Abstract
Academic books on Indian cinema and film industry have not kept pace with the prodigious number of films produced in India each year that, by some accounts, is the second largest film producing industry in the world. Given this mismatch, Aswin Punathambekar’s From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry is a timely reminder of the untapped potential of Bombay’s film industry for extending existing theoretical frameworks in media, film and production studies. The book provides a critical interrogation of the ‘sociohistorical conjuncture of the past two decades’ (p. 3) in the history of Bombay cinema that marks a transition between two worlds – the older traditional one dominated by family-owned studios conducting business along kinship networks – giving way to a newer one that, responding to and engaging with processes of globalization, seeks to break free from past shackles to adopt newer aesthetics, business practices and markets. Relying on close analysis of cinematic texts, of the discourse within and about the industry and of key events in the lead up to and during this transition, Punathambekar weaves a fascinating tale of interest to scholars of Indian cinema and those probing relationships between texts and industry more broadly. This is a tale of technological and economic transformation enabled by the state, the city of Bombay and the Indian mediascape. But it is also a narrative of the battle lines that get drawn due to an ideological struggle between competing cultural practices of media production with corporatized and ‘professional’ pitted against traditional and preexisting.
This book should be of immense interest to students and academics alike seeking to expand scholarship on non-western cinemas, but also to a broader audience comprising viewers and consumers who have noticed a shift in the grammar of Indian movies while lacking a theoretical vocabulary to explain the change. The book’s framework of analysis is centrally grounded within the emerging scholarship on industry studies and production cultures. It seeks inspiration from scholars such as John Caldwell’s ethnography of film and television industry professionals in Los Angeles and Michael Curtin and Serra Tenic’s emphasis on the spatial aspects of media production through analyses of key cities such as Hong Kong and Vancouver. The choice of these frameworks is aimed to supplement the predominantly text-centric scholarship on Indian cinema by unmasking the complex relationalities within which production cultures of media industries embed and thrive. As is evident in the structure of the book, this method does not elide textual analysis but supplements it with close readings of networks of consumers, producers, financiers, marketers and critics. Tracing these circuits of transfer and exchange along material and cultural geographies is one of the most significant contributions of this book to existing studies on Indian cinema. In doing so, it expands the horizons of Indian film scholarship by introducing newly emergent nodes in its network of circulation such as transnational diasporic communities, intermedia networks and worldwide screening locations that bring global audiences along with them.
A notable instance of this multi-sited methodology is provided in the second chapter of the book called ‘Staging Bollywood’ (dealing with the changing industrial identity of Indian cinema) wherein the text of the movie Luck By Chance is used as an allegory of the very conflicts between the two worlds that is a recurring theme within the book. The analysis here moves between key moments within the cinematic text and real events and issues in the industry as the celluloid world stages the real one. The movie revolves against the backdrop of the Bombay film industry and plots the hopes and disillusionment of two aspiring actors and their producers trying to finance a film through different channels. While the film goes on to be a success, the various subplots dealing with ‘stardom and film journalism, disenchanted extras and choreographers, marginalized screenwriters, erratic production schedules’ (p. 51) let us peep into a curiously hidden world that lurks behind the screens of Bombay cinema. This world animates the book’s core which is driven by the belief that scholarship on Bombay films is significantly enriched by engaging with what remains largely concealed from the viewers but is important nevertheless in determining cinematic texts. Through a reciprocal interplay between the texts of films and the contexts within which they are produced, Punathambekar illuminates the invariable struggle between competing ideologies and cultures pointing to the gasps of the old even as it grudgingly gives way to the new.
As the book unfolds, these structural determinants and concealed habitus of Bombay cinema extend far beyond the city. Its tracing of the global networks of the desi diaspora and their discovery and acknowledgement as a powerful factor in shaping the industry is carefully elaborated by the author. Close analysis of narratives of films such as Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham that centrally capture the non-resident Indian (NRI) experience and the digital access to films, songs and promotional material that erase time and space allowing distant fans to participate delineate the global force field within which Bombay cinema is produced and consumed today. What was once a centralized and provincial industry largely limited to the geographical boundaries of India is today a globally networked amorphous structure whose distant nodes create centripetal and centrifugal forces influencing the intricacies of cinematic narrative.
The story presented in From Bombay to Bollywood is collated through painstaking ethnographic, textual and archival research and is worthy of emulation by other scholarship bound to follow this book. It takes seriously the dictum that media, cultural and cinematic texts are encoded by and decoded within networks of articulation that are best understood when positioned within those chains of production and meaning making. At the close of the book, one is left wanting to know more about the many worlds in which it journeys. If the changing text in Bombay cinema in the past decade has been a visible fact, Punathambekar’s book demystifies that change by showing us the structural, geographic and material transformations that have enabled a new form of meaning making to emerge in Bombay. The book lays down a new path for subsequent scholars by nudging us to move away from uni-dimensional analyses and take seriously the production cultures within film industries. Its value lies as much in its compelling argument as in this invitation.