Indian Popular Film Industry: Genesis of Bollywood and the critique of the Production Logic

Indian Popular Film Industry: Genesis of Bollywood and the critique of the Production Logic

Published in J-Reader, Vol 2. September, 2016; ISSN 2395-0439

Abir Chattopadhyay

Abstract

The emergence and advent of Bollywood has probably become the terminal developing point of Indian Popular Cinema Industry or Mumbai Mainstream Film Industry at large. Lots of researches have already been accomplished on the recent trends of Bollywood cinema, major narratives of mainstream cinema, about Bollywood Entertainment Industry and so on. But very few works have so far dealt with the genealogy of the term Bollywood. Is it just a name-sequel of Hollywood or something similar to the traditional popular cultural notion of identifying any Indian [or any third world] Tourist spot as commonly 'Switzerland of India'? Naming Bollywood is not that inferiorly framed, rather is an independent looking term having 'difficult to get' but a distinct structure of meaning. Critics are of various conclusive outlooks and opinions about the genesis of Bollywood but a huge inconclusiveness too prevails at large. Google Search on Bollywood gives a plethora of activities relating mainstream Hindi cinema that needs to be configured to get a general value of Bollywood. This paper tries to rediscover the genesis of Bollywood in an outright open approach to find the coordinate of it.

1.

Prologue: In search of the Coordinate of Bollywood

What nevertheless remains unwritten there on Mumbai or Indian Popular Film Industry? Is there any area still left unsaid to make the audience newly informed other than endless categories of entertainment? Is there really any new area of discussion left which the other media like popular or critical magazines, book spaces and edited volumes could not locate or discover? It is doubtlessly difficult to find a new area still un-researched or un-contented by analysts, critics, popular scribes, authors serving corporate interests etc. Indian Popular Film Industry celebrating the centenary year of film production in various media reality shows and reality stage demonstrations has established its supremacy on behalf of the larger nationalist system to the millions of audience or civic population. In every such demonstration the optimum participation of bureaucrats, corporate impresarios, critics, production officials, producing companies, celebs, and respective government departments is widely observed as exactly same as the milieu in IPL, where the participation of both public, private and corporate has a common objective of ruling the dialectic of fete.

Meanwhile the traditional Mumbai Film Industry has been successfully metamorphosed into its present global identity Bollywood having the least reminiscence, if not completely rejected, of its earlier identity Bombay Film Industry whatsoever. Internet search engines comfortably show all information, earlier related to Bombay film industry, now as under 'History of Bollywood Films' thus casually inscribed the name 'Bollywood' of the film industry. Whatever Bollywood appears to be in audience's or whosoever's mind or as a common socio-cultural text may here be planted as such a frame that covers the whole of not just Mumbai but the so called mainstream cinema as an industry on the one hand and a mystic affair rather a viscid narrative to the public and specially the audience. Bollywood has become a signpost of total Indian Popular film production.

There are therefore two distinct streams of understanding the Indian Popular Cinema now celebrating the hundred years of cinema production as a 'fete', as the finality of all entertainment categories, overlapping and overdrawing all gross ideological confusions and diversities toward a homology of Indian cinema since its colonial phase. These streams of understanding or initiatives however are:

            (i) Central Administrative initiative, a systemic effort that still promotes cinema by its own mass-system of production-distribution-recognition [from NFDC, Films Division to National Film Awards] which deliberately considers the holistic structure of Indian cinema production as 'superstructure' of its own social systemic base rather state production system.

Basically in all its efforts since independence the Indian government tried hard to recognize such an initiative, in the name of art, which it does not recognize as a system but recognizes its financially empowered existence along with all radically alternative initiatives. They keep all necessary balance with the Mumbai Cinema or Bollywood.

            (ii) Secondly a parallel stream of both private individual and 'hypercommercial' initiatives that invest capital in both the production of popular commodity entertainers and also the Award giving shows like AIIFA, Filmfare and many such nationally and internationally held Award Programmes as post-production mechanism; analysts often consider as, albeit very mystic, a superstructure of the industrial production system.

These efforts nowadays are mostly fed by both global individual and transcorporate brands and institutions beyond any state administrative purview. The inflow of 'huge' private capital has become such a new symbolic artifact amount of which invested in a film becomes a new narrative for extension in social media.

            (iii) Thirdly, a holistic mass media initiative of a new cultural expansion of the contemporary cinema beyond its commodious nature in audience mind from its pre-global symbolization or a 'tag' to the contemporary post-global extension of reality that also marks the centurial development of Indian cinema as a courtesy to the Indian Popular Cinema.

The above initiatives however generate an ideological centripetality to every third critic that, whatever happening to the industrialization of cinema, the age old 'public limited' conception of social (production) base for films remains intact that gives us enough space to sustain all traditional critiques toward good cinema, bad cinema, commercial cinema, art cinema, protagonist's cinema, action cinema, Yash Chopra type romantic cinema, super hero cinema, 'Bhansali-Maniratnam-Anurag Basu-Dibakar Banerjee-Sujit Sarkar...new wave... blah-blah-blah and the list of arbitrary genres goes on exponentially everyday. In Hollywood three particular politically extensive features were very much distinctive since the post-war epoch, firstly 'One Man Hero' model; secondly 'Patriot' model and thirdly supernatural model and fourthly the 'Great Thief' model. Indian Popular cinema exactly after three decades is witnessing the revival of those three-four models. Cumulatively Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and Tollygunge are being bashed with these above models of cinemas.

From Evergreen Dev Anand to Angry Young Man Amitabh; or from Big-B to Bollywood Badshah the age of symbolic extension has always had a stereotype of Bombay Film Industry and became very popular. But some recent Television promos of Bollywood have made it more extensive toward common lives. 'Desh Ke Janbaaz Heroes Jiske Man Me Desh Bhakti Ke Sibha Kuch Nahin Hain' and many others have already made the extension in such an unprecedented reality condition that legitimizes the  contemporary form of 'Desh Bhakti' as a new condition in the audience mind. This extension plausibly features a long awaited 'imaginary' of cinema beyond its commodity identity what was earlier witnessed in Hollywood in successive two-three decades after the defeat in Vietnam War. Hollywood had shown the world the 'imaginary' of freedom, strength or might, polity, destruction, super-identity, future in astro-space, and above all a high modernity toward global integration beyond the simple traditional social models. Social networking media too have been proactive in such an expansion.

This traditional and largely state-sponsored logic of base superstructure relationship has always been the biggest award to all Indian Popular Cinemas that the audience, albeit being mostly unaware of, think nevertheless or being made up to legitimize the production of Bollywood cinema either evolving from the social perspective or somehow needed or functional for the society. Even Critics are habituated in working under the sponsored base-superstructure relationship where any extension is considered as natural as its production logic. This apparent naturality legitimizes all commercial stereotypes and directorial arbitrariness as the fall out of social praxis, whereas the reality remains far apart. So it has therefore become an ideology of Indian popular cinema beyond all creative and political alternatives. We call them 'Mainstream' Cinema and somehow become a vanguard of that ideology having a noble job of caging all critical films or cinemas into a strict political format in terms of least viewership.

This cumulative or gross nationalized ideology of popular cinema production has always been so strong and socially manipulative that it even absorbs all alternative or critical outlooks in the name of a needful entertainment strategy in its blackhole. Moreover the alternative production ideologies too (until monetarist globalization) were either dependent upon the patronage of government institutions such as NFDC, Films Division etc. or facing otherwise very tough edge to accumulate funding, human assistance/involvement and finally the audience. So the above formulated general models of cinema become too much cosmetic, non-critical and loosely measured. Noted film scholar Madhava Prasad too recognizes many such neo-classical production logics or categorization of cinema like 'so many cinema' model, 'yeh to public hai yeh sab janti hai' model, 'regressive pulse of people' model, 'art versus popular cinema' model etc.

So in these hundred long years, both mainstream and most of other critical models of Indian cinema have somehow been placed in the same production system and somewhere in the same popular production ideology too where the forces of production and production relations are as same as it is considered for other socialized production processes having otherwise enough mutually opposed options. But the question nevertheless remains whether the debate on the production logic of cinema in India gives us any radical non-mythical space from where we can start criticizing or categorizing cinema to be doing something 'revolutionary' alternative; or cinema in India has yet to provide any alternative text as third text to revolutionize the audience. I do not however intend to go into details of the criticality of Indian cinema here in this paper. The finality of all production concepts of Indian popular cinema therefore merges doubtlessly into 'Bollywood' covering not just all technical feasibilities of production but all ideological oppositions too that really is the most primated problem toward understanding of bollywood configuration and its alternative.

As per the chronology of cinema proceeds, common production logic of Bollywood studies chiefly manifests glossy iconic features like history of mainstream cinema, pathfinders of early cinema before and after independence, contemporary trend of cinematic issues: story, casting, music and background score, cinematography, stardom, real life maturity which the film is based on etc. But the general production logic or the rulers' mechanism in cinema production also has a darker politics of not just controlling the cinema production but the gross social system too. The mass audience on the other hand never behaved radically to understand the politics of production.

The political economy of cinema production therefore expresses a supreme producers' ideology as an apparatus to control both mass audience and even the possible critical approaches of cinema. A unique example tells the whole story of the ruse of the production logic of Bollywood. The Hit & Run case against a Bollywood Actor - the verdict of a Mumbai City Court setting him guilty - and finally absolving him from the guilty (for not having enough evidences) pop up the relevance of another Subhas Kapoor flick Jolly-LLB, where the Cinema at least could come out with a resolution against the mighty offender. The whole film was not just intersecting the Hit & Run case, as reported in the popular media, but share also two major 'mutually' oppositional signifiers also. The cinema Jolly LLB is based on a Hit & Run case where the main accused was a highbrow person, did everything to evade the guilt and so the court sentence. The cases both in cinema and the reality continued for more than a decade. The primary objective of our discussion starts here. The reality discharges the 'accused' with 'No' evidence whereas the reel gets a pronouncement of punishment after a film-long climactic drama. The most interesting aspect is that both the reality and the film have shared the so called same industrial formulation to fulfill their own objectives that quite obviously includes 'success' in any suitable form. The entertainment value or the use values of both signifiers share the same promotional platforms [here Social Networking Sites are popularly used] where the logic of production or perpetration is being primated to rule the socialization process. This is the ruse of the contemporary production logic of Bollywood that remains far away from the actuality where millions of people live in this country. We therefore need to reassess the production logic where only rulers' presence felt both in seats of judge and accused keeping others far apart.

2.

Ruse of the Production logic: Suppression of production factors

We popularly consider Indian cinema largely in terms of what Mumbai and others showing these years and so we have never been critical about the major signifier of production they follow as their ideology. This very signifier remains anyway the key factor a real exchange of capital and intellect invested. Citing an interview of New York University based Researcher Tejaswini Ganti (https://www.dukeupress.edu/producing-bollywood) would clarify the fate of the production logic when she was asked almost a similar kind of question:

'What makes the Indian Film Industry (Bollywood) unique?'

As the question asks about the backdrop or the genesis of a particular term and the industry format in totality, the question asking about the complete production logic of film as an industrial product/commodity/oeuvre in general must involve certain aspects:

            (i) Corporate i.e. investment aspects that would talk about huge capital and other players involved and subsequently the marketing aspects; but there is no industrial format for Bollywood or earlier Indian Popular Film production system ever recognized by either state or any other authority.

            (ii) Content/oeuvre aspects that involve both aesthetic and content elements;

            (iii) Making or production of labour aspects that involve stages of film making as both aesthetic and industrial aspects;

            (iv) Producer and director's own logic that involves the ideological aspects of film production;

            (v) Semiotic aspects that might involve the structural/cultural aspect that produces meaning of a film or the general logic of a film industry;

The reaction of Tejaswini Ganti shows our coordinate of understanding of Bollywood:

"First of all, even though filmmakers, the government, and the media keep pronouncing it as such there is no such thing as the “Indian film industry” – in terms of nationally integrated structures of financing, production, distribution, and exhibition, even if there is some overlap and circulation of personnel between the six main film industries in India. There are many film industries in India of which the Bombay-based Hindi film industry, now better known as “Bollywood,” is the most well-known globally; however, Hindi films comprise about 20% of the total number of films produced in India, with an equal number [and sometimes more] of films being made in Telugu and Tamil every year. When all of the films made in all of the languages – about 20 or so – are tallied up, that is what makes India the largest feature film producing country in the world; Bollywood doesn’t make 800-1000 films a year, it makes approximately 200 or so a year.

Now to answer the question: I think what is quite remarkable is how despite years of hostile or indifferent government policies, high rates of taxation, complete disinterest by much of the organized sector, scarcity of capital, and a very decentralized structure, the Hindi film industry managed to survive and continue to make films that were successful, touched people’s hearts, and were seen by millions of people all over the world. The example of the Hindi film industry counters all of those theories trotted about by neoliberal economists and Republican politicians in the U.S. about how excessive taxation and regulation kills entrepreneurship – it definitely did not do that for the Hindi film industry! Filmmakers complained and continue to complain about the Indian government’s economic policies that affect them negatively, but it didn’t stop them from making their films.

The description of the production account, as stated above, of the Mumbai Film Industry or so called Bollywood along with other regional film industries involves certain very interesting and axiomatic aspects that give us a totalist and popular mapping of the film production as a superstructure: These aspects are,

            (i) Absence of any industrial structure of film production despite filmmakers, government, pronouncing it as an Industry;

            (ii) There is no such nationally integrated film production cycle: financing, production, distribution and exhibition; the system is not even integrated by private enterprises.

            (iii) Existence of six film industrial zones in India; among them Bollywood is globally known;

            (iv) Number of Hindi, Tamil, Telugu films equally shares more than 70% of the total films made in India;

            (v) Total number of films made on all Indian languages makes the country the largest film producing country in the world; not just what Bollywood makes in a year;

            (vi) Despite hostile and indifferent government policies Bollywood keeps on producing sufficient films;

            (vii) Hindi films are still being circulated around the world.

Now, such a story of the production besides the oeuvre and film making, although has established it as a 'system' of producing films beyond all denial aspects, having its worldwide reach and other information, could not help but mystify certain production aspects:

            (i) The actual and general production logic of film as oeuvre i.e. the production logic of the process, orientation, commerciality, and other objectives toward producing the 'form', making money or profit and finally ruling the public spheres, all are involved as factors of production. The actual logic may come out like what Prasad argued arbitrarily about the models of cinema...Yeh Public Hain Sab Janti Hain...etc.

            (ii) The genesis of the sign 'Bollywood' subsequently,

            (iii) The totalist understanding of industrial-social-economic-cultural logic of about other film producing corners of the country etc. nowadays evenly merging into Bollywood in terms of joint venture of both capital and mechanical reproduction of oeuvre in every possible aspect [multiple distribution from theatres to Youtube].

So the above argument, its informative nature and subsequent ramifications reveal certain points of departure from the core logic production.

The first point of deflection is therefore a very popular point of discussion not in terms of 'making' but the hypercommercial logic of film production being made as popular cultural production of social interaction. But in every such case the hyper-commercial logic involves a far-fetched politics that tactfully suppresses the economic and other systemic exchange value behind the making of such contents. In this way, the above logic evades out the general factors of film production involved including not just about the status or fate of capital invested but also about the other production i.e. ‘from intellectual to labour’ factors; making of 'set and locations' that also partakes enough political inputs of production. Instead, the capital involved in making of films becomes a hyper-subjective issue in popular media and social networking sites. This hyper-subjectivity often comes out as a celebratory matter or fete, where people start celebrating and campaigning the super amount of profit in their own social and mass spheres. The revived use of the factors of production therefore becomes the factors of consumption in social networking spaces. Thus foreign location, technical special effects, action sequences, sexual exposures etc become the popular consumption points.

So the production of logic of any oeuvre as film, deliberately misses out certain factors of production process within the system, instead it pronounces how the capitalist or authority factors are involved in it to manage the system, feed the system, primary information about financing the system and finally define the system in the version of other empowered institutions of the social system and its social associates such as media partners, related sponsors and other corporate associates to deliberately suppress the labour-intellectual aspects of production or the aura of making a work of art. All the above factors and the players' contributions to the system are being transfused not in real economic logic but financial transsubstitution in language beyond any concrete nationalist economic principle. So here the whole production logic turns out to be the simple structure of financial language that tries to substitute the cultural logic of the oeuvre or content as the prime factor of film production. Absurd too happens.

The second departure is the genesis of Bollywood, a semiotic logic of production. Demystification of such a produced 'sign' leads to understand a new political economy of signification beyond all earlier production logics where the financial value does not measure or extend any social relationship of the oeuvre but the commodious cinema is transmutated into a further value that basically controls both social and industrial order. As exception, some few critical efforts were made in past two-three decades to produce some of the satire-critical movies where behind the content the logic rather politics of production was very apt and motivated. Films like Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron, Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kiyun Ata Hain, Salim Langre Pe Mat Ro, Garam Hawa etc. have had started a new critical-political genre which had gradually been faded out to the same industrial system of producing popular movies and could not sustain its concrete radical critical face. The genre of critical movies significantly disappeared in the processing of globalization and the making of Bollywood that started primarily featuring issues like Mumbai underworld, new religious majoritarian nationalist sentiment etc.

The third departure is the symbolic-exchange aspect of the whole country's 'film producing regions' specially, Bollywood, where the celebratory promotion leads to a massive effect in the audience psyche. This aspect in the name of communicational exchange obliterates all critical social projects turning them into a compulsively symbolic festive exchange.

The philosophy of the logic of production is therefore to establish a proclaimed notion of what the money investing system has produced and in this way the informatics of meta-corporate aspects of film production suppress the actual production signifiers thus making it more and more mystic with the time. It however leads the corresponding academic critiques to generalize them within the traditional political economic frame constantly by producing so called crispy, and story-telling mythic write-ups and gossips in popular film and entertainment magazines that finally compel people believe the whole film medium just as natural and obvious corporate social projects, albeit largely unknown and beyond the use of even targeted audience.

The above logic therefore remained so powerful and popularly legitimized by the corresponding social-political system that even alternative political objectives and productions of films had to accept the systemic legitimization to project their alternative and revolutionary approaches. So the radicality of understanding or debating over the production logic of Indian popular cinema has seldom been available in popular features and film reviews. Our goal here however in this context is to rediscover the genesis of Bollywood and other Indianwoods to understand the political economy of Indian cinema as a huge independent productive agent. Only then we would understand the real production logic of Bollywood because in such a situation the so called producers of culture industry remain always outside the social system. But they all maintain understanding with the systemic or controlling mechanism i.e. the ruling political-financial system etc. but nowhere with the people’s politics. This does not however mean that they don't have any idea about the society and social process. They treat society as just a user i.e. an agent of consumption, amass of rendering and revitalizing ‘fandom’ to finally legitimize the signifier of Bollywood production.

Howsoever...any ideological reduction of the production logic of Indian mainstream commercial films would legitimize cinema a mere capitalist's "produced and owned" commodity, a fetish of which could have been the ultimate destination and oeuvre at large that represents the contemporary social. Popular cinema has commonly established its journey in the audience mind not as a fetishable or fetishized commodity but a much more than that in the realm of entertainment, lifestyle and all other 'real' forms of micro value judgements of life and mundane exercises. In this way the so called commodity reaches a point of substituting the total social and represents the social systems not in the mode of reflection but as a new guideline for people. It is therefore a different mode of production process that albeit having roots in social issues never reflects any system without analysts' assistance. It reflects the 'focused' social as "minimally selected" for making the oeuvre of popular films whereas some new popular cinemas share a bit more about the 'social' system as many big directors like Mani Ratnam, Priyadarshan, Sujit Sarkar etc. fall in this category. Audience hardly gets any actual or critical re-assessment of its own social in a cinema in contrast to the contributions of critical directors like Rittick Ghattak, Mrinal Sen etc. So with the passage of short-lived critical political era of Indian cinema the post-globalization era accommodates films of both dealing with serious issues and sloppy flicks in its entertainment coverage. Item numbers and Item Songs are evident in both categories as a must evident in films dealing serious issues whatsoever. In this process we entered a 'total' age of cinema or mediational package.

3.

Bollywood beyond Commodity: Semiology of Bollywood

Now if the general condition of cinema production in Bollywood is just to produce a commodity of entertainment, India then has witnessed the commodity production since its initial days. How can one then justify the genesis of Bollywood? The Bollywood then can be legitimized beyond the commodity purview on a new political economic plane.

In his paper 'The Thing Called Bollywood', noted film scholar Madhava Prasad stated some very certain arguments which are required to be assessed further when nevertheless the finality certainly remains to rediscover Bollywood and the actuality of the production logic of Indian Popular Cinema. In his not big but very apt analysis Prasad is of opinion that

            (i) Bollywood, as strange name, but stranger is the wide acceptance of the term...where the dominant prevailing view is that Indian popular cinema is an entirely an indigenous product.

            (ii) Today not just English language media, but scholars, journalists are employing the term.

            (iii) Is it meant to suggest that the cinema is imitative and therefore deserves to be rechristened to highlight this derivativeness?

            (iv) 'It is natural that those who have invested in earlier models of Indian popular cinema — the 'so many cinema' model, the 'folk culture' model, the 'yeh-to-public-hai-yeh-sab-janti-hai' model, the 'regressive pulse of the people' model, the 'ideological' model, the 'art versus popular' model and so on should feel...resentful of this development which threatens to absorb their own special areas into its commodious purview.

            (v) Bollywood does not have any specific signified; an empty signifier; can thus be applied to any set of signifieds in the realm of Indian cinema.

            (vi) It seems to be a callous act of symbolic abduction.

            (vii) The term Bollywood has crept into the vocabulary of the Anglophone national culture...without anybody noticing it...like certain processes of which we became aware only...now witness naturalization of Bollywood as designation for what was previously known Hindi cinema, Bombay cinema, Indian Popular cinema, etc...the process of near-universal legitimation of Bollywood is a symptom of some other social and cultural processes, which have a wider significance.

            (viii) Can linguistic change be an index of social transformations and if so, how do we make sense of them?

            (ix) Where consumer capitalism has finally succeeded in weaning the citizens away from a strongly entrenched culture to thrift toward a system of gratification more firmly...in its long term control. They have produced yet another variation of nationalist ideology of tradition and modernity...relocated...the seismic centre of Indian national identity...in Anglo-America.

            (x) ...few exceptions like DDLJ continue to pose the 'return to roots'...Bend It Like Beckham is an obvious indicator of how the NRI is once again functioning as facilitator in the transition to a new model of self-relation...

            (xi) NRI Patriotism...NRI is increasingly beginning to look like the sole guarantor of Indian identity...

           

In this way Madhava Prasad defines Bollywood as NRI-ization of Indian Popular Cinema. He wanted to express his concern over the Bollywood-ization of Indian Popular cinema and its growing capitalist logic which, according to him, is a commodious description of the 'term'; typically a foreign made one like. For him the Bollywood or Bollywood-ization can be demystified as NRI-ization of Indian cinema which lived earlier in an entrenched culture. His social logic of Indian popular films thus includes afresh participation of Indian socio-economic factors, though not very clearly posited and socio-cultural factors or realities that was directly inducted in cinema even popular cinema.

But in the earlier era of the so called nationally entrenched culture, Indian Popular Cinema or Bombay Film Industry had possessed almost all those materials to become Bollywood someday. The Corporate globalization had just made the inward passage formally open for the global finance capital and other cultural ingredients both in the form of corporate and private capital and culture. Is it therefore just an 'iconic' foreign attachment of NRIs only that accomplished the Bollywoodization? If earlier producers, according to Prasad, are so resentful of today's Bollywoodized development of commodious culture, what then did they produce since 1950s or even before — were not all those commodious? Were they critical or revolutionary otherwise? No.

Moreover, it is also evident that why then some Indian Radical and even in some instances Popular directors too have had faced severe fund shortage throughout their careers where hardly any producer was ready to finance their films when they strived to portray social realities as much as they felt true? Why this fund-crunch for few directors is still evident even in popular cinema making too? If it reveals the long cliché argument of producers' commercial preference; then why is it so 'taken for granted' in a social system, whereas it has never been at all a systemic issue? If technically considered, the issue of funding a film starts from its oeuvre script to go further any direction. So it is not the finality of cinema, the oeuvre has long before been commodious and awaits further extension of production. The execution is then nothing but the production of sign of the oeuvre commodity for further commercial extension. Producers i.e. money lenders in the pre-globalized era were probably anxious about the cultural extension of the reality projected in cinema, if it might cause revolutionary outcome or whatsoever. But with the advent and growth of entertainment as an extension of the same commodity the fear of projecting any revolutionary, critical and finally anything like ‘critical to the system’ oeuvre has gradually been obliterated [Note: See Media's Propaganda Model in Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman].

It now comes out to be quite natural that in the era of global financial-mediational-ethnic convergence the funding may come from anywhere beyond any specific definition following the same even pre-globalization logic of funding and pre-production understanding between all categories of producers (from money lenders to oeuvre producers). We used to have information of very few renowned producers (money lenders or investors) and Production Houses like R.K. Films, Yash Chopra Productions, UTV Productions etc. out of innumerable unknown[s] in the pre-globalization era (in the nationally entrenched culture zone) and so is the situation of the contemporary post-globalization era. Money lending or investing mechanism in film production remains as volatile as it was eternally evident. The contemporary globalization scenario has just paved the way of the flush of global excess funds and siphoned/diversified funds.

The above logic is absolutely social and relevant to common people as well because audience in the post-globalization world is much aware of, and possess, scribed [cosmetic] knowledge of scripts, cinematography, music or background score, music director, action director, dance director or choreographer, even sound recordist in the era of dolby digital technology. Consequently any contemporary analysis must not form any general argument on just traditional and nationally formulated system-finance axis. Bollywood or popular cinema in its growing promotional phase has long been fragmented into many promotional and 'Sign' factors where to form any gross narrative behind becomes very difficult.

4.

Bollywood Not an Empty Signifier

Howsoever, coming on to the semiology of Bollywood what Prasad explains as its genealogy, he starts being critical to the term Bollywood. The very first point Prasad raises is 'Bollywood is strange name...stranger is its acceptance...but the dominant prevailing view is that Indian Popular cinema is an entirely an indigenous product'. Certain questions may now be decoded from the above statement.

·         Does the dialectics therefore stand between Bollywood and indigenously produced cinemas?

·         Does Bollywood signify only NRI made cinemas like Deepa Mehta, Gurinder Chaddha, Nagesh Kukunoor etc.?

·         In what sense the film production has been entirely an indigenous system?

·         The technology used in making first cinema was imported. For ‘oeuvre’ and ‘financing mechanism’ the ‘indigenous production’ concept becomes more volatile.

·         As said earlier, are not indigenously made films commodious?

·         Does Bollywood entail any such history related to the specific production logic? Or does Bollywood, the term itself, imperialize or invade meaning?

The above new epistemic options appear even more problematic when Prasad says that 'Bollywood is a sign but having an empty signifier...can be applied to any set of signifieds...'. Is there any sign there which has an empty signifier out its sign value? Does Semiology prescribe natural course of meaning within a sign dimension? Even if a sign does not have its external social reference it must at least have its virtual reference in the mediational universe and that too is a newer social extension as theorists are of opinion. Moreover as the signifier originates from the communicator of the term which Indian popular film production icons have always been empowered enough to establish that. Furthermore no empty signifier can produce such havoc and huge signified that covers the whole of Indian Culture Industry.

In case of such a mass sign like Bollywood it is largely indeterminate but never so empty because no signifier remains empty at the time of communication. It is the signified that may come out empty, as Umberto Eco defined, because the signifier may here be very tricky to produce a common signified for a mass use. For Bollywood it is exactly like that. As stated earlier that the real story of the production logic of film is largely unknown in Indian film producing arenas the potency of bollywood signifier also remains quite indeterminate. Bollywood is therefore a definite and dynamic sign producing series of newer meanings and objects to refer to by its users and far beyond films made only by NRIs. Plethora of aspects is there which Bollywood and Bollywoodization do signify that includes 'NRI involvement' factor too. It is simply evident on Internet how the meanings of Bollywood are popularly framed and used, not just as a simplified statement of the wider acceptance of the term as said Prasad.

Prasad however has argued interestingly that 'it can be applied to any set of signified[s] within the realm of Indian cinema'. Yeah, this is the Archemedean point where the attack on the Bollywood sign is to be launched to liberate cinematic (aesthetic and intellectual) signified[s] from the viscidity of entertainment. And this process legitimizes too the value of the sign, though based primarily on the commodity value, but immediately transsubstantiated into sign value where signifier is not at all imaginary, rather a promotional structure very regulated by huge monetarist affair. It has a differential logic of production that moves beyond traditional logic or inclusion of a third element like the NRI factor. Here the value of Bollywood as sign is to be realized only by the power of signification that transsubstantiates money invested and the content produced into its own realm outraging all earlier metanarratives or sign models not within a nationally entrenched culture but ruthlessly in favour of the ruling political and social power. The history of inclusion of so called filmy icons in Indian politics is thus old enough and widespread in all cinema producing regions of the country. So immaterial here is whether a commodity like DDLJ prescribes 'return to roots' as Prasad argues, because DDLJ as a sign prescribes nothing such except a heavy load of narratives too, otherwise Satyajit Ray, Rittick Ghattak, Mrinal Sen, Adoor Gopalkrishnan, Girish Kasaravalli and many others would have accomplished the revolution with their so empowered social references of oeuvres. It is just the storyline which means lot more than return to roots when the protagonist/director combination is trying to settle abroad. But nowhere the film has had any central message of return to roots or anything such at all except the family of Simran; DDLJ was however not a full length family drama. Like Bollywood DDLJ is also a structure that projects so many common signified[s] like,

           

            (i) 'aah tujhe chum lu main'; i.e. youth sexual arousal but very much intermittent and not beyond the 'reality' iconic value.

            (ii) Father allows daughter to lead a conditional independence before the life imprisonment in Deshi Shadi; so a 'ji le zindegi' syndrome is legitimizing the patriarchal programming.

            (iii) Conflict between 'mystic deterritorialization of culture (see, Tomlinson, Lull, Chattopadhyay) and also peaceful settlement in England';

            (iv) Fake and hyper-commercial issue-based nationalism' that cannot sustain in both English and Indian perspectives;

            (v) 'individuality’ (specially women) suppressed under traditionalism but Karwa Chauth has been projected so emphatically to save the same ‘Deshi’ (native) womanhood as second sex on the other hand;

All these narratives cut across Prasad's central 'return to roots' grand-narrative or signified. It is moreover a real difficulty to get hold of a gross and perennial signified because all other signified[s] would immediately be transformed into signifiers for further consumption in the communicative field of projection and critique. Audience here would receive it not in terms of economic or any other exchange values but as symbolic exchange.

On the other hand, In contrast to Prasad's NRI-ization, another noted film scholar Ashis Rajadhyaksha while coordinating Bollywood is of opinion that it is the global distribution of certain films that makes the category Bollywood. In his words,

On what is this hype based? Interestingly, in the past year, the box office of an Indian cinema made indigenously was itself less central to the phenomenon than a range of ancillary industries, mostly based in London, including theatre (the much-hyped London stage musical Bombay Dreams, a collaboration between Indian composer A. R. Rehman and Andrew Lloyd Webber), the music industry, advertising1 and even fashion (the month-long ‘Bollywood’festival of food, furniture and fashion marketing in Selfridges, London), all of which culminated in the extraordinary marketing exercise known as Indian Summer, in July 2002 (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/asianlife/film/indiansummer/index.shtml). All of this began, it is usually said, with the four films that Newsweek also mentions as having made distribution history, three of them directly or indirectly Yash Chopra productions: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ, 1995), the film which in some ways started it all, Dil To Pagal Hai (DTPH, 1997) and Karan Johar’s Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (KKHH, 1998), and Subhash Ghai’s Taal (1998). Before all these, there is of course the original box-office hit Hum Aapke Hain Kaun? (1994). Of Taal, for example, producer and noted ‘showman’ of Hindi cinema Ghai said, There’ll be 125 prints of Taal only for the foreign market.

So for Rajadhyaksha it was basically the global distribution and rating of Bombay films that made Bollywood which is binarily opposed to the Prasad's argument. Prasad argues about the influx of NRI-ed money and for Rajadhyaksha it is the outflow of Indian films into the global arena that made today’s Bollywood. Both however tried to be conclusive in defining Bollywood. Now what would therefore be the actual coordinate of Bollywood? Both analyses talk about global exposure of Bombay films but in opposite directional mode.

Bollywood therefore resides beyond any gross cinema production mechanism purview. Bollywood only refers to the 'sign' beyond commoditization. Bollywood is a sign that although originates from the 'oeuvre' or 'cinema' commodity but transcends subsequently toward new valuation. This new 'sign' valuation is getting more and more expensive day by day beyond any traditional economic configuration.

5.

Coordinate of Bollywood: Emergence of a new labour that legitimizes imaginaries

The mystic logic of Bollywood can now be deciphered in Prasad's resentful near-concluding argument that in contrast to its signifier 'the term is widely accepted in recent years'. The actuality behind this logic rests not in the rarity or availability of production factor; it is the very growth of consumption and manifestation logic in the popular audio-visual and new media that makes the term so powerful. But it is not an obvious project or to be a 'taken for granted' aspect of communication. It also requires and generates a new dimension of labour and a new exchange value that would substantiate the value of icon, brand, and all sorts of establishment act of signifier.

The growth of sign is therefore not dependent upon its logic of exchange value of ‘positioning’ in mediated spheres against loads of money involved only. The consumption logic as based upon the signification logic which is produced by a new value of labour at a new exchange value that enriches Bollywood where being withered of any political ideological compulsion or belief the so called ‘empowered’ elites start playing with some imaginaries of the ‘Spectacle’ i.e. amount of money invested, the shooting stories of hero-heroine, new item-songs, reality extensions of the film, etc. The value of spectacle cannot however be deciphered by digging out the traditional comparable past of the industry but by defining the value of the 'new' labour that causes acceptance among audience. This is the coordinate of Bollywood. Media rather mass media institutions substantiate and organize such labour to promote the consumption aspects of the term and the audience consumes it to its widest extent as 'believing the endless imaginaries'. Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, Akshay Kumar etc. are all big imaginaries of Bollywood; creators of the sign value because money as capital is evidently invested not on cinema production but on these icons.

Bollywood is therefore a 'means' of producing imaginaries that being detached from the social mode of production creates its own production forces and its 'new' exchange value. And in both cases money is nowhere considered or found as a true preset  of exchange value because money nowhere in a system is used as true instrument of exchange, rather it is substituted as consumptive sumptuary value. It is the commodious cinema that turns into the promotional sign value where money is further substantiated with the icons or iconic factors like "items". Here producers' money being expended but not at all exchanged in any economic dealing. In the Indian mainstream cinema, money is thus expended hugely to de-recognize all other traditional factors (specially human labour and intellect) of production and the corresponding social liability and the central social institutional system i.e. 'government and its people' too. Foreign locations, foreigners' involvement, newer global equations of relational couplings nowadays feature the Indian cinema. So money, invested and expended; and the content, used, create cinema as a final category of product. In such cases, as Baudrillard says, the total functioning is being performed like an auction, social auction. In his words,

'Money is nullified as divisible exchange value and is transsubstantiated by its expenditure into an indivisible sumptuary value. Thus it becomes the homolog of the painting (here please read cinema as oeuvre and Bollywood as Sign of production) as a sign, a unique and indivisible object...'

In this way, the general production logic is basically transsubstantiated into an indivisible sign value, here called, Bollywood. The transsubstantiation of money and the content into the particular sign Bollywood can therefore be easily established by the consideration of cinema as a canvas-category that becomes an object having only the investment logic as the base of production. The work of making commodity thus projects its value not in the quality of but the glimpses of spectacles for audience consumption. These spectacles are sign values that create the central Sign of Bollywood. The ideology of Bollywood is therefore "it happens here" or "it happens here too". The money value does cease to become an economic value because in every such case the transsubstantiation of money value beyond content value becomes a subject of discussion that helps enriching sign value of the category. Social Networking Sites and many other informative spaces often witness such popular posting from both production corners and enthusiasts that this is a huge budgeted film that affords to show such and such locations or stunts or risky shots etc.

So any ideological reduction in the general value of production of Indian popular cinema would certainly intercept to understand the being of Bollywood critically and would on the other hand promote the glamour of sign value as natural as the extension of lifestyle to finally establish a control over the audience culture. A quantitative study would somewhat clarify the consumptive situation: A search of 'Bollywood' on Google gives us 907 hundred thousand results, which all are the consumed outcome that outcasts the genesis of the term compared to the value of its 'newer' usage as a new use value or manifestation value. The new use value of Bollywood has been legitimized by the usage or consumption of millions of institutions or sources. If the Bollywood signifier remains mystic in the labour of consumption the signified of it is vividly open in the physical and virtual world. So it is no less important to accept the open factor than to define it in terms of the age old reduced production logic which neither legitimizes the value of traditional labour or intellect nor justify the use of money, the new labour and finally the politics of oeuvre.

6.

Bollywood-ization finality: Entertainment and Social Alienation

Now what if Bollywood becomes self-reflexively proactive to produce further meaning? The signifier of Bollywood in the contemporary mediation system, originating from the earlier signifieds of rituals, now works as the revival of the supreme sign value. It is then more of an 'out of the system' association with Hollywood on the basis of the importation of cinematographic technology and development of global cinema features in Mumbai, Chennai the term Bollywood started producing its own substructures in various revivalist modes. It started working in a new free trading environment, where no earlier economic, social preambular logic would work.

The Bollywoodization phenomenon therefore produces unlimited cultural forms, materials and ideas as newer 'Reality's. The use values of all forms and categories are to be generalized as Entertainment. Entertainment therefore remains finality of the Bollywoodization. The Bollywoodization phenomenon is the Culture Industry of India. The growth of Culture Industry in India with the popularity factor among audience has therefore alienated the real production system and the traditional labour force from the spectacle. The accumulated labour in the film industry has neither been recognized as intellectual property nor as a labour force. The history of Bombay film icons and popular filmy hyperreal tentacles have been the identity of the Culture Industry or Bollywoodization.

Lastly, Bollywood is therefore such a postindustrial phenomenon when media are in full concentration and convergence in the globe. Not just in Mumbai but in other giant film producing areas specially Chennai, Hyderabad also the cinema operates under transcorporate Bollywood coverage in all respect.

Bollywood is therefore such a sign dimension that although originates from the commodious structure of films, transcends far beyond the commodity and all traditional production values. Bollywood has produced a new value to be exchanged by the new labour producing hyperreal media-texts. It is so operating beyond an industrial format. No 'autonomy of cinema industry' trivia can be used to justify its operation. Mere industrial-commodious analysis and description of its colonial past falls short of coordinating Bollywood.

Reference:

(1) Prasad Madhava: The Thing Called Bollywood; isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1218620.files

(2) Rajadhyaksha Ashish: The Bollywoodization of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a global arena; Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 4, Number 1, 2003;

(3) Adorno Theodor: Culture Industry; Routlege;

(4) Baudrillard J.: For A Critique of the Political Economy of Sign; Telos Press.