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Industrial Identity in an Era of Reform >> 77

Bollywood that FICCI tried to weave. Over a span of three days, it grad-
ually became clear that the refashioning of the Bombay film industry as
Bollywood hinged on a set of unequal and deeply ambivalent interactions
across three interlinked fields: the Indian state and its tentative embrace
of the cultural industries; Hollywood hegemony, particularly as it defines
what constitutes the “global” for institutions like FICCI, powerful corpo-
rate consultancies, and that of course, continues to shapes the Bombay film
industry’s response; and a range of family businesses, small-scale produc-
tion companies, and large media corporations grappling with changing
conditions and emerging structures of production, marketing, distribution,
and exhibition.
I have suggested that focusing on these interactions is crucial for at least
two reasons. First, it forces us not to reduce the complexities of media
transition by focusing too narrowly on the state-cinema relationship. In
contrast to state-centric analyses that flatten out different domains and lay-
ers that constitute Bollywood, I have attempted to show that the transition
from Bombay cinema to Bollywood is not a straightforward evolutionary
movement from one distinct organizational system and culture of produc-
tion to another. Rather, it is best understood as a process that is ongo-
ing, uneven, and as we have seen, volatile at times. Much as the Indian
state, institutions like FICCI, and corporate consultancies imagine a Hol-
lywood-like future for Bollywood, it remains clear that such projections
cannot wish away deep-rooted social relations and cultural infrastructures
that mediate transitions across the production, financing, distribution, and
exhibition sectors.
Furthermore, approaching this decade as a formative interval allows us
to push back against official narratives that posit a neat integration of Bol-
lywood within globally dominant modes of capitalist media production and
circulation. Paying greater attention to industry dynamics reveals, instead,
how established practices—be they globally recognizable corporate logics or
the seemingly “local” realities of production relations in Bombay—are being
gradually reassessed and remodeled to meet the demands of changing eco-
nomic and sociopolitical conditions. It would be easy to discuss Yash Raj
Films or Dharma Productions as exemplars of “Indian” family businesses,
and equally easy to regard companies like UTV and Studio 18 as representing
the new, corporate Bollywood. But all these companies and the profession-
als that work in them are embedded in the same transnational media space
that is now Bollywood. The same forces of capital, technology, and state pol-
icy shape their practices. There is no cultural essence, then, that defines the
workings of family businesses in Bollywood. By the same token, companies