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

of the popularity of films and their influence over people’s lives, but are unwilling to learn about the particularities of the industry. The reason that the state has not attempted to know or study the industry, according to Ghai, is because of the general distaste for cinema. He described the condescension that state officials have toward cinema, which he felt was based on their age and class: “They’re all senior people who think that film or entertainment is not a serious man’s business. All these buddas [old fogies], politicians, government officials, they think ‘Cinema—ha ha ha—my servant goes, but I stop him from going to the cinema.’ ”
    Ghai asserted that politicians articulate the importance of cinema periodically during election campaigns because they realize the “pull” of cinema and its ability to “mobilize voters.” He also claimed that political leaders were aware of the key cultural and nation-building role played by films, “When they think about national integration, when they get their calls from Indian embassies from all over the world, that cinema is holding our culture over there. Cinema is a representative of Indian culture abroad.” According to Ghai, however, once in power, officials put aside the film industry’s concerns, “They are again back to their normal, ‘Oh, cinema is not a serious man’s business.’ ”
    Criticizing the Indian state’s attitudes toward filmmaking as shortsighted, Ghai brought up the United States as a counterexample where the state has encouraged and recognized the value of entertainment as an industry. He argued that American films have enabled the United States to dominate the world culturally, even leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. “They’re totally ignorant about the problems of the film industry, not realizing that [in] America, [the] entertainment industry is the second biggest industry after aerospace industry, exporting $600 billion, right? America became Big Brother because of the entertainment industry. . . because they’ve patronized the entertainment industry, so the best of talent from Europe and everywhere came to America and made America, and America fascinated every country and now it broke Russia. I would say Michael Jackson and Robert De Niro—they broke Russia. It is a threat to France; it is a threat to Japan; what is the threat? Bill Clinton? No: movies. Movies have such an impact on other nations, because children grow up with movies. Children grow with three things: with their school; with their parents; and. . . movies” (Ghai, interview, 10 December 1996). According to Ghai, the reason that the Indian state has not realized the potential of filmmaking as an industry, economic activity, and global cultural and ideological force is because, “these oldies never saw cinema; they were never in touch with cinema” (Ghai, interview, 10 December 1996). Despite his flippant tone, Ghai’s comments about political leaders’ antipathy toward cinema correspond with the history of statements about the medium. Gandhi apparently saw only one film in his life (Jeffrey 2006; Kaul 1998).

Cinema as Vice
    While some of Ghai’s statements are hyperbolic, his assessment of the Indian state’s lack of interest in the film industry as an economic enterprise is accurate. Unlike the U.S. government, which from the early part of the twentieth century treated filmmaking as a business and helped Hollywood to distribute its films globally (Miller 1998), the Indian state did not accord filmmaking much economic significance, even though shortly after Independence India became the second largest film producing country in the world. Despite filmmaking being the second largest “industry” in India in terms of capital investment—and the fifth largest in the number of people employed (Ray 1956: 32)—the developmentalist economic ideology of the newly independent nation-state constructed a hierarchy of needs in which