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Industrial Identity in an Era of Reform >> 53

for the Next Act—as indexing a complicated and evolving terrain of media
production, one marked as much by unpredictability as by a sense of cer-
tainty regarding the “next act.”
Drawing on panel discussions, various artifacts circulating at the conven-
tion, and trade-press coverage of the convention and this period of transi-
tion, my goal here is to complicate the official narrative in which the notion
of an interval is understood as constituting nothing more than an interrup-
tion and, more crucially, that the “next act” was readily imaginable. Focusing
attention on this moment of celebration opens up an opportunity to consider
the entire decade—from 1998, when the government granted industry status
to filmmaking in Bombay, until 2009—as a formative interval. The interval,
in other words, is not just an arbitrary break in a neat and linear narrative of
progress toward a seamless integration into the logics of global capital. As
Lalitha Gopalan has argued, where Indian cinema is concerned the inter-
val “lies at the bedrock of our comprehension of the structuring of narrative
expectation, development and closure . . . at times exceeding the intentions
of the filmmakers whose rational choice of the interval may be one among
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several ways to read the film.” I build on this theorization of the interval to
draw attention to novel responses and adaptations that shape an industry in
transition. I show that the result of a decade of corporatization has been the
emergence of a hybrid terrain of media production characterized by fam-
ily businesses reformulating their industrial identities to meet the demands
of new circuits of capital as well as a range of media corporations that have
entered the film business only to find themselves contending with the limits
of corporate logics in the Bombay film industry.
But understanding how the discourse of corporatization has played out
in Bombay requires us to go well beyond the issue of emerging models and
relations of film production, marketing, distribution, and exhibition. Thus,
in tracing the ways in which a range of industry professionals speak of this
period of transition, I also draw attention to the construction of industrial
identity as a crucial and defining aspect of corporatization. John Caldwell,
for instance, has shown us how industrial identity practices (branding, syn-
dication, franchising, and so on) are related to specific institutional and
economic logics. In his view, our understanding of the concept of identity
3
as “something more slippery and transitory” and involving performative
dimensions can be fruitfully extended to see that the “media’s approach to
corporate identity can be similarly contingent, slippery, volatile, changing,
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tactical, and theatricalized.” Indeed, Rommy Rolly’s performance in Luck
by Chance typifies several established industry professionals’ response to
calls for corporatizing their businesses and production cultures—a tactical