Page 79 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

66 << Industrial Identity in an Era of Reform

What Hossain and her fellow panelists offered was a straightforward and
homogenizing narrative of progress in which the transition from a “precapi-
talist” mode of production to one that would be in tune with global capital
was framed as being inevitable, if not entirely seamless. Needless to say, the
notion that a specific mode of organization, built on logics of kinship and
interpersonal ties, has remained stable and shaped the functioning of the
Bombay film industry for over five decades is equally problematic. I shall
focus on this aspect further in the next section where I examine family busi-
nesses’ reconstruction of industrial identities. But for the moment, I want
to signal that Vishesh Bhatt’s outburst, during which he accused corporate
executives of being irresponsible and even underhanded, needs to be under-
stood in part as a response to this corporate narrative in which Hollywood
would, in the fullness of time, come to define business logics, industrial prac-
tices, and production cultures in Bollywood.
Of course, Bhatt’s remarks were also a performance of incommensurabil-
ity, with the difference being that he mobilized a different strain of the same
culturalist discourse. While the corporate narrative located the Bombay film
industry in a “prolonged state of not-yetness,” a familiar trope that has been
deployed, as Madhava Prasad points out, by western critics as well as the
Indian state, Bhatt positioned small-scale and family-owned companies like
his own as part of a culture of production that was culturally distinct and,
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moreover, had the Indian public’s interests at heart. Not surprisingly, Bhatt
was not the only one to make this rhetorical move. By the end of 2008, news
and trade coverage of Bollywood had shifted to arguing that the studios, par-
ticularly those from Hollywood, were stumbling because they simply could
not come to grips with the specificities of the culture of media production
in Bombay. As Karan Johar put it in an article that catalogued a series of
Hollywood studios’ production fiascos in India: “I think the studios have
adjustment issues, cultural issues and inadequate human resources. They
understand the business, but how well do they understand the pulse of the
audience?” 21
That Johar and Bhatt took recourse to claims of cultural difference and
authenticity should not come as a surprise. Invoking the figure of a culturally
different and unique Indian “audience” had, after all, been standard operat-
ing practice for a range of media industry professionals in Bombay. As Maz-
zarella has shown, constructing the figure of “the Indian consumer” allowed
advertising and marketing professionals to situate themselves as “experts on,
and guardians of, local cultural difference” and, in the process, fortify their
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position vis-a-vis global clients. In the Bollywood context too, this move
on the part of producers and directors like Vishesh Bhatt and Karan Johar,