gender relationships, and residency-differenciated precarities in turn produce willful subjects who are ready to sacrifice their well-being to maximize the interests of the state and capital. Its content and writing style also reflect his personal background and professional training. Having left China in his late twenties to pursue an academic career in the US, Zhang returned to his homeland for a few months of fieldwork in 2012 in order to complete his PhD in gender studies at Arizona State University. He was subsequently hired by the University of South Dakota to teach global studies to undergraduate students for two years, then landed a job as Associate Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies at Kentucky University, where he completed his book manuscript. During his graduate studies, his sociology professor taught him “how to combine different methodologies into [his] unique voice.” He claims to have developed “a novel theoretical and methodological approach” that builds an “epistemic ground for fundamental change.” His ambition is no less than “to lay the foundation for better futures” and “to develop a different understanding of global neoliberalism and to transform the current system.” His book is published in the Thought in the Act series edited by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, two Canadian theoreticians working at the intersection of philosophy and art critique.
In his book Oriental Despotism, published in 1957, historian Karl Wittfogel introduced the notion of the hydraulic state as a social or government structure which maintains power and authority through exclusive control over access to water. He believed that Asian civilizations veered towards despotism because of the collective work needed for maintaining irrigation and flood-control systems. In Hydraulic City, anthropologist Nikhil Anand asks how water infrastructures and urban citizenship can be sustained in a country known for its messy democracy and bottom-up style of governance. The case of Mumbai’s water services exemplifies all that is wrong with Indian democracy: the failure to provide basic public services and carry out job-creating infrastructure projects; the inability to recover the costs of supplying water; and the politics of patronage and clientelist networks that tie impoverished residents to local power-brokers. And yet one is forced to acknowledge the resilience of the Indian system of governance in the face of chronic underinvestment and fledging democracy. The hydraulic city that emerges from this description is not a centralized formation of power, but rather a network or an assemblage of pipes, storage reservoirs, and valves, more or less controlled by a variety of residents, engineers, and administrators that move water in the city. Hydraulic City addresses the paradoxes of Indian cities where planned, improvised, intended and accidental mechanisms simultaneously shape the urban fabric. The” infrastructures of citizenship” that it describes combine the material infrastructure of leaking pipes and draining reservoirs, the market infrastructure that makes water demand meet supply, and the political economy of patronage relations around water provision.
When I heard Lisa Messeri had written an ethnography about space research, my first reaction was: what’s an anthropologist like her doing in a place like this? How can one study outer space with the tools and methods of social science? What is the distinct contribution of the anthropologist in a field dominated by rocket scientists and big bang theoreticians? What can the cosmos teach us about ourselves that is not grounded in hard science and space observatory data? To be sure, there is no anthropos to study in outer space, and other worlds are beyond the grasp of the ethnographer. The sociology of other planets remains a big question mark. So far, you cannot make participatory observation in space stations or conduct fieldwork on Mars. We may hire anthropologists, linguists, semioticians, and indeed all the help we can get when we encounter extraterrestrial civilizations and extraplanetary forms of life; but so far these close encounters of the third type remain the stuff of science-fiction novels and blockbuster movies. But on second thought, an anthropologist in outer space is not completely out of place. Anthropologists have always accompanied explorers and discoverers to the frontiers of human knowledge. They helped us understand alien cultures and foreign civilizations to make them less distant, and drew lessons from their immersion into other worlds for our own society. Anthropologists make the strange and the alien look familiar, and the “view from afar” that they advocate also makes our own planet look alien and unfamiliar. They also help us make sense of science’s results and methods, and have been a trusted if somewhat critical companion of scientific research and laboratory life. Science and technology studies (STS in the jargon) have taught us that natural scientists—contrary to a common prejudice—are never simply depicting or describing reality out there “just as it is”: their research is always characterized by a specific style and colored by the “scientific imagination.”
In 1990, Youssou N’Dour, Senegal’s most famous musician, released an album titled Set. The main song had the following line: Set, set oy. Ni set, set ci sa xel lo, ni set ci sa jëff oy… I had no idea what it meant, but in her book Garbage Citizenship, Rosalind Fredericks provides translation and context: Cleanliness, oh cleanliness. Be clean, pure in your spirit, clean in your acts… The injunction to be clean and to make clean (set setal in wolof), repeated in the song’s chorus, echoes the rallying cry of a grassroot movement in which young men and women set out to clean the city of Dakar from its accumulating garbage, substituting a failing urban waste infrastructure and denouncing the corruption of a polluted political sphere. Labelled as an exemplary case of participatory citizenship and youth mobilization, the movement was captured by political clientelism and made to serve the neoliberal objectives of labor force flexibility and public sector cutbacks. At the height of the movement in 1989, Dakar’s mayor made a shrewd political calculus to recruit youth activists into a citywide participatory trash-collection system. Their incorporation into the trash sector was facilitated by a discourse of responsibility through active participation in the cleanliness of the city. They became the backbone of the municipal waste management system and remain included in the sector’s labor force to this day. The history of the Set/Setal movement is only one of the case studies that Rosalind Fredericks develops in her book. The author finds the same activists who spontaneously took to the streets to clean up Dakar in 1988-89 having moved into low-pay positions as trash workers in a reorganized infrastructure that used derelict garbage trucks and often delayed payment of salaries. Together with their labor union leaders, they staged another kind of public protest in 2005-07: the garbage strike, supported by Dakar inhabitants who brought their household dumpings to the main arteries of the capital and piled them for all politicians to see. Other cases studied by the author include a NGO-led, community-based trash collection project in a peripheral neighborhood mobilizing voluntary women’s labor and horse-drawn carts, and the functioning of a trash workers’ union movement affirming the dignity of labor through discourses of Islamic piety.
In Brazil, women claim the right to be beautiful. When nature and the passing of time don’t help, beauty can be achieved at the end of a scalpel. Plastic surgery or plástica is not only a status good or the preserve of socialites and celebrities: according to Ivo Pitanguy, the most famous Brazilian plastic surgeon and a celebrity himself, “The poor have the right to be beautiful too.” And they are banking on that right. Rio and São Paulo have some of the densest concentrations of plastic surgeons in the world, and financing plans have made plástica accessible to the lower middle class and even to favela residents. While in the United States, people may hide that they have had plastic surgery like it’s something shameful, in Brazil they flaunt it. The attitude is that having work done shows you care about yourself—it’s a status symbol as well as a statement of self-esteem. Cosmetic surgery’s popularity in Brazil raises a number of interesting questions. How did plastic surgery, a practice often associated with body hatred and alienation, take root in a country known for its glorious embrace of sensuality and pleasure? Is beauty a right which, like education or health care, should be realized with the help of public institutions and fiscal subsidies? Does beauty reinforce social hierarchies, or is attractiveness a “great equalizer” that neutralizes or attenuates the effects of class and gender? Does plástica operate on the body or on the mind, and is it a legitimate medical act or a frivolous and narcissistic pursuit? Does beauty work alienate women or is it a way to bring them into the public sphere?
Anthropology in America at the turn of the twentieth century presents us with a double paradox. Cultural anthropologists wanted to protect Indian traditions from the violent onslaught of settler colonialism, and yet prominent voices among Indian Americans accused them of complicity with the erasure of their beliefs and cultural practices. They thought the culture that African Americans inherited from exile and slavery was not worthy of preservation and should dissolve itself into the American mainstream, and yet African American intellectuals praised them for the recognition of cultural difference that their discipline allowed. As Lee Baker puts it, “African American intellectuals consistently appropriated anthropology to authenticate their culture, while Native American intellectuals consistently rejected anthropology to protect their culture.” What made cultural assimilation the preferred choice in one case, and cultural preservation the best option in the second? How did the twin concepts of race and culture shape the development of anthropology as an academic discipline? In Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture, Lee Baker introduces a distinction between in-the-way people, the so-called “Negroes” as black persons were designated and self-identified at the time, and out-of-the-way people, the Native Americans or “Indians” who were relegated to the margins of American society.
The Duke Reader 