Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry by Tejaswini Ganti Read Free Book Online

audio-visual media in general—can directly influence behavior and shape attitudes and subjectivities. 18 The Supreme Court of India, in a 1989 judgment about film censorship, asserted this point of view unequivocally, “A film motivates thought and action and assures a high degree of attention and retention as compared to the printed word. The combination of act and speech, sight and sound, in semi darkness of the theatre, with elimination of all distracting ideas, will have a strong impact on the minds of the viewers and can affect emotions; therefore, it has as much potential for evil as it has for good and has an equal potential to instill or cultivate violent or good behavior. It cannot be equated with other modes of communication. Censorship by prior restraint is, therefore, not only desirable but also necessary”; 19 therefore, a film is judged according to the perceived positive or negative effects its main theme may precipitate in viewers, and thus in society. This perspective provides the continued justification for film censorship as well as institutions such as the Films Division—the state-funded documentary filmmaking institution.
    Thus, a striking characteristic of the state-generated discourse about cinema is the intense ambivalence—a complex mixture of pride, disdain,hope, and fear—expressed toward films and filmmaking, which arises from the multivalent nature of the medium: film is a product of science and technology, a mode of communication, an art form, a source of entertainment, and a commercial activity. This ambivalence is a result of the postcolonial nature of the Indian state and its particular relationship to modernity—a relationship that has been defined primarily by the apparatus and discourse of development, which has positioned “Third World” nation-states like India as “behind” the West (Gupta 1998: 10).
    Itty Abraham, in his work on India’s nuclear program, describes the postcolonial condition as marked by a specific experience of time , which he characterizes as “time-in-waiting.” This condition is one in which the future can be seen in the present, through the examples of advanced industrialized nation-states, combined with a simultaneous awareness of one’s own lagging development. Consequently, postcolonial time “drives state action in an endless search for ‘modernization’ and ‘development,’ which leads to an anxiety about world rankings and never ‘catching up’ while constantly projecting the moment when it may happen” (Abraham 1998: 19).
    This obsession with rankings, superlatives, and coeval temporality has also been a feature of the state-generated discourse about cinema. Since the motion picture is a technology, “a true product of the modern age” (Chhabria 1996: 1), two features about cinema in India are used to represent the modern nature of the Indian nation-state: first, the sheer volume of films produced yearly affords India the distinction of being the “world’s largest” producer, surpassing even that preeminent example of modernity, the United States; second, the history of cinema in India as contemporaneous with the history of cinema in the world—“India is among the earliest countries in the world to have adopted cinema” (Karanth 1980: 1)—counters connotations of technological incompetence, cultural domination, and backwardness that saddle terms, such as “Third World,” or “developing,” which historically located India in the international political and economic order. The date of the first screening of motion pictures in India, July 7, 1896, becomes an important signifier of India’s participation in the modern world, since “Indian audiences had their introduction to projected motion pictures in the same year as British, Russian, and American audiences, barely six months after the first ‘Cinematographe’ show at the Grand Café in Paris” (Karanth 1980: 1).
    While both the simultaneity of the filmic experience