Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (43 page)

As noticeable from Ghai’s statements, a discussion of the massesclasses binary often devolved into a general criticism of the masses for their filmic preferences. This sort of criticism was readily apparent in the trade press as well. For example,
Film Information
’s review of the film
Mela
(Carnival) illustrates how the masses and particular territories are associated with bad taste and poor aesthetic judgment:

Trade journalists who write these reviews present themselves as omniscient viewers, able to predict and speak for the variety of audience reactions. Since the elaboration of audience taste is drawn mainly from observing the
commercial outcome of
films, it frequently results in circular assertions, such as the masses are crude and vulgar because they like crude and vulgar films or that intelligent films do well in cities because city audiences are intelligent.

The separation posited between the reviewer’s judgment of the film and the hypothetical response (reviews are written on the day of a film’s release) of the mass audience in parts of northern India demonstrates how members of the film industry locate themselves firmly within the “classes” side of the masses-classes binary, positing their own tastes and aesthetic standards as distinct from the majority of audiences. Producer/ director Rakesh Roshan, in describing his filmmaking practice, asserted an inherent difference between himself and his audience: “I don’t try to
make difficult screenplays. I don’t like to confuse people, because I know when a common man comes to see a film, he doesn’t want to put pressure on his brain, though we like to see such films sometimes. I see some films and there are some complications and then you know you have to think over it, but a common man in India? I don’t think we should put that pressure on him” (Roshan, interview, May 1996). While Roshan represents himself as the more cerebral and engaged viewer in contrast to the “common man,” the following excerpt from my interview in 1996 with Rahul Agrawal, the director of marketing for a production company, reveals how the masses-classes binary serves as an opportunity to define the classes-self in opposition to the masses-other.
²⁰
I had asked Agrawal to describe the different audiences for Hindi films, and he asked me which film I had seen most recently. When I told him
Saajan Chale Sasural
(Lover Goes to His In-laws)—a film that was a slapstick comedy about bigamy—he asked me whether I had enjoyed it, and when I said “not particularly,” he immediately responded, “It’s not for you. It is for the mass audience, absolute mass audience, maybe your servant at home, or your driver, or rickshaw-
wallah
will enjoy that film because that’s for him.
Saajan
Chale Sasural
, though this is on [pointing to my tape recorder], it insulted my sensibilities. It is so stupid. I just couldn’t digest it, because it is not for me.” After establishing our common social and aesthetic distance from the presumed mass audience based on our dislike of the film, Agrawal went on to posit our shared class-linked cinematic preferences: “I’m thinking of a film for the elite audience and not for the mass audience. Have you seen
Lamhe
? [I nodded] Yes,
Lamhe
is a classic example. It’s a beautiful film. I loved it, I’m sure you loved it, because it is for us. It is not for the mass audience.”

Lamhe
(Moments) was an eagerly anticipated film that turned out to be a major box-office disappointment; members of the industry at the time attributed its commercial failure to the class composition of the theatrical audience—an explanation offered by Agrawal too that afternoon. “Unfortunately, films [that] have appeal for the
mass audience
run in the cinemas today, because they are the actual, they are the 90 percent audience, we are just 10 percent, and we don’t go twice and thrice to see a film; they go ten times” (interview, 1996). Even though it was my first ever meeting with Agrawal, and he really had no knowledge of me other than that I was an nri (non-resident Indian) from New York University, who was conducting research for my PhD, my level of education, Englishspeaking ability, and diasporic location positioned me as a member of the “classes” audience. Prior to his remarks about audiences, Agrawal had in
formed me that he had spent two months at Harvard University, enrolled in a summer international business program, and that he desired to pursue an MBA abroad rather than in India. Thus his continual assertion of our presumed shared aesthetic disposition was predicated upon his own educational aspirations for a post-graduate degree and his use of the pronouns “we” and “us” in his answers signaled his own location within the classes audience as well.

In Agrawal’s castigation
of
the masses for their tastes and excessive film-viewing, along with his distress over their sizable proportion of the viewing audience, we see the curious instance of a member of an industry— one that is overwhelmingly described as only concerned with the bottom line—lamenting the very existence of a sort of consumer and type of consumption that has sustained it financially over time. This is an example of the sentiment of disdain that underlies the production culture of the Hindi film industry and belies any simple portrayal of its commercial nature. The problem that 90 percent of the audience poses for Agrawal is an example of the tremendous ambivalence with which members of the industry regard the bulk of the viewing audience. While the masses brought in the revenues for the film industry, the classes earned the industry symbolic capital and cultural legitimation. Although these two audience categories were described dichotomously, it was still possible— according to filmmakers in 1996—to make a film that transcended their differences and appealed to both. “The film [that] is a super hit like
Dilwale Dulhaniya
,” Agrawal added, “or
Hum Aapke Hain Koun!
, or
Maine
Pyar Kiya
[I Have Loved], these sort of films appeal to both the elite and the masses. That’s why they are super hits” (interview, 1996).

Tarun Kumar’s dilemma in the editing room—of working out how to please both the classes and the masses, represented by the figures of aunties and servants—was an example of how Hindi filmmakers aimed to make films that appealed to the broadest audiences possible. “From 6 to 60,” which referred to the age span of filmgoers, was a phrase I heard uttered frequently during my early fieldwork that encapsulated this goal. Traditionally, a Hindi film was deemed an unqualified success only if it was a nationwide or an “all-India” hit, communicating to the industry that linguistically, regionally, and religiously diverse audiences were able to identify with the film. Taran Adarsh, the editor of
Trade Guide
, im
pressed upon me the necessity of a Hindi film doing well all over India and especially in the smaller centers, the ones referred to as the interiors, or the B-and C-class centers. “Those are the centers which decide if your film is going to be a success or not; that’s where you recover your investment from. . . the biggest of films may not be doing so well in the cities, in the metros, but they do phenomenal business in the interiors, in the B-and C-class centers” (Adarsh, interview, September 1996). When I asked him if films could be economically viable just on the strength of the large urban areas, referred to as A-class centers in distribution parlance, Adarsh responded, “We make films for not just Bombay, Delhi, or Calcutta. We make films for centers in Raipur, Bhilai, Gujarat, in Bihar, or Punjab. . . It is more important that a film does well there, than it does well in cities. A hit film in Bombay does not mean that it is accepted on an all-India basis. You have to have universal acceptance. You have to appeal to not just people in the balcony class; you have to appeal to the people— the hoi polloi also; you have to appeal to B-and C-class centers also. That’s where you realize that
aap ki
picture
mein kitna dum hai
[how strong your picture is]” (Adarsh, interview, September 1996).

I encountered the concern about universal acceptance during the preproduction process of
Ghulam
(Vassal), a film on which I worked as an assistant in 1996. The film, which was an adaptation of the Hollywood film
On the Waterfront
,
²¹
had as its backdrop the problem of extortion that is rampant in Bombay. In
Ghulam
, the particular neighborhood in which the protagonist resides is completely under the mercy of the local crime boss and his gang, who collect protection money weekly from all of the shopkeepers in the area. Vikram Bhatt, the film’s director, and some of his crew members initially were worried as to whether the problem of extortion depicted in
Ghulam
was as “universal” as the problem of labor in
On the Waterfront
. While
Ghulam
did extremely well in the Bombay territory, earning more than three times its cost for its distributor, and was categorized as a “super-hit” within that territory, since it did not fare as well in other parts of India, it did not earn the coveted title of a “universal hit.”
²²

Since a film had to appeal to everyone, the audience categories I described in the previous section operated more as boundaries than niches; that is, rather than thinking about audience taste as templates for making specific films, Hindi filmmakers regarded audience taste as constraints that needed to be navigated and negotiated. Subhash Ghai described his task as a balancing act of taking elements that he believed would appeal to the masses and presenting them in a manner that would appeal to
the classes. He articulated this “optimum balance” as that between the “earthy” and the “aesthetic,” where the former appealed to the masses and the latter to the classes. Referring to his earlier films, which were all big box-office successes, Ghai asserted, “
Karma
,
Vidhaata
, and
Saudagar
were liked by masses and classes both, [because] the gentry appreciated the cinematic expansion and dimension, whereas the earthy people liked the aggressiveness of Dilip Kumar and Raj Kumar” (Ghai, interview, 9 December 1996).

While Ghai presented his box-office success as a result of his judicious balance of cinematic elements, Aditya Chopra, whose first film,
Dilwale
Dulhaniya Le Jayenge
, was one of the biggest commercial successes of Indian cinema, described his method for achieving universal appeal as one of transcending social difference: “You just realize that you’re making a film for people who are going to be different, and you have to try and thread them in some way, link all of them together. That is actually what
Dilwale
was—this belief that, even if they come from different classes, this guy might ride an auto-rickshaw and we might go in a Mercedes-Benz—but he’s also going to cry if his mother dies, he’s also going to react when his sister gets married. Okay, so what you need to do is get to the essence of being Indian and strike that chord that will somehow or the other have a place in everybody’s heart” (Aditya Chopra, interview, April 1996). In Chopra’s words, the “essence” of being Indian appears to be a focus on the affective power of kinship relations. The idea that kinship relations overrode differences of class was expressed by other filmmakers as well and contrasted sharply with the discourse about the masses-classes binary, where clear-cut distinctions are drawn between filmmakers and their audiences. Mukesh Bhatt, who mentioned how filmmakers were selling dreams (of European travel) to the common man, posited himself as a member of the audience who shared an emotional bond with the implied mass audience due to the essential nature of kinship: “I believe, that ‘I’ as an audience, and a man of the street, we are no different. Just because I’m sitting in an air conditioned room, or sitting in a Mercedes-Benz, [that] does not make my heart and my emotion different from the man who is pulling the cart on the streets of Bombay. His emotion for his mother will be the same as mine for my mother. His emotion for his child will be the same as mine for my child. It’s only the bank balances that are different.” Thus according to Bhatt, films focusing on kinship relations, referred to as “emotions” (Ganti 2002) within the film industry, were the ones with universal appeal. Standing in again for the audience he asserted,

Bhatt’s professed psychic solidarity with the audience undergoes a drastic change a few years later, which I will discuss in the next chapter.

Although Hindi filmmakers strived for universal hits, by no means did they view it as an easy task. During my early phase of fieldwork (1996–2000), the dominant sentiments that I encountered were, “We can’t!” or “In India it is not possible”; producers, directors, and writers were constantly articulating what they could not make in terms of plots, themes, characterizations, and genres. There was an elaborate narrative of constraints mediated mainly through the figure of the audience, which hinged on the concepts of identification and acceptance. Subhash Ghai described the audience’s need for identification—a need, if may I remind, that filmmakers themselves ascribed to the audience—as restrictive: “In India, all of the stories, the ways that films get made, it has to be stories that audiences can relate to, they have to feel, ‘
Ki
yes, this is our story.’ People should be able to imagine that this is a story that they could have lived, a familiar story. However, in the West, you don’t have that problem, because people are educated. Educated people can imagine beyond their own lives so they can enjoy watching other people’s stories” (Ghai, interview, October 2000). The distinction that Ghai draws between Indian viewers and Western ones, premised on the level of formal education, demonstrates how the problem of identification for filmmakers is really one posed by the class composition of their audience. The fact that the majority of the Hindi film audience was comprised of the masses—90 percent, according to Agrawal—appeared to be the root cause for the variety of challenges articulated by filmmakers as constraints on their
filmmaking practice. For the remainder of this section I examine the three main obstacles expressed by filmmakers with respect to their audiences: cultural diversity, moral and kinship codes, and social conditions.

Filmmakers perceived the vast linguistic and cultural diversity within India as a significant hurdle for achieving broad-based appeal. The trade press is critical of Hindi films that appear too specific in terms of their cultural milieu, for that is thought to impede audience identification. Komal Nahta asserted that Hindi films were “more national in character” and that it was risky to depict anything too regionally specific: “You have to make them understandable to everybody”
²³
(Nahta, interview, September 1996). Screenwriter Sachin Bhaumick characterized Hindi cinema as full of artistic compromises because of its need to cater to such a diverse audience: “Now we want to cater from Assam to Madras, to so many languages, so our picture becomes full of compromises” (Bhaumick, interview, October 1996). Bhaumick defined “compromise” in terms of the variety of elements that producers and directors insisted be included in a Hindi film in order to please audiences all over India. He related the attitudes of filmmakers that he encountered while writing a script (the italicized portions in quotation marks indicate where Bhaumick is imitating producers’ and directors’ instructions to him):

Unlike Nahta’s comments, which describe Hindi films as abstracted from any specific regional milieu, Bhaumick characterizes Hindi films as a potpourri of regional customs and features. Whether it is one thing for everyone or something for everyone, either approach is premised on the
centrality of identification for the film-viewing process. Bhaumick’s representation of striving for universal appeal as limiting and compromising is an example of the disdain that filmmakers express toward their own practice.

In addition to the difficulties of audience identification, filmmakers represented audiences as possessing clear-cut moral boundaries, usually pertaining to ideal kinship behavior, which could not be transgressed.
Lamhe
kept surfacing in my discussions with filmmakers as an example of a film with all of the ingredients of a successful film—a strong story, stars with drawing power, hit music, high production values, proper marketing— which still failed at the box-office. Vikram Bhatt, a director who was in his late twenties when I first met him, interpreted
Lamhe
’s failure as a sign of the moral conservatism of audiences in India:
²⁵
“Indian audiences are quite stuck up with age old moralities and ideas, so one has to be definitely sensitive to those. . . A film like
Lamhe
, however good the film was, the people could not accept that a man in love with the mother could settle for the daughter. So lets say that what the audience is sensitive about sometimes can restrict us” (email communication 1999). Like Bhatt (and Rahul Agrawal), everyone I spoke to in the industry mentioned what a “good” film it was, and how they personally enjoyed it, but that audiences had “rejected” the film because its theme was unacceptable to them. This particular analysis of
Lamhe
’s failure is different from the reasons suggested by filmmakers and journalists in chapter two, which centered on the class-differentiated response to the film. Since the film-going audience is fundamentally unknowable, filmmakers’ theories about audience taste, preference, and desire constitute an elastic and flexible discourse, which nevertheless governs the basis of future decisions and transactions.

According to many members of the industry I spoke with,
Lamhe
failed at the box-office because the relationship between the male and female protagonists was perceived by the audience as incestuous. The film’s narrative centers around Viren, a wealthy nri who falls in love with Pallavi, a woman slightly older than he, on one of his trips to India from England. Pallavi, oblivious to Viren’s feelings for her, is in love with someone else and gets married. Pallavi and her husband are injured in a car accident when she is pregnant, and although both die, Pallavi first gives birth and exacts a promise from Viren to take care of her daughter. Viren leaves the child, Pooja, in the care of the nanny who had brought him up, and goes back to England, but returns to India every year for a day to commemorate Pallavi’s death anniversary. Pooja grows up into the spitting image
of her mother—the roles of the mother and daughter are played by the same actress—and falls in love with Viren who, after a great deal of personal turmoil, finally reciprocates her love.