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Industrial Identity in an Era of Reform >> 63

industry and indeed, “Indian” capitalism more broadly. Moreover, they were
seen as belonging to a very select group able to negotiate between the global
and the vernacular.
But for the most part, the discourse of corporatization positioned film
producers, distributors, and exhibitors in the Bombay film industry as out-
siders in an emergent Bollywood formation and regarded them as objects of
reform. Indeed, the assessment on the part of the trade- and business-press
as well as consultancy reports during the late 1990s and early 2000s had been
dire. As a Business Week report from 2002 declared: “Bollywood, as a busi-
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ness, is a mess.” Comparing the chaotic mode of production in the Bombay
film industry, one marked by a lack of proper budgeting, little preproduction
planning, half-baked scripts that were modified as the shoot progressed, and
the entire project hinging on the whims and fancies of stars, to the stream-
lined, efficient, rational, and corporatized mode and culture of production
that the likes of UTV and Reliance had supposedly ushered in, such stories
framed the transformation of the Bombay film industry into Bollywood as a
decisive break from the past.
This is reflected in these media corporations’ websites as well. In fact,
the most striking aspect of websites and other branding strategies of major
corporations like UTV Motion Pictures is the emphasis they place on how
well their missions are aligned with the FICCI-state narrative of change
in the Bombay film industry. For companies like UTV and Shree Ashtavi-
nayak Cine Vision, their industrial identity fit neatly in relation to the lin-
ear progression from Bombay cinema to Bollywood, defined in particular
by the adoption of rational systems of management and the formalization
of business practices in production, financing, and distribution. Consider
the website for UTV Motion Pictures. Beneath the UTV logo and a banner
advertising the latest film produced by the company is an introduction to the
company that declares:

Movies enjoy an almost ‘basic need of survival’ status in India. UTV
Motion Pictures has worked consciously to ride on that phenomenon,
pioneering not just newer films and story ideas, but also the very manner
in which films are made in India. From novel plots and stories that one
would think can never work in mainstream cinema, to pioneering the stu-
dio model in movie production, UTV has contributed to a positive change
in the Indian motion picture industry.

This narrative, in which UTV takes credit for professionalizing the film
production process and establishing new organizational forms in Bombay,