Page 58 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

Media Industries and the State in an Era of Reform >> 45

these transitions and observes that “while cinema has been in existence as a
national industry of sorts for the past 50 years, Bollywood has been around
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for only a decade now” (emphasis in original). Revisiting the period
between 1945 and 1951, when the Bombay film industry managed to establish
itself as a “national” film industry in the absence of state support, he goes on
to argue that the most recent attempt by the state to redefine its relationship
with cinema is, quite simply, a response to the problem of defining “national
culture” in globalized modernity. Rajadhyaksha’s argument is an important
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reminder of the state’s previous attempts to define its relationship with the
film industry and indeed, define cinema’s role in postcolonial India.
As Madhava Prasad has documented, the film industry did entertain
hopes that the government of postcolonial India would “recognize the poten-
tial that cinema held as a medium of mass education and would give it the
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same encouragement that was envisaged for other industries.” Drawing on
observations made by a group of producers from Bombay, Calcutta, Madras,
and Lahore who traveled to Europe and America in 1945 to study the film
industries there, Prasad notes that their report, in addition to positioning
cinema as a “partner in the about-to-be independent country’s campaign to
modernize and project a good image abroad,” also detailed what the gov-
ernment could do to provide a “stable and progressive foundation” for the
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industry. However, the Nehruvian state did not regard cinema as crucial
to the project of modernization and development. While communications
systems including the telegraph, telephone, radio, and later, television, were
brought under the purview of the state and included as an area of both eco-
nomic and political-cultural importance, cinema was seen as a distraction at
best and at worst, a site of moral failure akin to gambling. 64
Even as cinema was marginalized in the overall project of nation-build-
ing, the postcolonial state did acknowledge its usefulness as a vehicle for
propaganda. In 1949, the S. K. Patil Film Enquiry Committee was appointed
and charged with the task of reporting on the status of the film industry. 65
Critiquing the “shift from the studio system to independent entrepreneur-
ship” and the involvement of black market money in the film business, this
report also recommended that the state invest in film production, establish a
film finance corporation, a film institute, and film archives. Nearly a decade
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later, the central government set up a Film Finance Corporation (1960, FFC)
and in 1964 it brought the FFC under the control of the Ministry of Informa-
tion & Broadcasting and sought to provide low-interest loans to select proj-
ects. In 1970 the FFC was merged with the Indian Motion Picture Export
Corporation (IMPEC) and renamed the National Film Development Corpo-
ration (NFDC). These changes, while welcomed by the film industry, did not