Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry by Tejaswini Ganti (review)

In recent years, Hindi popular cinema—or “Bollywood,” as it is commonly known—has been the subject of a growing number of quality scholarly studies. Tejaswini Ganti’s Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry, an ethnography-based study examining how Bollywood evolved over the last two decades to become the global brand we know it as today, is a welcome addition to this corpus of literature. Drawing on a decade of participant-observation fieldwork, Ganti’s study reveals how the neoliberal restructuring of Bombay’s film industry has transformed the way films are made, as well as the kinds of films that are made, as the industry moves to satisfy the tastes of India’s resident middle class and diaspora. Ganti’s past work on Hindi cinema includes an ethnographic study of how the storylines of American films are adapted for Indian remakes and a classroom-ready introductory guidebook to Bollywood. In Producing Bollywood, rather than pursuing the meaning of individual films through a study of their textual elements as some scholars might, the author has concentrated on how directors, producers, and others within Bombay’s film industry see their work, their audiences, and the place of Bollywood within Indian and global society.

The idea of studying how participants within a film industry view that industry may seem ambitious or unwieldy as a project, especially when the industry in question is one of the largest and most prolific of its kind in the world (and when, of necessity, to conduct such a study, the researcher must study “up” socially—study the thinking and desires of some of the richest and most sought-after entertainment figures in the world). To narrow the scope of her study and thereby overcome the first of these problems, Ganti opted for an inventive, if unlikely, solution: she would focus her research on the quite small roster of A-list Bollywood directors, stars, and other decision makers. Astonishingly, she was able to pull this approach off, and over the course of her fieldwork, she interviewed or observed many of the industry’s elite at work, including the megastar Shah Rukh Khan, whom, she reports, she was able to interview “in a variety of locales, from . . . film sets to rehearsal halls, his car, and his home” (195).

Over the book’s nine chapters, Ganti elaborates on her basic premise—that since the early 1990s, the Hindi film industry has been restructured and gentrified “to conform to middle-class taste” (4)—from a range of vantage points. With regard to the business side of filmmaking, she argues that over this period, production processes have been rationalized to reduce the financial risk associated with making films, and the industry has moved to purge itself of the influence of organized crime and unsavory tax-evading investors. At the same time, the industry has pressed for greater social respectability and has sought to be seen as “cool” by elite audiences. On this theme, Ganti delivers a captivating account of how, over roughly two decades, Hindi cinema has moved from being viewed as kitschy and low-brow by India’s respectable “classes” to the position it occupies today—profitable, chic, attracting middle-class ticket buyers, and recognized by the Indian government as an engine for the nation’s economic growth. As any viewer of recent Bollywood fare already knows, this drive for respectability is evident onscreen in a decline in film plots that focus on “class conflict, social injustice, and youthful rebellion” (79). Thus, whereas peasants, workers, or others of modest economic means were often the onscreen heroes in films from earlier times, within the gentrified Bollywood of today, these figures have been replaced by designer clothes-wearing, middle-class heroes.

The author argues that gentrification and the rise of neoliberalism have impacted film exhibition in India as well, as multiplex theaters have been built to attract a middle-class that previously eschewed watching movies outside their homes. Located in shopping malls, and featuring plush amenities...