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Industrial Identity in an Era of Reform >> 73

have refashioned their industrial identities in response to the vision of Bol-
lywood that the Indian state and FICCI wanted to celebrate. Karan Johar’s
Dharma Productions is a particularly good example of this group of compa-
nies, and the narrative that the company’s website offers speaks precisely to
the calibration of industrial identity for a new phase of capital.
Designed by an IT company that developed web solutions for Yash Raj
Films, UTV, Reliance Entertainment, and other prominent media compa-
nies, the Dharma Productions home page includes standard elements such
as details of films produced by the company as well as information about
upcoming productions, a list of key awards that Karan Johar-produced films
have won, and promotional materials including screensavers, wallpapers,
and mobile phone ringtones that fans can download. To understand how
Karan Johar repositioned his family-run company in Bollywood, we need
to navigate to the “Our Profile” section of the website. Featuring a picture of
Karan Johar’s father Yash Johar, whose career in the Bombay film industry
began in the early 1950s, the profile begins by listing a series of well-known
films that Yash Johar produced. Reminding us that he established Dharma
Productions Private Limited in 1976, the profile situates the company as
one that has been a key player in the Bombay film industry for over three
decades. Three decades of production history are glossed over, however, as
the narrative then leaps from the 1970s to the moment of corporatization
during the late 1990s:

Dharma Productions Pvt. Limited’s reputation as a clean, honest company
grew with each of these films and helped build a tremendous amount of
goodwill within the fraternity. From then on Yash Johar formed a pro-
prietary concern under the name of Dharma Productions in 1997. What
followed next was cinematic history from Dharma Productions (my
emphasis).

The emphasis on Dharma Productions being a “clean” and “honest” company
suggests that the articulation of industrial identity became an imperative
only during the late 1990s and specifically in relation to the film financing
scandals and the discourse of safai (cleaning up/cleansing) that I discussed
in the previous chapter. Having made the transition into the late 1990s, the
rest of the three-page profile focuses entirely on Karan Johar’s career begin-
ning with his directorial debut (Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Heartbeats, 1998). And
it is through Karan Johar’s trajectory in Bollywood that Dharma Produc-
tions’s identity as a family-run yet thoroughly professional and globally ori-
ented company is constructed.