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Media Industries and the State in an Era of Reform >> 47

the mafia’s hold over the film industry, but a series of changes at every step of
the filmmaking process, including preparing a bound script, developing and
working with schedules, getting stars to sign and honor contracts instead of
proceeding with verbal assurances, in-film branding through corporate tie-
ups, aggressive marketing and promotions that reflected processes of mar-
ket segmentation underway in India, the entry of large industrial houses,
corporations, and television companies into the business of film production
and distribution, and the emergence of multiplexes to replace single-screen
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cinema halls across urban India. As a journalist reporting from FRAMES
2003 for the English-language national daily The Hindu, noted: “Bollywood
has an itch and it has much to do with the perennial drone of corporatiza-
tion as panacea for its ills. For the second day at Frames 2003, sections of
the film industry continued to outline how far the tie-clad manager could
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venture into their private turf.” By the time I arrived in Bombay in the fall
of 2005 for my first phase of field research, critics in the film industry who
had dismissed corporatization as little more than a set of cosmetic changes
seemed to have been silenced. As the widely circulated KPMG-authored
consultancy report for FRAMES 2005, titled “Focus 2010: From Dreams to
Reality,” declared:

The seeds of corporatization have been sown . . . the stakeholders, espe-
cially the new generation of producers, directors and performers are now
much more receptive to international best practices to redefine the way
of doing business. Better discipline has resulted in a slow turnaround in
the industry, which recovered from an unsuccessful 2002 to record bet-
ter profitability in the last two years. Aided by investments in technology
and the right measure of governmental intervention, India could establish
itself as an important global filmmaking hub outside of Hollywood. 73

With a string of hits in 2005–06 that broke several box-office records, an
increasing percentage of “clean” funds, a slew of commissioned reports from
corporate consultants emphasizing the importance of “filmed entertain-
ment” to the growth potential of the overall media and entertainment sec-
tor in India, and unprecedented levels of global visibility, memories of an
industry plagued by losses and operating under the ominous shadow of the
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underworld had been banished. The safai, it seemed, was paying off and the
future, as it were, was close at hand.
One way to understand this moment of transition is in terms of the
media and entertainment industries, and Bollywood in particular, having
become useful to the state. Of course, the argument regarding usefulness