Bollywood and Indian Cinema: Changing Contexts and Articulations of National Cultural Desire
Veena Naregal
* Projecting Desire: History, Politics and Cinematic Form Through 1975
* Talkies: Regional Cinemas and the Bombay “Social”
* From Independence to the 1975 National Emergency
* Changing Institutional Contexts: Post-Emergency to 1992 and Beyond
* Expatriate Audiences, International Markets
* Conclusions
* Notes
* ENTRY CITATION
One may justifiably regard the recent attention that Bollywood has evoked among distributors and
audiences in the West as but the latest twist in a story where the first steps towards shaping a
recognizably Indian cinema began just over a hundred years ago. The development of Indian cinema
may most profitably be seen as part of creative struggles on the subcontinent to shape a cultural
modernity through an engagement, firstly, with the agenda of the colonial state and, subsequently, with
that of its postcolonial counterpart. In sketching the role of the commercial film industry in shaping
distinctive cinematic institutions and practices, as well as cultural identities, this chapter points to
several overlapping and often contradictory strands, whereby international trends have been
simultaneously absorbed and resisted, even as the medium was used to reshape the patterns of cultural
and linguistic diversity on the subcontinent into mass popular forms to reach new audiences.
As one of the most important sites through which the Indian experience of capitalistic modernity was
mediated and a general public—beyond elitist, upper-caste reading audiences—was both constructed
and contested, cinema occupies a unique position among Indian cultural institutions. And yet, on
account of its “lowbrow” status—and its far-from-liminal presence notwithstanding—the commercial
film industry has failed to win recognition from the Indian state or mainstream sectors of the economy
until recently. This gulf between official discourse on cinema and the evident cinephilia of the
moviegoing public affects all aspects of its production and consumption, including industrial
organization, aesthetics, regulation, reception, and appreciation. Except for the interlude where a
government-funded, neorealist “parallel” cinema movement was able to thrive between the 1970s and
the mid-1980s, state patronage for the Indian media industries, up until the deregulation of the media
,sector in the 1990s, was directed mainly towards maintaining a monopoly over radio and television.
Recent government moves to encourage financial institutions to invest in film production
notwithstanding, and despite producing the largest number of films annually in the world, the Indian
film industry has not been self-sustaining and remains dependent on informal sectors of the money
market. The forms of mainstream, “parallel,” “middle,” and regional Indian cinemas and their
consumption have been shaped not only by these political and industrial contexts but also by debates
pertaining to patronage and other critical issues in the fields of theater, literature, and performance.
This account will focus mainly on cinematic developments in the second half of the 20th century but
always with the implicit assumption that this narrative has been necessarily shaped by a larger temporal
and spatial cultural dynamic. 1 Interestingly, despite their popular following, the realms of commercial
cinema and popular music were dismissed with utter disdain until recently by the Indian English-
language press and sections of the liberal-nationalist and left-oriented intelligentsia. 2 This attitude
stemmed partly from bourgeois anxiety over the possible contamination of middle-class culture from
contact with the “lowbrow,” but it also illustrates the conceptual intricacies of what constitutes the
“popular” in an intensely stratified and linguistically divided postcolonial society such as India's (Nandy,
1998a).
The subaltern studies project 3 did not explicitly address the making of modern audiences. Nevertheless,
in problematizing the relationship between elite normative discourses and subaltern agency and
consciousness, this body of work foregrounded how difficult it has been to the-matize the disjunctures
that define a colonial-modern popular culture. It also implicitly acknowledged that colonialism
enduringly altered key parameters of subjectivity, social belonging, and cultural production. However, in
trying to recover the voice of nonelite subjects from the historical record of colonialism and nationalism,
the core work of subaltern studies largely discounted the dynamics of the cultural mainstream
established through institutional shifts introduced during the colonial era. All the same, the subaltern
studies analyses fed into the critique, emerging in the 1980s, of the nation-state and Third World
nationalisms. They also underscored the questions postcolonial theory and cultural studies posed
regarding the processes of cultural representation and co-option underlying national cultures and
postcolonial/transnational flows. 4
All these intellectual currents increasingly brought home the need to think about the nature of Indian
middle-class dominance and its relation with lower-class/caste perspectives and the making of a
national cultural mainstream. 5 Although the most influential work addressing such questions of culture
and power focused mainly on print and the discourse of colonial/postcolonial intellectuals, the late
1980s saw the first serious attempts to engage with the codes and history of Indian commercial cinema
as a significant cultural artifact, partly inspired by the “media revolution” taking place in India around
the same time (Nandy, 1998a; Rajadhyaksha, 1986; Thomas, 1985; Vasudevan, 1989). 6 This led to
, further work analyzing the distinctive modes of address, narration, and reception of popular Indian
cinema (Chakravarty, 1993; Nandy, 1998b, 1998b; Vasudevan, 1993, 2000a). 7 Not surprisingly, the only-
too-obvious intersections between institutions of cinema and politics that have evolved in India—
especially in the four southern states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Kerala 8 —also
invited attention to the linkages between cinematic representation, ideology, and political power
(Pandian, 1992, 1997, 2000). In surpassing the limited nature of print audiences, Indian cinema
represented one of the most important sites where the experience of a general public was
approximated and contested. More recent work has further probed the connections between large
collectivities such as cinema audiences and debates about cultural values and political behavior (Prasad,
1999; Srinivas, 2000). With the erosion of middle-class support for secular nationalism since the late
1980s, the recent ideological shifts to redefine India as a Hindu nation have inspired a series of analyses
on how these shifts are articulated and consumed through popular cinema (see Niranjana, 2000;
Vasudevan, 2001).
And yet, despite this very rich and stimulating body of work, a number of important questions remain
unaddressed about the structures of patronage, including the influences of the state and market forces
mobilized in shaping the circuits of production and distribution of popular cultural products in
postcolonial India. Most interestingly, as against the patronage available to print media from national
and provincial business elites, as well as for broadcasting through state funds, commercial cinema has
survived mainly through exploiting surplus merchant capital available through parallel money markets.
Thus, quite uniquely perhaps, the links between mainstream and informal sectors of the economy have
been integral to disseminating a “lowbrow” cultural mainstream, impinging thus in important ways on
the public sphere. The implications of these connections between informal networks of finance and
distribution and the contours of the public sphere within the scenario of Indian capitalistic modernity
have seldom been analyzed, 9 and yet in the attempt to understand the particular trajectory of Indian
modernity, the need cannot be overemphasized to address conceptually the role of such intersections in
defining arenas of ideological/cultural production, distribution, and consumption, as well as the
disjunctures between statist/elitist and mass/popular discourses. This chapter is an initial venture in that
direction. 10
Projecting Desire: History, Politics and Cinematic Form Through 1975
This section of the analysis falls into three parts, focusing on the initial foundations of India's cinema, the
implications of the shift to talkies, and the roles of cinema in the period between Independence in 1947
and the 18-month state of emergency imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi 11 in 1975, which was a
watershed moment in recent Indian history.
COMMERCIAL THEATER TO SILENT FILM
Veena Naregal
* Projecting Desire: History, Politics and Cinematic Form Through 1975
* Talkies: Regional Cinemas and the Bombay “Social”
* From Independence to the 1975 National Emergency
* Changing Institutional Contexts: Post-Emergency to 1992 and Beyond
* Expatriate Audiences, International Markets
* Conclusions
* Notes
* ENTRY CITATION
One may justifiably regard the recent attention that Bollywood has evoked among distributors and
audiences in the West as but the latest twist in a story where the first steps towards shaping a
recognizably Indian cinema began just over a hundred years ago. The development of Indian cinema
may most profitably be seen as part of creative struggles on the subcontinent to shape a cultural
modernity through an engagement, firstly, with the agenda of the colonial state and, subsequently, with
that of its postcolonial counterpart. In sketching the role of the commercial film industry in shaping
distinctive cinematic institutions and practices, as well as cultural identities, this chapter points to
several overlapping and often contradictory strands, whereby international trends have been
simultaneously absorbed and resisted, even as the medium was used to reshape the patterns of cultural
and linguistic diversity on the subcontinent into mass popular forms to reach new audiences.
As one of the most important sites through which the Indian experience of capitalistic modernity was
mediated and a general public—beyond elitist, upper-caste reading audiences—was both constructed
and contested, cinema occupies a unique position among Indian cultural institutions. And yet, on
account of its “lowbrow” status—and its far-from-liminal presence notwithstanding—the commercial
film industry has failed to win recognition from the Indian state or mainstream sectors of the economy
until recently. This gulf between official discourse on cinema and the evident cinephilia of the
moviegoing public affects all aspects of its production and consumption, including industrial
organization, aesthetics, regulation, reception, and appreciation. Except for the interlude where a
government-funded, neorealist “parallel” cinema movement was able to thrive between the 1970s and
the mid-1980s, state patronage for the Indian media industries, up until the deregulation of the media
,sector in the 1990s, was directed mainly towards maintaining a monopoly over radio and television.
Recent government moves to encourage financial institutions to invest in film production
notwithstanding, and despite producing the largest number of films annually in the world, the Indian
film industry has not been self-sustaining and remains dependent on informal sectors of the money
market. The forms of mainstream, “parallel,” “middle,” and regional Indian cinemas and their
consumption have been shaped not only by these political and industrial contexts but also by debates
pertaining to patronage and other critical issues in the fields of theater, literature, and performance.
This account will focus mainly on cinematic developments in the second half of the 20th century but
always with the implicit assumption that this narrative has been necessarily shaped by a larger temporal
and spatial cultural dynamic. 1 Interestingly, despite their popular following, the realms of commercial
cinema and popular music were dismissed with utter disdain until recently by the Indian English-
language press and sections of the liberal-nationalist and left-oriented intelligentsia. 2 This attitude
stemmed partly from bourgeois anxiety over the possible contamination of middle-class culture from
contact with the “lowbrow,” but it also illustrates the conceptual intricacies of what constitutes the
“popular” in an intensely stratified and linguistically divided postcolonial society such as India's (Nandy,
1998a).
The subaltern studies project 3 did not explicitly address the making of modern audiences. Nevertheless,
in problematizing the relationship between elite normative discourses and subaltern agency and
consciousness, this body of work foregrounded how difficult it has been to the-matize the disjunctures
that define a colonial-modern popular culture. It also implicitly acknowledged that colonialism
enduringly altered key parameters of subjectivity, social belonging, and cultural production. However, in
trying to recover the voice of nonelite subjects from the historical record of colonialism and nationalism,
the core work of subaltern studies largely discounted the dynamics of the cultural mainstream
established through institutional shifts introduced during the colonial era. All the same, the subaltern
studies analyses fed into the critique, emerging in the 1980s, of the nation-state and Third World
nationalisms. They also underscored the questions postcolonial theory and cultural studies posed
regarding the processes of cultural representation and co-option underlying national cultures and
postcolonial/transnational flows. 4
All these intellectual currents increasingly brought home the need to think about the nature of Indian
middle-class dominance and its relation with lower-class/caste perspectives and the making of a
national cultural mainstream. 5 Although the most influential work addressing such questions of culture
and power focused mainly on print and the discourse of colonial/postcolonial intellectuals, the late
1980s saw the first serious attempts to engage with the codes and history of Indian commercial cinema
as a significant cultural artifact, partly inspired by the “media revolution” taking place in India around
the same time (Nandy, 1998a; Rajadhyaksha, 1986; Thomas, 1985; Vasudevan, 1989). 6 This led to
, further work analyzing the distinctive modes of address, narration, and reception of popular Indian
cinema (Chakravarty, 1993; Nandy, 1998b, 1998b; Vasudevan, 1993, 2000a). 7 Not surprisingly, the only-
too-obvious intersections between institutions of cinema and politics that have evolved in India—
especially in the four southern states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Kerala 8 —also
invited attention to the linkages between cinematic representation, ideology, and political power
(Pandian, 1992, 1997, 2000). In surpassing the limited nature of print audiences, Indian cinema
represented one of the most important sites where the experience of a general public was
approximated and contested. More recent work has further probed the connections between large
collectivities such as cinema audiences and debates about cultural values and political behavior (Prasad,
1999; Srinivas, 2000). With the erosion of middle-class support for secular nationalism since the late
1980s, the recent ideological shifts to redefine India as a Hindu nation have inspired a series of analyses
on how these shifts are articulated and consumed through popular cinema (see Niranjana, 2000;
Vasudevan, 2001).
And yet, despite this very rich and stimulating body of work, a number of important questions remain
unaddressed about the structures of patronage, including the influences of the state and market forces
mobilized in shaping the circuits of production and distribution of popular cultural products in
postcolonial India. Most interestingly, as against the patronage available to print media from national
and provincial business elites, as well as for broadcasting through state funds, commercial cinema has
survived mainly through exploiting surplus merchant capital available through parallel money markets.
Thus, quite uniquely perhaps, the links between mainstream and informal sectors of the economy have
been integral to disseminating a “lowbrow” cultural mainstream, impinging thus in important ways on
the public sphere. The implications of these connections between informal networks of finance and
distribution and the contours of the public sphere within the scenario of Indian capitalistic modernity
have seldom been analyzed, 9 and yet in the attempt to understand the particular trajectory of Indian
modernity, the need cannot be overemphasized to address conceptually the role of such intersections in
defining arenas of ideological/cultural production, distribution, and consumption, as well as the
disjunctures between statist/elitist and mass/popular discourses. This chapter is an initial venture in that
direction. 10
Projecting Desire: History, Politics and Cinematic Form Through 1975
This section of the analysis falls into three parts, focusing on the initial foundations of India's cinema, the
implications of the shift to talkies, and the roles of cinema in the period between Independence in 1947
and the 18-month state of emergency imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi 11 in 1975, which was a
watershed moment in recent Indian history.
COMMERCIAL THEATER TO SILENT FILM
