Chapter 5
Bollywood
Amitabh in Piccadilly and Rajnikant in Tokyo
It was the summer of 1999, and Amitabh Bachchan was walking down London’s Piccadilly Circus, trying not to be recognized. Major Indian movie stars could still in 1999 hope to walk anonymously in Piccadilly, but Bachchan was not surprised when a group of movie fans suddenly placed him. What was surprising was who they were.
‘I saw this group of Kurds running towards me’, he says, and his instant reaction mobilized a racial‐religious stereotype: ‘I thought they wanted to assassinate me.’ But then, ‘They stopped right there and started singing songs from Amar Akbar Anthony and Muqaddar ka Sikandar.’
The encounter led him to some further musings. ‘Hindi cinema is gaining worldwide recognition,’ he said to the Times of India (18 July, 1999). ‘I don’t mean only those films which make it to Berlin or Cannes … Rajnikant is tremendously popular in Japan. And I’m told that our stars are known even in Fiji, Bali and Chile. Amazing!’ It led him to a strange admission. ‘But we’re not marketing ourselves properly,’ he said ruefully. ‘Someone out there is making pots of money at our expense.’
So who is this ‘someone’ and how come Bachchan doesn’t know? His puzzled incomprehension of an audience out there reproduces the same bemused ambivalence with which the Indian movie industry has responded to news of audiences outside their familiar domains. Stories of 1950s and 1960s megastar Raj Kapoor’s much touted popularity in China and Turkey in the 1950s, or of 1980s ‘disco dancer’ Mithun Chakraborty’s fame in the Soviet Union, are bizarre oddities to an Indian cinema that has historically assumed that its enormous local impact, by its very nature, disqualifies it from imagining an audience beyond the domestic one. Or that, if there is at all a global audience, it must necessarily consist only of India’s diaspora: that nobody else really cared.
Statistics seemed to confirm this belief. Although India remains the world’s largest film producer, in 2011 its box office revenue worldwide was US $1.5 billion, of which only a tiny 8 per cent came from outside the country: 6 per cent from the USA alone, and only 2 per cent from the rest of the world. In contrast, China that year overtook India with a revenue of US $2.03 billion, of which 44 per cent came from foreign markets. The world was yet to be convinced that Bachchan’s Kurds, Chileans, and Fijians, Chakraborty’s Russians, or Rajnikant’s Japanese make for a credible global market.
The question really has been why not: what prevents the apparently large numbers of people watching Indian films worldwide from becoming an accountable audience? For one possible answer, we could extrapolate from the study of traditional Muslim audiences of Indian cinema in Europe by German scholar Christiane Brosius. Indian films, she says, have often played the role of a helping hand to enable first generation migrants to recognize that culture is something that one has to appreciate. Where schools and networks such as cultural and religious centres are seen as failing to provide adequate socialization for diasporic audiences, film serves as a backdrop for negotiations, and the dramatization of ‘we Muslims don’t do that’ versus ‘they are doing it’.
One consequence for such cultural access is that the Indian cinema abroad is viewed as creating an elusive, even fugitive audience, a public willing to consume but not necessarily willing to ‘come out’. It is increasingly evident that such a public is not confined to the Indian diaspora, but includes, say, Nigerian Hausa viewers, who engage with the fantasy worlds of Indian cinema ‘as a secure third space’, in the words of anthropologist Brian Larkin. Turkish film scholar Ahmet Gurata shows how the title song of Raj Kapoor’s Awara/The Vagabond (1951) was played throughout Turkey, was the top-selling record, and was performed by a number of Turkish singers who circulated it as a Turkish record in music markets, going on to ‘literally become part of folk culture when Turkish folklorist İlhan Başgöz recorded a folk version in 1957 in the eastern city of Kars’. And it includes Koreans enrolling for Bollywood dance classes in Seoul, who explicitly claim that this is their local culture, and has nothing to do with India.
Bachchan’s bafflement at meeting his Kurdish fans would be echoed yet again in 1995, when the Tamil film Muthu, featuring Rajnikant, Tamil cinema’s biggest superstar ever, was released in 1999 at Tokyo’s Cinema Rise. To everyone’s surprise the film netted US $1.7 million over a nine-week run. Scrambling for some kind of cultural explanation, its executive producer B. Kandaswamy Bharathan, credited with having masterminded its marketing, hazarded the wild guess that the film’s message that money is not everything in life must have appealed to a Japanese audience ‘that’s been talked down about for not being as hardworking as the post-war generation’. The Japanese Ambassador to India went further. In trying to explain the success of Muthu, he spoke of Tamil fascination for ikebana and bonsai, and Japanese students flooding to Chennai’s Kalakshetra, the famous school for the Indian classical dance form, Bharatanatyam. He even floated a linguistic theory that Japanese and Tamil share a common origin.
The word Bollywood: a ‘remix’
In many ways the arrival of Bollywood, and with it the claim for the cleaning up and professionalizing of the movie industry, was also a claim to have resolved these grey cultural areas and arrive at a style that was now properly international. Bollywood announced itself from its inception as a global strategy, on a par with the famous Hallyu or Korean Wave, in which the cinema would spearhead a gigantic marketing initiative for all things Indian.
The term itself, Bollywood, is commonly viewed with derision: as though the Indian cinema produced something of a copycat, or even a spoof, of a Californian original. But the industry widely accepts that, however dubious the word, it has been a game-changer.
An important marker for this change occurred in 2006, when the very character of the Indian state appeared to have been transformed, and with it, its attitude to its cinema industry. That year, India announced a new ambition: propelling itself, in the words of an upbeat economist, from ‘socialist stagnation to global growth’. Its Approach Statement to its Eleventh Five-Year Plan was dominated by visions of growth and of global integration. Somewhere in this ambition for global integration came a word new for the Indian state: soft power. Indian author and politician Shashi Tharoor, one of the leading proponents of such a concept, has often spoken of how India could influence and alter other people’s attitudes ‘by attraction rather than military coercion’ if it leveraged its great strengths in soft power. And what are these strengths? He listed India’s long history of ideas, its diversity of language and ethnicity, its films, its literature, and its food.
It was important that India’s ambitions for globalizing its economy coincided with the digital revolution. The new economy was pivoted around the outstanding success of IT and IT-enabled services, continued the Eleventh Plan statement, which also ‘first demonstrated what Indian skills and enterprise could do, given the right environment’. Bringing the entertainment industry into the digital economy was the new mantra, and it would be achieved through a new sector, Media & Entertainment, or, informally, Bollywood. This would be a clutch of varied industries including print, television, radio, music, and gaming, each with their own distribution platforms, but all coming together through diverse crossover strategies. This sector now saw numerous corporate interests entering at different points in the chain from movie production and exhibition to its exploitation on different platforms. Some were domestic, like industrialist Anil Ambani’s Reliance MediaWorks, while others included some of the biggest names in film production—Fox, Disney, and Viacom—setting up shop in India.
Change was undoubtedly in the air, and yet Bachchan’s bafflement would remain like a hovering miasma. Was there indeed a fugitive audience out there, or had the global audience for Indian cinema bottomed out? If there was one, how to reach it? Were there still pirates in the woodwork making pots of money outside the visible sector? How to clean up this invisible economy? Could it be that for all that had changed, things had remained the same?
A good metaphor for all of Bollywood’s anxieties was provided by two seemingly unrelated events that occurred in the year 1997. The first event took place in England, when a record album named Bollywood Flashback was released by a music producer named Bally Sagoo. This album was commissioned by Sony, following market research that had identified an untapped market. Famous Hindi film songs could reproduce reggae’s evolution into dancehall directed at British-Asian youth if they could be ‘spiced-up’ and reissued. Songs like Chura liya, from the teenage movie Yaadon Ki Baraat/Procession of Memories (1973), sung by Asha Bhosle and composed by R. D. Burman, were rereleased set to electronic rhythms and dubs drawn from rap and hip-hop.
Within England itself the trend that this album set was viewed largely within an established dancehall aesthetic. In Sagoo’s own description, his remixes catered to Asian kids who, like most of Western youth, ‘wanted the punchy, racy bass lines, the great drum beat and the powerful female vocals coming across … more melodies than lyrics’, ‘a good beat and a good vibe, a good song on the dancefloor’.
To many within the British Asian community, however, such a ‘coming out’ of a musical form from narrow ethno-political moorings into the mainstream was disturbing. As British-Asian scholar Ashwani Sharma noted, Sagoo’s promotion by Columbia and Sony ‘illustrates how concepts within the discourse of ethnicity, such as “migrant” and “diaspora”, are articulated alongside the expansion of new consumer markets around the world’.
Within India, however, Bollywood Flashback’s success set off wholly different anxieties. Here too, as in England, it was a culture issue, but quite another kind of cultural history was at stake. A decade before Bollywood Flashback, Indian markets had been flooded by the remixed versions of famous Hindi film songs from an unknown music label named T-Series, owned by a man named Gulshan Kumar. Kumar had, it was said, exploited a copyright loophole to make a fortune releasing ‘cover’ versions of hundreds of famous movie songs. Alongside this practice, Kumar also made a name as a producer of devotional songs.
When India imported the remix aesthetic, it directly clashed with the ‘cover version’ economy, creating something entirely different. Unlike dancehall, which sampled the original before adding the DJ’s voiceovers, Indian remixes were entirely new renditions, with new singers, styles, and accompaniment. Outside India, these would be labelled ‘remakes’ rather than ‘remixes’. Within India, say Marshall and Beaster-Jones in their study on the remix legacy, the terms became largely synonymous, and commercial remix videos on television ‘tended to represent highly erotic moments’ with ‘young female starlets dressed for—and dancing in—urban nightclubs, [while] ostensibly innocent lyrics were resituated to fit the narrative of an eroticized club context’. What the remix now did was to open up the possibility of famous songs being rendered with entirely new interpretations. One of the most famous was a 2002 remix of a Lata Mangeshkar song, Kaanta laga/A thorn pierces from a somewhat obscure 1972 film titled Samadhi/Divine Union. This remix, from an album named DJ Doll released by T-Series, features a woman, played by the actress Shefali Jariwala, reading a pornographic magazine, after which she enters a dancehall, sets fire to that magazine, and gyrates before her boyfriend.
The panic that accompanied such renditions—led by Lata Mangeshkar’s own horrified call for a complete ban on such reinterpretation—echoes the entire history of censorship going back to its earliest colonial origins: namely, India’s extraordinary capacity to read new meanings into, indeed to deliberately misread, well-known texts. What it also did was to further echo the concerns about Bollywood as itself being something of a gigantic remix economy comprising many ‘mixer-grinders’ as the industry calls them, recycling the cinema’s history on numerous grey-economy platforms.
The second incident was this: the same year as Sagoo transformed the Hindi film song, T-Series owner Gulshan Kumar was murdered. His killer was allegedly his own composer, Nadeem Saifi of the musical duo of Nadeem‐Shravan, who had risen to major 1990s fame when Kumar had given them a break with the hit film Aashiqui/Lover (1990). The reason for the killing was never entirely established, but it was widely rumoured that there was a gangland connection. Nadeem himself remained in England for several years, a fugitive from justice. What the murder nevertheless did do was to provide a further spin to the controversy around the remix.
The arrest
In 2001, even as the Hindi cinema was putting together its upbeat story of globalization, and shortly before Kumar’s grisly murder, yet another incident occurred that shook the Mumbai (since 1995 Bombay’s new name) movie industry to its core. In January of that year, Mumbai’s leading movie financier Bharat Shah was arrested, accused of money laundering for the Dubai-based businessman Chhota Shakeel, who was being investigated in India for running an extortion racket and other criminal acts. Shah was a very big name in the city, a diamond merchant with a side business in real estate, generally viewed as financing films with only a tiny part of his vast finances mainly because he liked to hang out with the beautiful people.
The Shah episode turned into a complicated saga that highlighted the underside of globalization: activities that the Indian state considered criminal. The 2002 Lisbon arrest and 2004 extradition of the gangster Abu Salem caused especial tension, for fear of who in the industry he might implicate. Salem had also been accused of masterminding the 1993 serial bomb blasts in Mumbai, which had seen several movie people implicated, and the movie star Sanjay Dutt sent to jail. The tensions were such that film producer Yash Chopra, the leading spokesperson for the film industry, had to put out an announcement explicitly designed to assuage concerns, saying in November 2005 that ‘no underworld‐film industry nexus exists in Bollywood at present’, since ‘money is easily available’.
If Bollywood was not a clean-up as much as it was a process of legalization of time-honoured business practices, at a time when the Indian state was finally making its peace with the Indian cinema, both the Kumar and Shah episodes also revealed its complicated, even violent, face. The Bollywoodizing of the Indian film industry would soon grow into perhaps the bloodiest war yet between traditional financial practices and the state, as several of its practices were criminalized, driven both offshore and underground. From that war would be born a new—some might say more properly neo-liberal—state: the India that would become an investment and tourist destination and a software and information technology powerhouse. And Bollywood, if the Indian state got it right this time, would be its new cultural face.
With this transition too, as with Ardeshir Irani in the 1920s and Raj Kapoor in the 1950s, the problem was not the availability of funds. Despite the fact that the industry commonly claimed that less than 15 per cent of all releases broke even, and less than 5 per cent made serious profits, in most regions of India there appeared to be no dearth of investment in certain aspects of the filmmaking process, especially some key ancillary economies. What was lacking was legitimacy.
In 1983‐4, it was estimated that ‘black’ income generation was at an astonishing 18‐21 per cent of the country’s overall Gross Domestic Product. Of the seven major sources of the national production of black money, the third largest source—after ‘real estate transactions’ and ‘large scale manufacturing’—was the film industry.
In 1969, the film theorist Chidananda Das Gupta had spoken of this very ‘black money’ which, he said, had originated in the scarcities of the wartime years, when the ‘spoils of large-scale profiteering stayed outside the banks’, and it had stayed out ever since. ‘An industry which costs more in services than in goods’ offered an ‘excellent area for this unaccounted and untaxed wealth to hide and multiply’. The consequences were inevitable: ‘the mass film in India … landed itself in a star system without studio control, formula film-making without Hollywood’s variety of formulas, an annual investment of some 85 million dollars without Hollywood’s audience research or other organisational safeguards.’
But how different, actually, was this from Hollywood? The question would shortly take on a new urgency when, in 2009, Mumbai industrialist Anil Ambani’s Reliance Big, one of the major corporate players to emerge from Bollywood, announced plans to invest €1.2 billion into Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks. That investment both saved Spielberg’s struggling company and ensured Ambani’s ‘integration with the US entertainment industry via these relationships with some of the heavy hitters of Hollywood’, writes film historian Manjunath Pendakur.
The convergences had not been confined to the 2000s: there was similarity between what Shah was doing, in making a shift away from the box office and towards the sale of secondary or subsidiary rights, and what had happened in the 1970s when Universal Studio’s Lew Wasserman had outlined how these rights could be monetized. Like Wasserman then, Shah was now a financier rather than producer: green-lighting independent productions that he felt were most compatible with his other business interests. Both had given a new lease of life to independent productions (in Shah’s case literally so, ‘presenting’ such independent classics as Ramgopal Varma’s Satya/Truth, 1998, Kamalahasan’s Hey Ram, 2000, and Sanjay Khanduri’s Ek Chalis Ki Last Local/The Last Train at One Forty, 2007). Unlike Wasserman, Shah did not really fund blockbusters, but like him, Shah too milked newer and newer areas of invisible secondary rights, moving the industry away from its dependence on the box-office. For Wasserman this was, after Jaws (1975), a combination of ancillary rights, from selling toys and partnering fast-food chains, to milking later revenues from pay-TV, home video, and DVD sales. Shah’s own ancillary services for investors were a little more complicated.
On 8 January 2001, the Indian Express claimed that it had ‘astonishing evidence’ that as many as 60 per cent of the films in Mumbai were being financed by mafia dons, and that ‘as many as 20 films released recently are suspected to have been financed by Dubai-based underworld don, Chhota Shakeel’. And what did they expect in return? Mumbai’s leading financial journalist Sucheta Dalal analysed the entire Bharat Shah episode from an unusual viewpoint. She primarily contended that what Shah was doing was to convert the film industry into a kind of financial gateway, for money to enter for other destinations within the city’s overall finance sector.
By 2007, barely six years after the Shah episode, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) claimed that the system had been largely cleaned up. Once upon a time traditional distributors played multiple roles, it said, including movie financing and taking on risk, but now all this was in the past. Now financing was available from banks at very affordable rates, and this, coupled with the ability of exhibitors to directly enter into screening agreements with producers, meant that the middle-men were on the verge of extinction.
The CII argued that this had been made possible because of three changes. First, the arrival of the multiplex, which ensured transparency in collection. Secondly, digital distribution, often via satellite, which ‘eased the distribution of movies to the remote villages of the country’. And finally, the corporatization of financiers into new generation production houses. Such production houses integrate their work in film with a number of other initiatives in financial services, infrastructure, and communications.
The disaster
The transition would be littered with casualties. In 1995, some years before the Bollywood Flashback/Gulshan Kumar episodes, occurred the disastrous launch of the institution that was meant to be the gleaming new face of everything Bollywood: the Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Limited (ABCL). This was a proper corporate intervention, financially evaluated and with corporate investment. Its primary asset was the brand value of the film superstar Bachchan himself. And it was going to do things with his persona that were still, in the mid-1990s, completely new to business strategy in the entertainment sector.
A scant decade later, many of these strategies would become standard practices. In 2012, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) listed them as premised on the recovery, based on genre, star-cast, and music, of anywhere between 40‐80 per cent of their production costs before the film is released, through pre-sale of rights for cable and satellite, music, home video, and select merchandising. Despite the obvious benefit of such profits coming in, the problem for FICCI was that this model was limited to large studios. Individual producers, on the other hand, still had to bear the bulk of production and associated publicity and advertising expenses. This meant that even after a string of successes, a couple of failures could have a devastating impact on individual producers.
In 1995, ABCL was clearly looking at just such a model. The problem was that it did not even have that initial string of successes: it tanked from the moment it began. In its very first year it incurred a loss of Rs 8 crore (US $2.5 million at prevailing rates of exchange) on television slots, and then, killingly, a further loss of Rs 7 crore (US $2.2 million) on the Miss World beauty pageant which it had agreed to event-manage. In 1997, UTV sued ABCL for the eleven Hindi films for which ABCL had bought distribution rights.
The Miss World pageant was a financial disaster, but more importantly—in the way Bachchan found himself confronting right-wing pro-Hindu morality women’s groups—also a cultural disaster: an indication that the path to globalization would not be as smooth as he and other corporate utopians had anticipated. What especially hurt was the failure of the one surefire ingredient that would, only the previous decade, have ensured the success of a blockbuster: brand-Bachchan.
When banks sought to attach his bungalow in Juhu (a famed tourist landmark), Bachchan turned the clock back, and returned to the kind of people who had been historically the movie industry’s friends and financiers. In his case these included well-known political fixer Amar Singh and the tainted Sahara-India corporate group that bailed Bachchan out (and whose head, Subroto Roy, is, at the time of writing, in jail).
A somewhat more successful 1990s transition occurred in the cinema of Mani Rathnam, a key contemporary and briefly partner in the ABCL mode as well, with his Telugu‐Hindi compatriot Ramgopal Varma. Both moved from an earlier film economy into 2000s Bollywood, but both also made geographical moves to Mumbai: Rathnam from Madras and Varma from Hyderabad. Rathnam’s breakthrough hit, Roja (1992), received an unprecedented release both in original Tamil and in dubbed Hindi. The film is set mostly in Kashmir, where its protagonist is kidnapped by ‘terrorists’, and his South Indian Tamil-speaking wife finds herself unable to communicate with Northern Hindi-speaking military officers. Roja faced a relatively minor political controversy for its humanization of Islamic terrorists, but Rathnam’s next feature, Bombay (1995), proved far more controversial. This was based on the 1992‐3 Hindu‐Muslim riots in the city following the destruction of the Babri mosque by Hindu militants. The story of a Tamil Hindu‐Muslim couple migrating to Mumbai is intercut with growing signs of religious fanaticism around them. The film was distributed by ABCL, which only added to its already controversial existence when they checked with the leader of the far-Right political party, the Shiv Sena, as to whether it was ‘all right’ to release the film.
Varma’s primary reputation too was established with a Telugu film, one considered a classic of its time, the campus movie Shiva. A young college student (the 1990s Telugu film star Nagarjuna in his first major role) becomes caught up in gang rivalry and eventually becomes a crusader for justice. His important work—his crime trilogy Satya (198), Company (2002), and D (2005)—was however both made and set in Mumbai, where it presented the definitive version of the city as steeped in crime and gang-wars, often referencing actual individuals and barely disguised real-life events.
Unlike ABCL, which had clearly spread itself thin, Rathnam and Varma established their identity primarily through the films they made and propagated. What their work directly facilitated was the birth of an independent sector within the mainstream Hindi cinema, attempting a technologically enhanced gritty realism, using their own authorial signature to market films that had no major stars but hugely innovative stories exploring new genres including the horror movie, the gangster film, and the cinema of urban brutalism.
A large number of independent filmmakers emerged, who either worked with Varma and Rathnam, or had been supported by them in their early career. Three of the most famous filmmakers in Hindi today, Anuraag Kashyap, Sriram Raghavan, and Tigmanshu Dhulia, started either as scriptwriters for Varma and Rathnam, or their first films were produced by them. Kashyap, best known for his thriller Black Friday (2004), about the terrorist blasts in Mumbai in 1994, had earlier co-scripted Varma’s gangland thriller Satya. Varma also produced Sriram Raghavan’s landmark debut, Ek Hasina Thi/There was Once a Girl (2004), a slasher film of a vengeful murderess, and Shimit Amin’s 2004 crime movie Ab Tak Chhappan/Fifty Six Down So Far, about vigilante police taking on gangsters in the city. And Tigmanshu Dhulia, who wrote Rathnam’s film about a terrorist attack on India’s Republic Day, Dil Se … /From the Heart … (1998), later made his own famous debut Haasil/Acquisition (2003), about violent student activities in the small town of Allahabad.
All three filmmakers are today known for having revolutionized 2000s Hindi cinema with raw, edgy, and violent films often set in the city’s underclass, featuring criminal groups, student leaders, or sometimes terrorists (see Figure 11).
11. Violent new Bollywood: Manoj Bajpai plays Sardar Khan, in centre, from Anuraag Kashyap’s The Gangs of Wasseypur (2012).
‘Digital Dawn’
By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, India was suffused with major new ambitions. It would no longer be a backward ‘third-world’ post-colonial nation-state, but repositioned as an emerging financial superpower. In marketing its financial muscle, for the first time the Indian state would use its cinema without embarrassment. On its side, a somewhat more self-assured movie industry, now properly Bollywood, would partner the state and lend this name to an entire creative economy that both FICCI and CII—the key representatives of ‘India Inc.’—had begun taking very seriously indeed.
FICCI’s Entertainment Committee was now co-chaired by veteran Bollywood director Yash Chopra and his younger, equally influential, colleague Karan Johar. Its hugely promoted 2012 Report, Digital Dawn: The Metamorphosis Begins, signalled just what Bollywood now meant. By 2011, the Indian M&E (media & entertainment) industry was worth Rs 728 billion (US $ 16.3 billion at prevailing exchange rates). The dominant medium was television, but new sectors showing considerable muscle were animation and VFX, digital advertising, and gaming. India had properly entered the era of the blockbuster.
Digital Dawn noted that there existed two extreme ends to the spectrum. One was measured by a new benchmark: the ‘one hundred crore club’ (US $20 million), reflecting the amount achieved in domestic theatrical collections. In 2011, the films in this category were by Salman Khan (Bodyguard, Ready), Ajay Devgn (Singham), and above all Shah Rukh Khan (Ra.One, Don 2).
On the other hand, said the Report, niche content from independent filmmakers also gained widespread acceptance. Such content that did well was overwhelmingly in the slasher/thriller/noir genre: Pawan Kripalani’s ‘found-footage horror film’ Ragini MMS and Mohit Suri’s erotic slasher Murder 2. Another genre that appeared to be doing well was the fictional film based on a true story, such as No One Killed Jessica, based on the real-life murder of model Jessica Lall in full view of the public in a bar; and Milan Luthria’s The Dirty Picture, based on the life of Malayalam star Silk Smitha. And then there were the edgy comedies: Anand Rai’s hit starring Kangana Ranaut, Tanu Weds Manu, and the Aamir Khan-produced Delhi Belly. 2011 was also good for non-Hindi (and thus non-Bollywood) industries: the Punjabi (Jihne Mera Dil Luteya/They Who have Stolen my Heart), Bengali (Baishey Shrabon/The Twenty-Second Day of Shravan) and Malayalam (Traffic) cinemas saw significant success beyond their native states, in India and internationally.
By 2011 Indian films were being regularly released in Eastern Asia, Western Europe, Australia, and Latin America. If there was one thing that showcased the ambitions of the new Bollywood, it was the Asian success of 3 Idiots. A comedy starring Aamir Khan, critiquing the institutions of mass-produced higher education in engineering and valorizing innovation, it was released on 230 screens in Korea and across 900 screens in China, including in a Mandarin-dubbed version: a complete first for any non-Hollywood foreign film in China.
Plus ça change …
Buried deep in Digital Dawn was an old, old problem, resurfacing like an itch. In 2011, it said, ‘commercial success ratio of films remain(ed) roughly 15 per cent to 17 per cent’.
This proportion had remained virtually unchanged, at least since Independence. It was a crucial figure in the Bharat Shah episode: but what the Shah controversy had revealed was not that 83‐5 per cent of the films did not make money, but rather that they made it outside the contours of the visible economy. Given Bollywood’s much-touted claim that things had changed for the better, the question becomes, just what had changed since Bharat Shah? Surely, with the new Bollywood that the FICCI Report heralds with companies like Fox and Viacom claiming an ‘increased sophistication across the industry value chain’ through ‘stricter financial discipline’, and micro-management of ‘all aspects of production’, from the scripting stage till release for large budget films to control costs, something would have changed?
Bizarrely, it appears not. Digital Dawn admitted the need to ensure ‘early entrapment of cash-flows’ through saturation releases, but appeared strangely unsure as to how to go about it. Among the newer forms of ancillary revenue-augmentation processes it discovered was pay-per-view on DTH (Direct-to-home) television using micro-pricing, which could, it claimed, compete with the cost of a pirated VCD.
What however of active viewers, those who did more with their movies than merely watch them and pay up? The only ancillary economy it was able to find, that might capitalize on this activity, was the marginal one named licensing and merchandising (L&M). Although ‘L&M channels … have the potential of creating a marketing buzz for the film before the opening weekend and can help build loyal communities and fan-bases’, the Report noted that as of 2011, such revenue added up to only 5 per cent of the total film industry revenue. The only example that existed of a successful exploitation of merchandising was Shah Rukh Khan’s superhero production Ra.One, which used gaming, digital comics, costumes, novels, action figures, toys, stationery, and accessories to make an additional revenue of around Rs 15 crore (US $3.3 million at prevailing exchange rates).
It appeared that the cinema had come full cycle. We were back to the problem with which we began this inquiry, back to the oceanic but eternally elusive audience. Both Bharat Shah and the video pirate now provided in their own distinct ways answers to the question Bachchan asked at the top of this chapter: who it was that was making ‘pots of money’.
Ghostly presences, and Bollywood at Selfridges
By the mid-2000s there was a strange similarity between the ghostly financial presences, of pirate and financier. Both were integral parts of the industry even as both were widely seen as its worst enemies. Both Shah and the pirate forced the basic question that has been raised in India since colonial times: why—and for whom—did the Indian cinema exist? And how could the Indian film industry get to them?
In the 2000s, answers to this question were apparently being provided by two kinds of film industries that effectively split Bollywood in half. On the one hand, filmmakers who frankly acknowledged their debt to film piracy, as they catered to a deep cinephilia and often accessed their audiences with films that sought cult status even as they represented the grisly underside of globalization. The first of these, by Anuraag Kashyap, still the ruling high priest of such cinema, was the unreleased Paanch/Five (2003), a film that faced censorship trouble and then became a musical cult movie extensively viewed entirely in the informal digital sector. His next film, Black Friday, faced a similar fate until it got a small commercial release. It was based on a true-story account of the people who were involved in the terrorist bomb attack on Mumbai in 1993. A sprawling film, it involves a narrative so vast that there is no central point of view from which the entire story makes sense. All the characters are bit players; there is no single plot mastermind. Kashyap’s next feature No Smoking (2007) had major Hindi movie star John Abraham enter, in his attempt to quit the tyranny of smoking, another and more tyrannical space that is literally represented as a descent into the nether regions of the city: a vertiginous space entirely devoid of rational definition.
No Smoking was co-produced by another major name, the filmmaker/composer Vishal Bhardwaj. Known primarily for his adaptations of Shakespeare, his first film in this series, Maqbool (2003), sets Macbeth in the Mumbai underworld. His Omkara (2006) adapted Othello in a story set among political gangs in deep Uttar Pradesh, and his most recent Haider (2014) sets the plot of Hamlet in Kashmir, and amid battles between the Indian army and Islamic terrorists.
Alongside a 2000s Mumbai movie there also emerged a distinctly Delhi cinema, through films such as Dibakar Bannerjee’s Khosla Ka Ghosla/Khosla’s Nest (2006) and Oye Lucky Lucky Oye (2008), a Kolkata cinema in Srijit Mukherjee’s Baishey Shraban (2011), and a Chennai cinema in M. Sasikumar’s Subramaniapuram (2008). Although very different kinds of films, all of these had a distinct family resemblance in their emphasis on the contemporary; on local subaltern idioms, languages, and practices, that made them all equally Bollywood: or at least, the ‘other’ Bollywood, the cinema for an audience that—typically in their elusiveness—finds meanings that often go beyond the control of marketing teams wanting to ‘entrap’ filmgoing into cash flows.
In sharp contrast was the mainstream, authorized Bollywood, the globalizing face of an upbeat India represented especially by the major Hindi producer of the 2000s, Karan Johar (Figure 12). Johar began his directorial career with the blockbuster romance Kuch Kuch Hota Hai/Something Happening Within Me (1998), followed by the ensemble dramas Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham … /Occasional Joy and Sorrow (2001) and Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna/Never Say Goodbye (2006). He also put together a production ensemble, comprising his major star and the face of Bollywood, Shah Rukh Khan, his choreographer and now herself a considerable filmmaker, Farah Khan, his costumier Manish Malhotra, and his ‘stylist’, art-director Sharmistha Roy.
12. The heyday of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan in Karan Johar’s production Kal Ho Naa Ho/Tomorrow May Never Come (2003, directed by Nikhil Advani).
This team had actually first been assembled for an earlier film, one that announced the arrival of Bollywood: the Yash Chopra production Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge/Braveheart Gets the Bride (1995), directed by Chopra’s son Aditya. Set mostly in London and elsewhere in Europe, and then in the Punjab, the film squarely addresses the key audience of this form of Bollywood: the Non-Resident Indian (NRI). In the film, featuring Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol, the British-Asian hero woos his girl across Europe, but to win her, he has to travel to the Punjab and win over her austere father first, by revealing his commitment to traditional Indian values. Much the same NRI template defines most of the Johar variant of Bollywood: Kuch Kuch Hota Hai was a teeny-bopper college romance featuring the entire team, with designer Sharmistha Roy hired to reproduce the Archie comics’ Riverdale High School; Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham … , set partly in London and unashamedly addressing NRI values of tradition, fidelity, and family values, again features the same team, as well as the leading face of India’s new design industry, Abu Jani-Sandeep Khosla.
13. Classic Bollywood retro: advertisement for the Mata Hari fashion collection by Bollywood designers Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla inserted into photographs of Guru Dutt’s famous musical Mr & Mrs 55 (1955).
As Johar, Khan, and Chopra developed it, Bollywood acquired two key features. First, a relentless focus on ancillaries that both Chopra and Johar signed. This was not in terms of spectatorial ‘entrapment’ in the FICCI sense, but in the form of a legalized variant of the Bharat Shah version: of cinema that directly worked with diverse other economies. And secondly, an emphasis on ‘retro’ (Figure 13): Bollywood has almost always defined itself in terms of the cinema that had passed, the histories that had been made, paying back its debts. We see this almost literally in the plot of Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om (2007), set in the 1970s and the present, in which a movie star who was an extra on the sets of the Subhash Ghai film Karz/Debt (1980) and later saw a crime being committed, extracts revenge through restaging that past in the present.
Both ancillary markets in their full range and Bollywood retro were in evidence in the first full display of the complete Bollywood economy outside the screen, in London’s ‘Indian Summer’ of 2002. The Summer was kicked off by fashion designers Abu Jani–Sandeep Khosla’s reconstruction of the film star Dimple Kapadia’s Mumbai home on the ground floor of the London department store Selfridges. Bizarre as it seemed, it was prepared for nothing more than an announcement of the ‘Bollywood at Selfridges, May 2002’ season, to be attended by stars Amitabh Bachchan, Madhuri Dixit, and Dimple Kapadia. At a multicultural music, art, and dance series at Trafalgar Square, the then Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, launched the guide to ‘Asian London’ that officially represented everything that now stood for Bollywood—activities including fairs, the Andrew Lloyd Webber-produced musical Bombay Dreams, and Channel 4’s special open-air cricket screenings, as well as Asian food, clothes, and street markets—even as he lamented that ‘Visitors to London, and Londoners themselves, often do not know how to access the incredible range of Asian culture, shops, street markets and food that is on offer in our city.’ The ‘Asian London’ website listed the important Bollywood clubs (Bhangra Mix, Club Asia, Disco Divane @Bar Bollywood, Stoned Asia, Kuch Kuch Nights, and Azaad).
Abu Jani–Sandeep Khosla, who designed the Dimple home mock-up at Selfridges, proclaimed that their fantasies ‘have always been whacked out and over the top, perhaps due to our fascination with movies … Mughal-e-Azam or Pakeezah, for instance, have inspired a certain richness and opulence in our clothes’: something they displayed with their aggressive designer traditionalism in Bachchan’s costumes in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham … and even more spectacularly in their costumes for Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s 2002 remake of the Barua and Bimal Roy classic Devdas, as they did in their much-publicized wedding trousseau for film star Tina Munim on her marriage to tycoon Anil Ambani, for which Ambani asked them to, in their words, ‘let our imagination run wild and create the most fabulous outfits we could design’.
By the mid-2000s, when Johar’s cinema came of age together with India’s new design industry, India’s designer-branded apparel or ‘pret’ business was worth over Rs 19,000 crore (US $43 billion at prevailing exchange rates). Johar’s true contemporaries were less filmmakers and more frontline designers who included, besides Jani–Khosla, Manish Malhotra, who was responsible, as one fashion blurb had it, ‘for re-inventing the Bollywood heroine’.
Afterword
In 2015, even as this book was being written, Anuraag Kashyap’s mega budget Bombay Velvet was released. A few years earlier, four filmmakers had come to make something of a collective statement about the clout they now possessed: Bollywood’s biggest name, Karan Johar, and the leading duo of the independent cinema, Kashyap and Dibakar Bannerjee. The fourth member was interesting: the only woman in the top league, Zoya Akhtar is the daughter of the Hindi film scenarist and lyricist Javed Akhtar, and had already made several films that presented a new future to the sector, with tell-all stories about the city’s rich and famous, set within the film industry itself, such as Luck By Chance (2009).
The four of them came to co-sign a film named Bombay Talkies which, ostensibly a celebration of the centenary of Indian film, was also an announcement of a new power coalition that many felt was even post-Bollywood in its possibilities. Impossible as recently as a decade ago—as far-fetched perhaps as, say, Steven Spielberg co-authoring a film with Quentin Tarantino—its very existence would bring together what had appeared until then deeply opposed forms of cinema.
Now Kashyap’s big, dark, noir musical would take this further, signalling a further marketing consolidation of the two Bollywoods. On the one hand, it was a tell-all story of crime, unions, corrupt tabloids, set in the rich and corrupt Bombay of the 1970s. On the other hand, the production scale, the emphasis on music, and perhaps most directly the casting of Karan Johar, making his acting debut, as one of the two villains, signalled the film’s intention to bring the two aspects of Bollywood together in a single film.
Bombay Velvet was one of the biggest financial disasters of early 21st-century Bollywood. Its failure has ‘set the clock back by years’, according to one respected film analyst. It may also have shown once again and at the same time, both the resilience of the Indian film industry, and the adage plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.