Page 54 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

Media Industries and the State in an Era of Reform >> 41

would only invest in Hindi-language films that had a capital investment of
over Rs. 5 crore (50 million) and stipulated that the borrower had to be a
corporate entity with an established record. 46
For their part, banks and financial institutions were unwilling to invest
in a highly disorganized and unpredictable industry in which only a hand-
ful of well-established production companies could produce two or three
47
films in any given year. This hesitation was also partly due to the failure of a
few high-profile attempts by film stars such as Amitabh Bachchan to launch
48
publicly traded companies. Further, interventions in financing were never
simply a question of transparent accounting practices and sources of capi-
tal. This moment of reform also generated a discourse of “corporatization” as
the way for the film industry to clean up, shed its image as a dysfunctional
“national” cinema, and assume its place as a global player. In a report tracing
events leading up to the arrest of Bharat Shah, a leading film financier and
diamond merchant, the English-language news magazine India Today noted:

Pundits are hopeful that the cleansing operation will eventually lead to
more legitimate sources of funds and increasing corporatization. Shah’s
arrest has also sent a strong message down the ranks in Bollywood. Every-
one—from directors to stars—will think twice before signing on with
unknown entities and, hopefully, only the genuine makers will thrive. Says
a leading star secretary, “Safai ho raha hai, accha hai” (it’s being cleaned
up, it’s good). 49

The deployment of the word safai is particularly telling and worth dwell-
ing upon. Going along with government and industry discourse, safai does
simply mean “cleaning up.” But the word also evokes notions of “neatness,”
“purity,” and “cleansing” that, in turn, signal the need to situate this moment
of transition in state-media ties in relation to other contexts and develop-
ments: the deindustrialization of the city of Bombay beginning in the late
1970s and the gradual transformation of urban space; the shift to a service-
oriented economy and reconfiguration of Bombay’s location in the world
economy; the rise to power of the nativist, right-wing Shiv Sena party in the
state of Maharashtra whose leaders tapped into the resentments and frustra-
tions that these changes had wrought; and a range of other wrenching transi-
50
tions that the official renaming of Bombay as Mumbai indexes. The desire
to refashion the Bombay film industry into Bollywood needs to be under-
stood, then, alongside other “clean” visions of the future of the city that were
articulated, for instance, in the widely circulated and critiqued document,
“Vision Mumbai: Transforming Mumbai into a World-Class City,” developed