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Industrial Identity in an Era of Reform >> 69

silence the independent businessman or Vishesh Bhatt, both of whom posed
questions critical of both consultancy reports and the spectacular accumula-
tion that they claimed to document. But it was a telling indication as to how
crucial the formal language of business administration had become for par-
ticipating in the modes of speculation that new sources of capital demanded.
I would argue, then, that the panel session on film financing and indeed the
FICCI-FRAMES 2009 convention as a whole revealed that the transition
from Bombay to Bollywood was, at its core, about the shift to a new mode of
speculation. What the discussions at the convention and statements by fig-
ures like Vishesh Bhatt and Karan Johar elided, however, were the ways in
which small-scale and family-owned companies have adapted, maneuvered,
and successfully negotiated this transition. By the same token, corporate
executives’ performances and the identity strategies they deployed through
websites and other platforms masked the extent to which the rational busi-
ness models and managerial practices that they espoused were, in fact, tem-
pered and modified by powerful and well-established social networks in the
Bombay film industry. In other words, the reality on the ground was far more
complicated than straightforward corporate/kinship or global/local dichoto-
mies underpinned by a narrative of incommensurability could suggest.

Managing Difference

We could begin by observing that small-scale and family-run companies,
given their capacity to leverage long-standing social relationships, have con-
tinued to shape production dynamics and the organizational form of Bol-
lywood. As a number of scholars have documented, the development of the
social network comprising producers, financiers, directors, and actors in
25
Bollywood can be traced back to the late 1930s and 1940s. The 1951 Report of
the Film Enquiry Committee, which provides considerable detail on the oper-
ations and structure of the film industry during the interwar period, notes
that the industry was defined by a large number of independent producers. 26
By the time World War II had ended and India gained independence in 1947,
there were as many as 125 “new producers” releasing 228 films out of a total
of 283 films, a sharp rise from a total of 42 independent producers operating
in 1940. Comparing the situation in Bombay to Hollywood at the time, this
27
report goes on to blame these independent producers, many of whom left the
business after a few attempts, for the problems afflicting the film industry.
This problem of independent producers with access to capital from a
range of sources is often cited by government reports as well as the trade-
press as a key reason for the emergence of a chaotic production culture in