The Reform of Bombay Cinema: State-Industry Negotiations, 1939-69

The Reform of Bombay Cinema: StateIndustry Negotiations, 1939-69 Dissertation submitted towards partial fulfilment of the requirement of M. A Final Semester Examination 2017 By Sudipto Basu Department of Film Studies Jadavpur University Examination Roll No. PFI174003 DECLARATION I hereby declare that this dissertation does not contain any material that has been submitted for any other degree or diploma in any university or institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference is made in the text of the thesis. --------------------------------Sudipto Basu ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Moinak Biswas, my supervisor, for overall guidance and help. He has been crucial, through his writings and his courses, in forming some of the basic ideas informing my work. I would like to thank the staff of Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University for their kind co-operation. Special thanks must go to the librarians, Mrinal K. Mandal and Pranab K. Patra for suggesting and finding out books for me whenever I so required. This project would not have been possible without the encouragement of Madhuja Mukherjee, who asked me to go ahead with an archival project even at the risk of failing to do justice. The experience has been rewarding. Kaushik Bhaumik helped me generously with his reading of the Bombay film industry over a long conversation in Delhi, and his thesis has been a constant inspiration. Ravi Vasudevan offered certain useful suggestions and generously shared some important archival material. This project is dedicated to Pujita Guha, who gave me the access to the wealth of archival material that forms the project’s backbone. Without her love and company, this project would perhaps not have been completed. Lastly, I have to thank Baba who took care of me throughout the period of my writing. CONTENTS Title. Sl. No Page 1 Introduction 2 2 Chaos and Control: The Evasiveness of Reform in the Indian Film 5 Industry 3 Negotiating Infrastructural Crisis Inside and Out: The Bombay Film 21 Industry in the 1950s 4 Revisiting the ‘Moment of Disaggregation’: the 1960s and its afterlife 36 5 Bibliography 55 2 INTRODUCTION This dissertation tracks three decades of the relationship between the Bombay film industry and the Indian state as it relates to the question of infrastructural reform. This period is bracketed off by 1939, the year of the All India Motion Picture Congress, and 1969, the year the Indian New Wave burst onto the scene. While the arguments I am making could with certain variations apply equally well to the other film production centres, I chose the Hindi film industry in Bombay for two reasons. One, it is the pre-eminent centre in terms of production volume and has been so throughout most of the history of Indian cinema, tied as it is to the financial economy of India’s commercial capital. Bombay’s economy telescopes the many scalar economies of region, nation and globe all at once into a network. Its film industry therefore serves as an exemplary case study, subject to flows and variations from the other ‘regional’ industries, ‘reflecting’ certain changes that occur across the board. Two, and perhaps connected with the economic, is the cultural prominence borne by the Hindi film industry, its metonymic ‘standing in’ for the whole of Indian cinema (problematic as that is in erasing the histories of those cinemas in its shadows). A third more mundane reason for choosing the Bombay cinema is the relatively easy availability of archival resources, suiting the short period available for this study. Briefly, what I show in the dissertation is that the project of reform of the Bombay film industry was always already delayed, missing the mark or slipping by. While the factors responsible for such a state of affairs are too many to enlist, the two main ones can be, at the risk of simplification, be declared outright. One is the failure of the political class which made up the post-Independence state to understand the very nature of cinema: the range of affects it generates, its play with desire. One might perhaps make a crucial distinction here between the “Centre” and the South Indian states, for in the latter case cinema did play a crucial role in the act of state-making, in generating a populist politics via the cinematic institution (a mode that Madhava Prasad has called “cine-politics”).1 Secondly, and tied to the first reason, is the failure of the Congress-led state to recognize or match up to the dynamics of indigenous capital, which was effectively the determinant economic force within the film industry. In short, what the Congress-coalition missed in its attempt to size up the film industry to the austere ideals of Nehruvian socialism was that this indigenous capital was 1 M. Madhava Prasad, Cine-politics: Film Stars and Political Existence in South India (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2014). 3 itself shifting alliances, tapping into newer reserves of popular energy, desire and affect as the 60s were ending. The fast-eroding nationalist consensus between state and capital which, I hope to show, ultimately led to the paradigmatic shifts in the film industry could not in retrospect be contained either by rigorous policymaking, mere censoring of film content or relentless taxing, yet this is what the state unsuccessfully tried to do. The three chapters, covering roughly a decade each, are structured around three corresponding ‘crisis points’. Chapter 1 traces the earliest reform efforts made by the industry in 1939 at the Motion Picture Congress, when attempts to ally with the state-in-becoming were made. It then outlines the chaotic post-War situation brought about by the crumbling of the ‘studio system’ (which in any case never properly existed in the Hollywood sense) because of the entry of speculative capital from the cotton and bullion trades, the growing dominance of these financiers within distribution, and the development of the freelancing ‘star system’. The chapter follows this through a reading of the 1951 Report on the film industry submitted by the Film Enquiry Committee (headed by S.K. Patil). The Report recommended steps to be taken towards rationalization and regulation of the industry, embodied in a statutory Film Council setting terms of production, distribution and exhibition and a Film Finance Corporation for extending loans to producers. Chapter 2 maps the crisis brought about by the widespread failure of Hindi films throughout the early part of the 1950s. The star system, the shortage of exhibition venues and escalating entertainment tax, which were widely professed by industry spokesmen to be responsible for the crisis, are tracked in some detail, as are the various strategies generated in response. Briefly, these are: scaling down production through an alternate to the star system with more investment into story values (roughly coinciding with the realist encounter brought about by the international film festival), scaling up production through investment in colour and epic spectacular modes of filmmaking, the opening up of the world market through both these strategies (the one looking towards international film festivals, the other catering to a market for orientalist extravaganzas). Finally, I look at the fates of the twin proposals of a Film Council and the FFC as they are negotiated by the industry through the Film Federation of India. As it happens, only the FFC is formed at the end of the 50s with a much more limited brief than had been envisaged by Patil. A clear symptom of change in power equations becomes slowly apparent in the decade: it is the exhibition sector, connected to the real estate business, which comes to be occupied by “risk-free” speculative capital, leading to the steady hiking of theatre rentals. 4 Chapter 3 re-visits Madhava Prasad’s famous formulation of a ‘moment of disaggregation’ in the late 1960s. 2 While Prasad locates a fracture on the ideological level of film texts, reflecting a broken consensus in the political field, I trace the disaggregation within the industry itself: the breaking out of a “film war” between producers, distributors and exhibitors culminating in two successive shutdowns in 1967-68. The industry’s lowest workers play a role in it too and it is my (to an extent speculative) contention that a certain alliance is gradually struck up between male film industry labour and speculative capital (now tied to the more openly visible operations of the smuggling-extortion mafia) as the industry moves to the 70s. More concretely however, I read the re-configuration of the FFC – with its new policy for encouraging film experiments – in the shadow of a failure to restructure the whole of the industry through the proposed Film Council. While most of the dissertation is written as an economic history of the film industry, I briefly analyze Bhuvan Shome as a symptom of the failed reform project and the passing of a certain mode of bureaucratic governmentality. While it is beyond the scope of my dissertation to fully substantiate it, India’s subsequent (film) history attests to a relation between the governing class and the people that definitely does not pass through the ideals of a rational, bureaucratic welfare state, but rather through certain other modalities. One of these is the flowering of widely accepted informal configurations of governance, sovereignty and citizenship helmed by a mix of populist politics and speculative capital, deploying to various purposes expenditures of physical energy through a militarization of the subaltern male body. 2 M. Madhava Prasad, “The Moment of Disaggregation,” in Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000 Paperback Edition [1998]), 117-137. 5 CHAOS AND CONTROL: THE EVASIVENESS OF REFORM IN THE INDIAN FILM INDUSTRY “In brief, the haphazard growth of the industry under the full blast of laissez faire except for the fortuitous but erratic control during the war, lack of careful and proper planning, decentralisation and dispersal, the absence of a godfather in Government departments, overmuch reliance on individual rather than collective initiative and effort, too little regard for art and too much emphasis on wrong notions of entertainment, the burden of taxation, the presence of misfits and 'unfits' in key positions, "professionalism" rather than "contractualism" among the artistes, the stranglehold of finance, lack of organisation and cooperation, the absence of any policy on the part of Government in regard to the direction, purpose and regulation of the industry, the multiplicity of authorities which have a say in its affairs, the confused attitude of state authorities and Ministers towards the very claims of the industry to exist, its dependence on the foreign market, and competition with foreign films incorporating a different approach to life and containing different ideas of moral and spiritual values but possessing superior organisation and commanding wider markets, better talent, richer resources and less strict censorial attention—all these have been the important factors which have affected the industry during its progress to its present stage of development and history.” – The Film Enquiry Committee Report, 19511 The end of World War 2, and the transfer of power in India just two years after in 1947, ignited hopes in many quarters that the Indian state would finally begin to take note of the film industry, give it legitimacy (essential for borrowing from banks) in the form of institutional and credit support and thereby help it flourish. The preceding decade of the 30s, leading up to the end of the war, had increasingly seen the flourishing of a ‘realist’ cinema of social reform and ‘historical’ vision. This was fuelled in large part by the nationalist-cultural aspirations of the educated, urban middle class, which took to the cinema in greater numbers than before. They not only became the culturally dominant audience segment, but began to fill the crucial roles of filmmaker and ‘amateur’ critic as well, paving the way for cinema’s legitimization.2 Consequently, a bazaar cinema3 of physical thrills, erotic pleasure and bodily 1 S.K. Patil et al., The Report of the Film Enquiry Committee (New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1951), 171. 2 Representative figures in this context are Baburao Patel and K.A. Abbas. Baburao Patel moved from an early filmmaking career to become the iconic editor of filmindia, the premier cinema publication of Bombay for nearly two decades until the mid 50s. Abbas moved in the opposite direction, from film journalism to making. Crucially, Abbas had a debate in the late 30s on the legitimacy of cinema as an art form with M.K. Gandhi. See 6 adventure began to be relegated to a somewhat secondary, marginal role in the nationalcultural imagination and genre hierarchy – though there continued to be a certain negotiation of these modes (the social-realist/historical melodrama and bazaar) in the emergent social melodrama of the 1940s and 50s.4 In fact, the social as a hold-all textual/generic form, attempted to contain both these varieties of popular energy under the sign of bourgeois reform. In this chapter, I trace the attempts to reform the Bombay film industry from the 1939 Motion Picture Congress to the publication of the 1951 Film Enquiry Committee Report. The reformist impetus, as we see, was already at work in the textual and generic forms of the films being made. However, Bombay cinema, which already carried the stigma of being a lowly entertainment form, was beset by the 1930s with the sense of an infrastructural collapse. Even in the days of the studio system, the speculative nature of the enterprise made it common for conservatives to place the cinema alongside drinking, gambling, races etc. as a vice (as Gandhi had most famously done, eliciting a plea from K.A. Abbas). The lack of vertical integration in the industry meant that there was a major gap between the production and supply ends, making filmmaking a risky affair. Corporations and formal lending mechanisms were therefore unwilling to handle the business (even though there were exceptions such as Bombay Talkies).5 The cinema therefore naturally invited speculative capital from the traditional mercantile communities of India, who specialized in precisely these forms of high-risk investments by re-channelizing often undeclared surpluses from other trades.6 The nature of capital investment, combined with Bombay cinema’s propensity Debashree Mukherjee, “Creating Cinema’s Reading Publics: The Emergence of Film Journalism in Bombay,” in No Limits: Media Studies in India, ed. Ravi Sundaram (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), 165-198. 3 Kaushik Bhaumik uses the formulation to mean the culturally cosmopolitan early cinema genres such as the costume drama, adventure romance and stunt film, drawing on such traditions as the Parsi theatre and the folklore of the Arabian nights, which “were aimed at the physical and social location of cinema in the bazaar.” See Kaushik Bhaumik, “Bombay Film Cultures: The Late Silent Cinema Era and the Transition to the Talkies,” in The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry, 1913-1936 (DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2001), 126148. 4 The derision of the bourgeoisie towards stunt cinema can easily be gleaned from the comments of K.M. Munshi, Home Minister of Bombay, at the IMPC, “Films of booted females flogging gangsters wither away, like mushrooms, before they bloom.” From the IMPC proceedings, quoted in M. Madhava Prasad, “The State in/of Cinema,” in Wages of Freedom: Fifty Years of the Indian Nation-State (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 125. 5 See Debashree Mukherjee, “Open System,” in Bombay Modern: A History of Film Production in Late Colonial India (1930s-1940s) (PhD thesis, New York University, 2015), 49-97. 6 Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The Curious Case of Bombay’s Hindi Cinema: The Career of Indigenous ‘Exhibition’ Capital (part I),” Journal of the Moving Image 5 (2006), accessed May 6, 2017. http://jmionline.org/article/the_curious_case_of_bombays_hindi_cinema_the_career_of_indigenous 7 for subsuming lowly cultural forms (lowly in the eyes of the educated middle class), were the two factors which drove the bourgeois zeal to reform it. The All India Motion Picture Congress, 1939 From the 1930s onwards, the political aspirations behind the middle-class move to a realist ‘cinema for tradition’ was clearly discernible: the screen became a representational site par excellence (representation meant not only in cultural but political terms), articulating a desire for popular sovereignty and statehood.7 Such a desire is evident in the industry’s first move towards explicitly organizing itself and forging ties with the nationalist elite, the state-inwaiting of the independent nation. In November 1938, led by Chandulal Shah of Ranjit Movietone, a group of Indian film producers, distributors and exhibitors decided to move for organized action on a national scale.8 The All India Motion Picture Congress (hereafter, IMPC) very early on gained the patronage of the noted Congressman, S. Satyamurti, then member of the Imperial Legislative Council. Satyamurti was made president-elect of IMPC to make him represent the industry’s interests in the Legislative Council, particularly in light of the uncertainties of the impending war.9 There were also hopes to impress on the colonial authorities cinema’s importance as a ‘national industry’, which would then make it eligible for state finances and subsidies. Debashree Mukherjee suggests that the hosting of film premieres, luncheons and tea parties for colonial administrators by various industry notables was also “designed as displays of a neat and tidy home... [conforming] to colonial standards of scientific hygiene and orderliness.”10 Such an aspiration of modernity had to be staged for the ‘outsider’, since the industry had already acquired the disrepute of being a sink of black money. Mukherjee’s suggestion takes on particular importance in light of the discourse on the industry’s “health”, which would increasingly be leveraged in narratives of infrastructural reform. To boost its engagement with the public and gain political-cultural legitimacy, the IMPC held a silver jubilee celebration of the Indian film industry with an elaborate exhibition and 7 “For Phalke, the imperative was to make the screen and the figures on the screen represent the spectator, i.e. o be their representative in a cultural, but also, inevitably, political sense. Mythology was the easiest available resource for this very elementary politics of representation, since its familiar heroic and divine figures not only occupied the screen, but also served as alternative, albeit surrogate, figures of power and authority.” Ibid, 124. 8 “Jubilee of the Indian Motion Picture,” TOI, May 5, 1939, A1. 9 The IMPC might have been held on the eve of an impending War precisely to encourage protectionist measures for the film industry, whose financiers still had memories of the curtailments brought about by the First World War. See Mukherjee, Bombay Modern, 112. 10 Ibid, 94. 8 national-level Congress held at the Churchgate Reclamation in Bombay.11 The spectacularly planned exhibition12 was flanked on one side with an amusement park (“with some novel features of diversion, varied from day to day”) and a tea garden, thereby situating cinema within a range of respectable urban leisures and entertainments.13 There were also “history stalls” displaying film equipment of yore – aimed at instilling in the public a sense of technological wonder and affective engagement with the cinema apparatus – and live demonstrations of film shooting at certain hours. It is interesting to note that 1913, the year of Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra, was named as the originary moment of the Indian film industry. The choice of a mythological with pronounced swadeshi aspirations fitted well with the nationalist projection of a grand mythical past which could be claimed as a tradition connecting up to the present negotiation of modernity. As Madhava Prasad argues, for Phalke it was the screen which was site of engagement, the space that had to be occupied by indigenous characters, stories and values. The “history stalls” of the Exhibition, by shifting focus from the screen back onto the recording/projecting apparatus, interestingly harked back to an older moment of exhibition (a ‘cinema of attractions’)14 when the object of wonder to the film public had been the cinematograph machine itself. The reformist impetus however dominated.15 Importantly, one of the decisions the IMPC executive committee took was to approach educationists in the hope that film would be adopted for more edifying purposes, thereby alleviating to an extent the persistent fear of ‘corruption of ideals’ of young urbane students – for long one of the steadiest patrons of the cinema.16 At the distributors’ 11 “An Attractive Exhibition Site,” TOI, May 5, 1939, A6. The architects Sykes, Patker and Divecha were contracted to design the exhibition grounds, which were broken up into a neat system of gridded stalls and ‘streets’, “blazed with light and colour”. Stalls were rented out to various major film companies, eminent distributors as well as equipment manufacturers like Fazalbhoy, Eastern Electric Engineering Co., Agfa, Kodak, R.C.A. Photophone etc. See “Jubilee of the Indian Motion Picture,” TOI, May 5, 1939, A1 and “Rapid Progress of India’s Film Industry,” TOI, April 29, 1939, 15. 13 There is a tremendous amount of Euro-American literature situating cinema, especially early cinema, within the new institutions of leisure and consumption brought about by rapid urbanization and modernization of life in western capitalist societies towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. For a typical example, see Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, eds., Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995). 14 Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), ed. Wanda Strauven, 381-388. 15 Chandulal Shah, chairman of the reception committee, remarked, “Unfortunately, films had, as far, been used in the country only as a means of entertainment. Their educative value had been sadly neglected.” See “Rapid Progress of India’s Film Industry,” TOI, April 29, 1939, 15. 16 Madhava Prasad lists of a series of resolutions taken at the First Session of the Indian Motion Picture Congress which were informed by nationalist anxieties of representation and an anti-bazaar rhetoric: formal protests against orientalist propaganda in films such as India Speaks, Wee Willie Winkie, Lives of a Bengal Lancer, The Drum and Gunga Din; critiques of the production of crime films; even proposals for the slow elimination of regional language film production in the country in favour of Hindustani-driven national cinema. See Prasad, “The State in/of Cinema”, 125. 12 9 conference, a resolution asked that exhibitors “discontinue the practice of showing stage dances and other stage attractions with feature pictures as such a practice was ruinous to the general interests of the trade.”17 Dance was in particular the target of bourgeois criticism: associated in the Hindu cultural imagination of the reformists with Islamicate courtesan cultures of bodily pleasures and eroticism.18 The prohibition might also be construed as an attempt to achieve for the spectator a unity of experience derived solely from the filmic text; as a move away from the ‘pre-modern’ variety format of early cinema. The Film Enquiry Committee and its discontents With the transfer of power accomplished in 1947, it was therefore natural for the various representatives of the Bombay film industry to assume that the new state would finally give it the formal recognition and necessary infrastructural and credit support which it had so long lobbied for. The industry, faced with an unprecedented infrastructural crisis accelerated by the War, naturally hoped that the state would now hear its case, and made several deputations to that effect. The state, for its own part, had woken up to the importance of mass-media in its nation-building project and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting therefore quickly decided to institute a comprehensive enquiry into the state of the film industry in August 1949 under the chairmanship of S.K. Patil, the Governor of Bombay. The Film Enquiry Committee Report (hereafter, in this chapter, called ‘the [FEC] Report’) in 1951 was the most comprehensive review of the film industry since the Indian Cinematograph Committee Report (hereafter, ‘ICC Report’) of 1928. The Report’s clearly identified the problems besetting the industry; its recommendations included a systematic overhaul through heavy state intervention into film production and financing, the training of film workers and the regularization of film-related laws throughout the Union.19 The Committee’s attention to detail, fairness of representation and balancing of viewpoints was in the best tradition of a publicly deliberative democracy; its ethos that of a militant bureaucracy intent on getting things done. Yet the Report barely succeeded in making the systemic difference to the film industry it had hoped to, and even though some of its recommended institutions were later founded after years of bureaucratic red tape and prolonged negotiations, the effects they 17 “Bank to Finance Film Industry,” TOI, May 4, 1939, 13. Kaushik Bhaumik, “Creating a Cinema for Nation and Tradition,” in The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry, 1913-1936, 149-195. 19 It comes to us as no surprise, of course, that the two industry representatives within the Film Enquiry Committee were V. Shantaram and B. N. Sircar, both figures associated with a reformist social-realism. 18 10 generated were far from their originally projected purposes. It might be worthwhile to track, in this context, the possible reasons for this failure. For one, there is the question of address and representation. Whose reform efforts did the Committee recognize through its constitution? Who did it speak to when it tried to enquire into the state of the industry? A particular crisis of representation is manifest in the very opening pages of the Report – when certain industry associations questioned the competence of the Committee in judging the industry particularly due to the absence of financial or technical experts sitting on it, rendering it possibly incapacitate in economic or technical matters. However these complaints were quickly contained by ‘leaders of the industry’ who reposed faith on the Chairman. These moments of disarray throw up an often-ignored fact in critical literature on Indian cinema: that its labour-intensive industry, often drawing on preexisting popular, ‘low’ cultural forms for its material and address, had to constantly negotiate a class divide between the discourse of its ideologues and the bazaar energies of its labour force.20 The reticence of this labour force to undertake a reform project based on paper-based bureaucratic regimes is indicated by their pronounced lack of interest in writing responses to the Committee’s detailed questionnaires.21 The Report makes note of this lack, but it then asserts that since several industry associations have replied and since these associations themselves represent the collective interests of its members, the Committee considers this a sufficiently representative view of the industry as a whole. On the other hand, only ten of the 1500 Central and state legislators to whom the questionnaires were sent replied – which perhaps holds some clue to the actual investment of the ruling political class in cinema and its reform. Ultimately, both the colonial and postcolonial state looked upon popular cinema as something excessive, with a ‘corrupting’ potential and difficult to keep under control, unreliable in its tendency to shape-shift and therefore inherently unsuitable for any planned programme of developmentalism. Inspite of the embourgeoisement of popular cinema through the 30s and 40s and the many links the industry forged with political elites, one senses that the state’s attitudes towards it remained 20 This is not to argue that there was no alliance between them. In the 30s, we might have schematically aligned the ideologues coming from the educated middle-classes with a literary realism, the labour force with the action genres. As already argued, the social film which came into being into the 40s managed to contain these variant energies in a negotiated form. Even within the industry, a certain coalitional form persisted. However this was often liable to break down, as happened in the late 60s, when a new configuration between the bazaar and capital emerged. See Chapter 3. 21 Noting the inadequate number of written responses to the questionnaire issued to the public, Patil decided that the Committee should collect oral evidence by touring the country’s main production-exhibition centers. See “"Opinion Surveys" On Film Industry: Inquiry Body's Move,” TOI, February 6, 1950. 3. 11 much the same – to be content to censor, discipline and tax it from outside, unwilling to engage positively.22 Bombay cinema after the War While the industry had for a long time faced complaints of being unaccountable due to the lack of reliable statistics,23 the collapse of the studio system during the War and the subsequent entry of small-time trader-adventurers into the film industry as producers and financiers had made the situation nearly uncontrollable.24 The War had hugely increased the social base of cinema through its massive employment of youngsters in the army and industry, especially of the lower middle and working classes.25 These new inductees into a leisure economy gave fillip to a massive expansion of the exhibition sector.26 The War economy had temporarily necessitated a strict rationing of raw film stock and licensing of firms, thereby drastically reducing the number of films produced in 1944 and 1945.27 As a result of the enforced shortage and the growth of the cinema habit, returns per film had turned exceedingly good. With the abolition of rationing controls in 1946, production activity suddenly burst forth to cash in on the high demand.28 The number of producers had exponentially shot up since the beginning of the war, sensing a boom market.29 This intensive fragmentation of the production sector obviously inflated the cost-per-film; most of them 22 Prasad notes that the continuity between the colonial and indigenous elites extended in their Censorship attitudes towards the private. While the British had every reason to be anxiety to protect the private space of the white woman from the native’s gaze, the Indian bourgeoisie heavily resisted the breaking down of traditional patriarchal hierarchies of inside/outside under the pressures of modernization by effectively prohibiting the kiss. Prasad, “The State in/of Cinema,” 127. 23 For a list of complaints about the lack of reliable data on the film industry, from the ICC Report down to the FEC Report, see Nitin Govil, “Size Matters”, BioScope 1(2) (2010), 108. 24 Debashree Mukherjee surmises that this influx of speculative capital in the industry resulted in part due to the War-time curbs on speculation in the cotton market, which traditionally invited such high-stakes ‘gambling’. See Mukherjee, Bombay Modern, 119-123. The actor V. Nagaiah would also mention in an opinion piece the presence of “speculators, cotton merchants, hardware dealers” in the industry. See “V. Nagiah Suggests SemiNationalisation of Industry,” Screen Vol. 1 No. 4, October 12, 1951, 5. 25 Entertainment tax had in fact been waived for armymen in the Bombay presidency early 1944, ostensibly as an added incentive to retain and entertain soldiers during the war. See “Entertainment Tax for Services: Concessions Granted,” TOI, January 19, 1944, 6. 26 In fact, exhibition equipment worth some 40 lakh rupees was imported inspite of wartime difficulties. See FEC Report, 12. 27 To meet the demand for raw stock, a black market had sprung up. The colonial government intervened through instituting a system of licensing; only licensed firms could buy raw supplies. The number of completed films dropped to 126 in 1944 and 99 in 1945. See FEC Report, 63-64. 28 Within 3 months of decontrol, there were 100 new producers. See FEC Report, 13. 29 The figures rose from 102 producers making 171 films in 1940, to 151 producers making 200 films in 1946, up to 211 producers making 264 films in 1948. See FEC Report, 64. 12 failed miserably in the business and quickly left. Only 25 producers continued in the industry from 1946 to 1948.30 Meanwhile, a new rationing of building materials – especially of cement, steel and bricks – had come up in the post-war years, exacerbated further by the post-Partition need to building refugee settlements. The government totally stopped the construction of all ‘elaborate and luxurious constructions’, which obviously also included film theatres.31 Even the licensing of theatres which had planned to convert existing buildings into cinemas using materials not in scarcity became de facto halted. The Partition also led to a substantial part of the market and talent of the erstwhile undivided ‘national film industry’ being lost. The situation in the years leading up to the Film Enquiry Committee investigation beginning in 1949 was therefore a seemingly hopeless mess. There were too many films being made for a limited exhibition sector, often by rookie producers with no experience, quite often with full exploitation rights being sold to the distributor-financier (typically a member of the traditional business classes/castes) under duress conditions in lieu of cash advances (lent at usurious rates of interest) to cover overbudget expenses. The distributor assumed importance because he could guarantee that a film would be exhibited under the circumstances. Adding to the woes of the rookie producer was the fact that very few owned production facilities or engaged in more than one production at a time – with the result that overhead costs were not divided. Films quite often shot beyond schedules (and budgets) because the crew had to be assembled anew for each production. There was additionally a high tendency within the post-War talent-labour market for economic-social mobility: not only did stars move from production company to company, but critics, technicians, directors all made a gamble for the high stakes.32 The mobility of stars across not only companies but types of films ensured that these types could not become solidified into genres (in the Hollywood sense), could not be identified with particular star personas.33 Moreover, the ritualistic mode of reproduction of the same meant that not much thought was given to the economic basis of genre – which is dependent on a steady inventory of working capital, locations, and skill sets which can be re-used across several productions. The runaway success of a particular type of film would trigger a small cycle of ‘formula 30 See FEC Report, 64-65. FEC Report, 27. 32 FEC Report, 13-14. 33 FEC Report, 70. 31 13 films’, which was sustained only till the public got tired.34 One must note, however, the mutually reinforcing nature of the economic arrangement: when enquired by the Committee why a mercenary attitude prevailed amongst the artistes, an actress replied that they had no option considering that most production companies left the industry within a year or so.35 A necessary correlative of this ‘heterogeneous form of manufacture’ (Madhava Prasad’s formulation)36 came to be the primacy in the production process given to the star’s body. The economic fallout of this model was, obviously, the gross inflation of star salaries: a large part of which came to be paid tax-free in black money. The new ‘independents’ therefore vied with each other to secure stars for their productions as the only guarantee of box office success, often coaxed to do so by the distributor-financier who advanced the productionmoney and likely made additional suggestions on the ‘story’ and the singers.37 The obsession throughout the 30s in the developing nationalist-bourgeois discourse on cinema had been on stars whose bodies could be idealized and emulated – whose physique could be the repository of virtue and valour.38 A resolution passed at the Cine Artistes’ Conference at the IMPC recommended that producers add a clause in contracts that stars should maintain themselves in the fittest condition with respect to their roles.39 It is this ascribing of sacred value in the star’s fit body – through not only critical writing, but the growing institution of the publicity spread – that enabled the self-valorization of the star in the production process, replacing the premium paid on the ‘story’/script as blueprint. The Report in fact dwelled substantially on the question of literary adaptations in cinema, which was often recommended as the principal cultural solution towards a ‘better cinema’ in the bourgeois discourse. There were mutual recriminations as regards this. Authors alleged that producers did not appreciate their talent very often, while producers in turn complained that authors were unwilling to accept changes made to their stories in the screenplay. Quite often, literary property was not bought because, as the Report notes, producers simply assumed that the public would know a good story beforehand.40 It is more probable that the ‘independent’ producer did not have enough of his budget left after paying exorbitant star salaries. The 34 FEC Report, 71-72. FEC Report, 71. 36 Prasad, “The Economics of Ideology: Popular Film Form and Mode of Production,” in Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000 Paperback edition [1998]), 29-51. 37 FEC Report, 116-117. 38 For a discussion on the disciplining of star bodies in 30s Indian cinema, see Kaushik Bhaumik, “Creating a Cinema for Nation and Tradition,” in The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry, 1913-1936, 149-195. 39 Y.A. Fazalbhoy, The Indian Film: A Review (Bombay: Bombay Radio Press, 1939), 44. 40 FEC Report, 68 35 14 situation, in any case, was that the industry had become unprofitable for the independent producer, even though most distributors and exhibitors were likely doing well enough to survive in the market.41 The project of infrastructural reform: some conjectures on its failure A pertinent question in this context might be why, inspite of all symptoms calling for a need to internally re-organize and centralize its activities, the industry could not do so. After all, it is not that such a will was entirely lacking. The IMPC had already in 1939 proposed the founding of a Cine Finance Corporation and a central information and statistics bureau (statistics being crucial to the desired rationalization of the industry) at the Film Distributors’ Conference.42 The Cine-Technicians Conference had passed a resolution to construct a central laboratory to take care of all release print work in a bid to maintain uniformity and standardization, which could not be achieved through individual studio laboratories. There were similar resolutions to enforce standards on theatre projection and maintenance through a central supervisory board, and on the fixing of standard salaries and employee benefits for cine-workers.43 Of course, the War frustrated whatever momentum these reform efforts might have gained from the State on whose support it crucially depended, which had no interest in the cinema beyond regulating the black market in raw stock. This was obviously not the first time that a chance for thoroughgoing change had been missed because of mere contingency. The FEC Report noted that the ICC Report’s recommendations had been jettisoned either because there were ‘important constitutional changes in the offing’ or because ‘the world was passing through a severe financial crisis’ (the Great Depression) at that point – thereby thwarting plans for financial assistance to the industry. Such a missed encounter, as we shall see, would continue to characterize nearly every state intervention into cinema: always already arriving late, if at all. 41 FEC Report, 16. The Cine Finance and Banking Corporation of India was a limited company with investments from highranking businessmen, which was supposed to “co-ordinate and balanc[e] the various activities of the industry through the control of finance.” It had planned for seven subsidiary companies working in different sectors of the film industry (production, servicing, distribution, publicity, training, insurance etc.) and an authorized capital of Rs. 1 crore. Before the proposals given for a Film Council and Film Finance Corporation, these were the most comprehensive efforts of centralization of planning and finance, undertaken from within the industry. As to its subsequent fate in the turmoil of the war, little could be found. See “Help to Indian Industry: New Financing and Controlling Body,” TOI, Jan 7, 1939, 14 and “Bank to Finance Film Industry,” TOI, May 4, 1939, 13. Also see the abridged prospectus of the Cine Finance Corporation, published in TOI, March 4, 1939, 8. 43 “Cine-technicians in Conference,” TOI, May 5, 1939, 12. 42 15 But this does not, of course, help us account (‘from within’) for the inability of the new postindependence state to develop the film industry. One possible clue is provided by the state’s attitude towards development as such – while Nehruvian socialism was committed to industrialization through a planning economy, it did not, like Communist states, presuppose an abolition of private property, rather opting for a plan of capitalist accumulation and redistribution. This was a matter of much significance to a Western capitalist world gearing up for the Cold War.44 While the Planning Commission sought to reshape domestic industrialization heavily by dictating investment patterns to private firms and providing the necessary subsidies and credit support, their plans for the former set of interventionist measures were repeatedly thwarted by a range of factors both internal and external to the state. Among the major internal factors were (i.) a lack of cohesiveness within the state and (ii.) a bureaucracy which could not adapt to the changed conditions, showing an inability to extract performance out of the business class.45 As Madhava Prasad notes, the Nehruvian state was a coalition in two senses: both a compromise-formation between divergent political tendencies and smaller political factions (left and right), and a class coalition between a former zamindari aristocracy, the urban bourgeoisie and the working classes.46 It so happened that the state was either unwilling or unable to heavily intervene without upsetting the upper class-castes in the party which gave it crucial coalitional support and patronage. The bureaucracy meanwhile lost the reformist impetus given the lack of political will in the legislature. Excessively dependent on the medium of writing for their day-to-day work, it had expended its ability to ‘get things done’ in the depersonalizing of inter-action brought about by the drive to merely stack information in files. Moreover, given a slow moving system of incentives, the bureaucracy found itself amenable to a ritualistic reproduction of the same instead of a reformist leap into the new. Among the chief external factors was the state’s adoption of an import-substitution model of industrialization (as opposed to an export-led model), which effectively sealed off the domestic industries from external competition and disincentivized co-operation with the state’s reform programme. This is evidently the case for the Indian film industry, which had managed to relegate imported (mainly Hollywood) films to only a marginal economic role 44 The USA was, for example, instrumental in helping the Indian economy through instruments like the Delhi Masterplan, funded by the Ford Foundation. In the 60s, it provided grants during its food shortages. 45 I take this analysis of state-capital relations from Vivek Chibber, “Late Development and State-Building” in Locked in Place: State-Building And Late Industrialization In India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 13-48. 46 Prasad, “The Moment of Disaggregation,” in Ideology of the Hindi Film, 117-137. 16 since the era of the talkies. While Hollywood (and international art cinema) coming in through the theatrical and festival circuits had a major role to play in Indian cinema’s negotiation with an ‘international’/’world cinema’ aesthetic and heavily influenced its fashioning – and while it even occasionally served as the role model for the industry’s selforganization – India’s ‘national cinema’ grew well insulated from global economic competition. The rentier class of middlemen distributor-financiers – perhaps given their historical habits of absolute surplus extraction from a zamindari economy characterized by intensive subinfeudation – continued to reproduce the same relations of production as long as it could get the usual profits.47 Whenever the distributor-financier felt that directly producing a film would fetch a greater profit, he would step into the role. The producers’ body IMPPA was therefore split between a very small group of stable producers with their own studio facilities and regular avenues of finances, a vast number of independents as well as those distributors-financiers who had turned producers themselves. When a 1948 draft scheme for “voluntary control of production” was tabled at an IMPPA meeting, it did not meet with much support. The IMPPA, the Report claimed, could exert only “moral” control over its members. The industry – an aggregation of social actors cutting across class-caste lines, working through logics of production which depended on ‘getting things done’ only through a steadfast, if often wasteful, informality – could however come together unanimously when threatened by too drastic an incursion into its ‘domestic’ affairs.48 This was especially true whenever there was an increase of entertainment tax, as when the Central Provinces government increased the tax share on ticket sales to half of the price from one-third.49 The entertainment tax issue has in fact remained a rallying point for the industry throughout its long negotiation with the state. The unusually high percentage taxed on box office collections obviously indicates the state’s skeptical attitude towards the medium. But it also allows us to read the insistent bourgeois rhetoric of the social-educational use of cinema, repeatedly addressed in public conferences having bureaucratic or state representation, in a new light. 47 In agrarian economic history, subinfeudation refers to the extensive rent-exploitation of land based on occupancy rights. Typically, between the actual tiller of the land and the landowner many levels of middlemen proliferate, subletting the land by breaking it up into smaller and smaller fragments. While the productivity of the land suffers, the surplus-extraction multiplies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subinfeudation , accessed May 7, 2017. 48 “An air of secrecy or mystery surrounds the script and often not even the producer is sure of the financial side of the enterprise. Everything seems elastic; the story is not final nor the shooting schedule. There is perennial room for improvement and plagiarism.” See FEC Report, 89. 49 “India-wide ‘Token Strike’ by Cinema Houses,” TOI, July 1, 1949, 11. 17 What the rhetoric attempts is to subtly negate the equation of cinema with entertainment proper, eroding the discursive ground for the levying of such high taxes. The claim to socialeducational value therefore does not just function as an aspiration towards a ‘healthier cinema’, does not merely register a discursive tussle on the status of cinema in a nation aspiring for global respectability, it more pragmatically points to a real economic necessity in the industry. This connection between lofty respectability and tax waivers is evident wherever governments have been known to ‘bless’ the occasional film which it judges to have some highly ethical or patriotic purpose. One incidentally registers the conjunction of the discursive and the economic in the very first paragraph on entertainment tax in the FEC Report. The Committee notes a semantic quibble arising from a queer choice of words in the Seventh Schedule to the Indian Constitution (conferring on states the right to tax entertainments), which lists “cinema” separately from “entertainments and amusements” (instead of “other entertainments and amusements”). This leads the Committee to wonder if cinema should not be included within the purview of “entertainments and amusements” (an interpretation which would exempt it from taxing), but it then realizes that such a view of course runs counter to both common sense and existing practice. The discursive split between “cinema” and “entertainment” would be ideal for the industry from an economic angle. However, the Report dashes any such hopes: it opines with some finality that Indian cinema should strive for ‘responsible entertainment’ and thus reinscribes it to a taxing future. It should interest us that, much later, the information & broadcasting ministers in Indira Gandhi’s cabinet would leverage the industry’s demands for reduction in entertainment tax with a demand that they pay something in ‘social tax’ instead.50 However, since the state could not ultimately trust the fickle industry to supply the public with its required educational diet, it instituted the rule of showing “approved films” (usually shorts and newsreels made by the Films Division) before the feature: the masala film was preceded by a suitably ‘digestive’ supplement.51 Exhibitors had to pay a flat rental for these “approved films”; this rental came to be seen as another form of taxation by the industry. They complained that since they complied with the demand for compulsory showing, the additional taxation was uncalled for. 50 Filmfare, 4 July, 1969, 29. Quoted in M. Madhava Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film, 121. This practice was in fact borrowed from the war-time need to show propaganda and recruitment films, suggesting in a sense a continuity of the military into civil life. See Anuja Jain, “The Curious Case of the Films Division: Some Annotations on the Beginnings of Indian Documentary Cinema in Postindependence India, 1940s–1960s,” The Velvet Light Trap No. 17 (2013): 16-17. 51 18 The excessive tax burden on cinema ensured that evasion was a common practice wherever a loophole could be found. The Report notes that wherever tax was levied on declared box office collections, there was widespread falsification of figures. Since the distributor’s share of the box office takings was often drawn from the declared figures to the tax authorities, many distributors complained to the Committee of incurring losses – even asking for , as in the case of Bombay, inspection of theatres by tax agents. The question of official data brings us, incidentally, to a methodological quandary in researching Indian cinema; a problem, as I shall show, effects the question of its reform too. A running theme throughout the Report is that the task of aggregating statistics and information on the film industry is a near impossible job given the lack of centralization and co-ordination. One finds at most that there are some reliable figures available with state agencies, but the bulk of statistics (especially related to finance) has to be in any case pieced together from disparate sources like trade journals, industry reviews (Y.A. Fazalbhoy, Panna Shah, etc.), licensing and tax authorities, then it has to be adjusted with some speculation on the variation between the declared and the actual (one knows that a lot of black money goes around, sometimes shown in the books under “padded” account heads). Additionally, the fact that the typical financier invests across several trades complicates matters further. So while it is generally known that the Indian film industry is one of the biggest in the world, it is difficult to exactly pin down its contours, make sense of how large or intensive it actually is. Nitin Govil has suggested that what the ‘film industry’ aggregates under its singular sign, in its accumulation of statistics, is in fact a series of interconnected but disparate set of practices of knowledge, action and creation: numbers perform a certain game of ‘visibility and disappearance’ (visibility in its claim to global significance as one of the biggest media industries, disappearance of the unaccounted money into some other head).52 The question of reform of the industry is therefore inherently complicated: one does not know the scale at which this project must be launched, exactly what set of practices must be brought into the fold of the state and regulated. The recommendations of the Patil Committee Report One senses this hesitation in the Report’s proposals on the course of reformist action to be taken by the state. Following the model of UK’s Film Finance Corporation, it recommended that an FFC be similarly set up in India. But it did so after considerably deliberating on the economic feasibility of such an institution. Since the crises had been caused by factors 52 Govil, “Size Matters.” Also see Nitin Govil, “Recognizing "Industry"”, Cinema Journal 52, No. 3, (Spring 2013), 172-176. 19 extrinsic to the state, the Report reasoned – confirming the state’s deeply felt externality to cinema – it would be criminal to add extra burden to the public exchequer by initiating a project bound to lose money under extant conditions. But later when the Committee does agree in principle to the FFC demand, it scaled down. In fact, the consistent advice given to the industry throughout the report was a series of scaling down decisions: restrict production to the market demand (so that films do not have to lie around, waiting to be distributed), reduce the cost of each production through serial manufacture and efficient allocation of resources (so that it is easier to cater to specific niche tastes like the demand emanating from film societies for an art cinema), combine the fixed assets of several production facilities into fewer but better equipped companies (centralization, instead of profligate dispersal). However this task for ensuring a scaling down seemed to be itself too big for the state to undertake. The Report realized that the reform project could only be mounted by a strong intervention by the FFC on the whole of the industry, yet fearing too violent a pushback from its established elites and, ultimately, a reticence of the state in backing a field it always looked upon with suspicion, it retreated.53 The Report instead recommended selective intervention for the FFC: fund only a limited number of films with good credentials.54 Crucially, the distribution sector which effectively determined the ‘backwardness’ of the industry was left out of the purview of the FFC.55 The Report foresaw a lack of funds and a probability of higher risks if the FFC were to handle both production and distribution.56 The very split between the production and exhibition ends of the industry – too few theatres to handle the total number of films produced, no guarantee that a film starting production will be exhibited – which was the cause of its woes was thereby maintained (it would take a long time for the prohibition on building cinemas to be relaxed). The relations of subservience of production to distribution-financing were similarly kept unchallenged: effectively limiting the FFC project to a very small scale.57 While the Report noted more than once the profitability of firms producing films on a continuous basis, investing the profits of one venture into 53 FEC Report, 109. B.K. Karanjia noted that under him, the FFC policy looked for young filmmakers who would not get money from commercial sources. Literary adaptations would be encouraged, as would be low-budget films in black and white. See the interview conducted by Sushama Shelley, ‘No Black Money!’, TOI, Dec 17, 1988, p. A2. 55 “It would always be open to the Corporation to float a Distributing Concern to ensure that producers financed by it are not exploited by distributors, but we feel that the less the proposed Corporation disturbs the normal trade channels, the better.” See FEC Report, 104. 56 FEC Report, 106-109. 57 The Committee naively assumes that once funding at low interest rates for small films is made available, the distributor-financier’s dominance will wither away. See FEC Report, 103. 54 20 another, it had no suggestion for ensuring how such a model may be made inculcated and made practicable for the whole industry. Curiously, after essentially capitulating to this idea of a (partial) reform, the final recommendations of the Report made one last brave attempt to imagine a thoroughgoing alternative: it asked for the constitution of a Film Council of India (hereafter, FCI) to act as the industry’s “friend, philosopher and guide”.58 An 18-member body was proposed – consisting of representatives from all sectors of the industry, along with a high judicial authority as chairman, and nominated candidates from the states having major film industries – as well as additional specialist advisory panels, wherever envisaged. The FCI was imagined to be the panacea for the industry’s multiple ills: an all-encompassing body with statutory and regulatory powers, in due time, to be integrated with the proposed Production Code Administration (to pre-censor scripts and films along Hollywood lines) and the Board of Censors. Among its prescribed powers were the ability to control volume of production, mediate disputes between sections of the industry, judge the eligibility of producers, even under certain circumstances, institute a system of licensing of firms similar to the War-years. Naturally, as in the case of entertainment tax hikes, the fragmented industry found the will to fight back. But this is an episode which will have to be dealt with in the following chapters. 58 A very useful summary of the Report’s recommendations can be found in “State “Guide” to Industry,” Screen Vol. 1 No. 4, October 12, 1951, 1. 21 NEGOTIATING INFRASTRUCTURAL CRISIS INSIDE AND OUT: THE BOMBAY FILM INDUSTRY IN THE 1950s The Post Film Enquiry Scenario “It is not realised that the majority of film producers lose money in their productions. The number of producers of unsuccessful pictures is legion. Their financial mortality is unknown, because dead pictures, like dead men, tell no tales.” – S.S. Vasan, President, Film Federation of India, 19551 The years immediately following the publication of the Film Enquiry Committee Report were again witness to an acute crisis within the industry. As already noted, the post-War years had given rise to a volatile situation where production came to be centred entirely around the star system, with competitive bidding amongst rookie producers, films being made on advances from distributor-financiers (with rights being divided between the distributor and producer in various degrees). This arrangement worked for some time: while “infant mortality” among producers was too high, films were making enough money for the financiers to sustain the existing form of production. Even when money was lost, the chance of making extravagant profits continued to invite speculators into film financing. However, in late 1951, the Bombay film industry was witnessing a marked slump. Ninety-five percent of its films were flopping and the production sector was losing as least two crores of its five crore rupee outlay every year.2 The star-system was overstrained and underperforming. Some of the top stars could only give 2 shooting days per month to a production.3 At one point Nargis was engaged in 18 films simultaneously; she completed some 50 films within 5 years of joining the industry! Finance, intimately linked to the speculation in the cotton and gold bullion markets,4 came at the time under tremendous pressure.5 The crash in money markets, particularly the bust in the 1 “Film Seminar in Delhi: Solving Problems of Film Industry,” Times of India (TOI), March 1, 1955, 9. See Sohrab Modi, “The Future Belongs To Colour,” Filmfare Vol. 1 No. 11, July 25, 1952, 10 and J.P. Tiwari, “Plight of the Indian Film Maker,” Filmfare Vol. 01 No. 08, June 13, 1952, 9. 3 See K.M. Modi, “The Indian Film Industry,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 99 No. 4857 (5th October, 1951): 869. 4 The cotton and bullion trades were themselves intimately linked. During and after the American civil war, when Bombay became one of the chief exporters of cotton to Britain, cotton was paid for in bullion. Some of the bullion money was further pumped into construction and the Back Bay reclamation. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business strategies and the working classes in Bombay, 19001940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 Paperback Edition [1994]), 23. 2 22 Bombay Bullion Exchange, in the early 1950s had hit the industry hard, with many films languishing in production and several film companies on the brink of liquidation.6 Production volume in 1951 had dropped by around a third in a year.7 Further, by 1953, the gradually looming closure of the Pakistan market, Hindi cinema’s most significant export circuit – where local producers had managed to get protectionist measures passed in order to build a national film industry – would further make the crisis acute.8 There were hopes that the state would assist in tiding over the present crisis. The publication of the Patil Committee Report therefore struck a chord.9 Unsurprisingly, it generated a series of enthusiastic responses from many industry veterans who had previously advocated for state intervention. But as the succeeding sections will make clear, the question of infrastructural and aesthetic reform – tied together in statist discourse – would gradually come to chart very different paths despite periodic attempts to connect these up through policymaking. Fearing the nationalization of the industry, its three main sectors – production, distribution and exhibition – would soon unify under the Film Federation of India and fight back the project of state-intervention, while attempting to resolve infrastructural crisis from within. In the succeeding sections, I shall chalk out the reasons cited by contemporaneous film industry accounts (of the 1950s) as responsible for its woes, and outline the responses it would take to mitigate them. Two tendencies emerge in answer. The introduction of colour drives filmmaking on to even grander scales than before on one hand. The other tendency tries to neutralize the primacy of the star by investing into modest middle-class dramas within a social realist frame. The international film festival in 1952 is perhaps the singular event making this transition possible. It introduces the neorealist encounter into Indian cinema. The currents of that encounter shall notably give rise to the art cinemas of the 50s, which would then carry over on to the state-sponsored New Cinema of the late 60s (of interest to us in the third chapter, as the state moves on to a project of aesthetic intervention). Through the film festival, I enter into the question of market expansion and go on to detail the ‘exhibition 5 The above cited J. P. Tiwari was President of Bombay Bullion Exchange, Chairman of Bombay Talkies as well as proprietor of M. & T. Films and Studios Ltd. in 1952, and would preside over the IMPPA in 1956: in all respects a representative figure of the nature of capital investment into the industry. 6 “The Fortnight in Films,” Filmfare Vol. 1 No. 3, April 4, 1952, 4. 7 “Western India Theatres Ltd.: Speech of the Chairman, Mr. K.M. Modi”, TOI, October 5, 1951, 7. 8 For details on the closure of the Pakistan market, see Editorial, “Hostile Friendship!,” filmindia Vol. 18 No. 02, February 1952, 3-7. Also see “Current Topics,” TOI, August 6, 1953, 6 and “The Fortnight in Films,” Filmfare Vol. 01 No. 03, April 4, 1952, 4. 9 Chandulal Shah, President of the Film Federation of India (FFI) called in 1952 for a full implementation of the FEC Report recommendations. See “Raising Standards of Film Production: Keskar’s Friendly Warning,” TOI, July 8, 1952, 7. 23 racket’ gaining ground in the late 50s. This racket would become the site of the prolonged crisis and disaggregation happening in the industry in the late 60s, which will be dealt with by the third chapter. Lastly, I chalk the fight given to the Film Council proposal by the Film Federation towards the end. The Star System and the Discourse of Health The star-system naturally drew substantial ire. Conservative opinion recycled the moral censure familiar to us from the 30s about the disreputability of (particularly female) stars, their courtesan culture backgrounds, making it necessary to ‘clean up’ the industry and its films.10 A discourse on health was much used in narratives of reform, implying not only economic sickness but moral murk. The presence of “black marketers, profiteers and racketeers” as financiers (what Kaushik Bhaumik names the bazaar mode of finance) was further cited as a source of moral bankruptcy.11 Censorship was considered to be a failure in regulating film content. Conservatives like B.V. Keskar,12 then Minister of Information & Broadcasting felt that censorship was still too lenient, letting too much lewdness pass without consequence. 13 Certification as ‘adult viewing only’, a legislator noted, seemed to paradoxically add to the raciness of a film and had no dissuading effect. Conservatives therefore pushed for an implementation of the Production Code Administration (as was recommended by the Patil Committee) to pre-censor scripts, not so much to ensure economizing (which was the Committee’s purpose) as to control film content from the very beginning. Health, or its apparent lack, was therefore the third term mediating the question of reform and modernization, along with the discursive opposition between ‘entertainment’ and ‘education’ already-noted in the first chapter. According to the vacillating needs of the moment, health was either proposed as the goal of the reform project or held as the qualifying pre-condition for any State involvement in funding or subsidizing cinema. 10 The ‘method actor’ V. Nagaiah, most famous for his roles in devotionals suggested, “I feel that many who enter this industry do not have clean records.” Nagaiah recommended a ‘semi-nationalization’ of the industry with half the budget supplied by the State, in exchange for pre-approval of stories, artistes and directors. See “V. Nagaiah Suggests Semi-Nationalisation Of Indian Industry,” Screen Vol. 01 No. 04, October 12, 1951, 5. 11 “Indian Films Have Bad Effect On Youth,” TOI, April 29, 1953, 9. 12 Keskar became notorious for banning film songs in 1952 from All India Radio, ostensibly to promote classical music. The subsequent capture of the market by Radio Ceylon would lead the government to launch Vividh Bharati, an exclusively popular music channel. 13 Keskar suggested that the industry should take up pictures with religious themes and biopics of national heroes to improve its self-image and palliate the ill-effects of its lewdness. See “New Censorship Rules: Film Industry’s Plea to Govt.,” TOI, June 19, 1953, 3. 24 But, conservative opprobrium aside, it was widely felt within industry circles that the starsystem was responsible for its woes. Even an ‘outsider’ like Frank Capra had added his voice to this fray, triggering embarrassment within the industry about its global image. 14 The profligate nature of the industry seemed to crystallize, in these opinions, in the stark unprofessionalism of stars. The veteran director-producer A.R. Kardar blamed star tantrums and whims – their habitual lateness in reporting for work, keeping crews waiting, their lack of preparation for roles, infrequent communication with producers, the propensity to take suddenly planned long vacations in faraway places – for throwing production schedules and budgets haywire. 15 Frequently, such behaviour was a bargain for extra fees. Kardar maintained that the indiscipline of stars was chiefly responsible for the slipshod quality of films: producers had to manage the extra costs incurred by siphoning funds off other heads. The focus shifted from making a ‘good film’ to finishing it anyhow. Kardar made an appeal that stars should sign for no more than two films at a time, and guarantee at least twelve shifts to each producer in advance – but this obviously went unheeded, given that the conditions of production did not change. In any case, stars themselves cited the lack of a steady contractbased income due to the collapse of the old studio system as the reason for signing up on as many as six films at a time on an average. In addition to the extravagance of star salaries – the focus of much criticism for draining meagre finances – it was pointed out how stars bargained for the appointment of their pet assistants, crew members, and junior artistes in productions they had been signed for. It had become commonplace for stars to force producers to sign up opposite leads with whom they had existing professional (and sometimes, personal) relationships even when the lead pair had in the recent past failed to deliver hits. Kinship ties and affective relationships dictated to a large extent the functioning of the industry – freelancing personnel travelled from production to production en bloc, following the star who patronized them. Kinship partly explains the industry’s conditions of reproducibility, the transfer and regeneration of capital and labour within it across the years. It might be one key to how the industry has always managed to pull through despite a perpetually felt consensus about ‘hard times’. 14 15 Editorial, “What Price Stardom?.”Filmfare Vol. 1 No. 3, April 4, 1952. “A.R. Kardar Assails Star System As Menace,” Screen Vol. 1 No. 31, April 18, 1952, 1. 25 Several methods to break the monopoly of the stars were broached. Open talent hunts to find fresh faces were launched in popular film periodicals.16 Selected participants would be tested in print with the public before being offered films. It was hoped that the influx of new stars would resolve the crisis of available shooting dates, which inevitably derailed production schedules, and reduce salaries overall. On a more formal footing, the Film Enquiry Committee had recommended the setting up of a Casting Bureau to regularize employment of actors and create a level playing field. The opening of a training institute was sought for both by the Committee and sundry commentators like K. M. Modi, President of IMPPA in 1951, to provide new acting (and technical) talent on a regular basis. 17 But even in 1957, the problems of the star-system persisted as before. Star salaries had soared to as much as Rs. 3 lakhs (of a standard budget of 10-11 lakhs) and a spate of films become locked in production, totalling to about a crore in dormant capital.18 Filmfare carried an appeal by four important producer-directors looking for new actors, and shortly thereafter sponsored an all-India talent hunt contest launched by Bimal Roy and Guru Dutt.19 In the event of a failure to restructure the mainstream, Kardar had pointed to an emerging alternative: a new breed of star-less films with more investment in story values which had proven successful, giving a clue to the direction that could be taken by enterprising producers. This path would be taken up by the emergent realist cinema tendency first, and by the New Cinema much later. Experiments with Colour Colour films were experimented with during the early 50s, hoping that a novelty would be a crowdpuller. Part of the impetus must surely have been from the competition provided by Hollywood films, which had already switched over to colour. Moreover, the acclaim received by Renoir’s River abroad, which invited repeated exhortations on the painterliness of the Indian landscape, triggered a series of colour experiments. Ambalal Patel – formerly one of the proprietors of Sagar Film Company, a cinematographer and stills photographer who dabbled with technological developments through the years – imported Gevacolor film stock 16 A.R. Kardar launched a talent hunt in 1952, whose finalists were published in Screen. Chand Usmani, Peace Kanwal and Anita Guha came out of this contest and themselves became stars, if in various degrees of fame and differing contexts. See Screen Vol. 01 No. 04, October 12, 1951, 4 & 12. 17 This would only be answered with the opening of the Film Institute in Poona in 1965, whose graduates would not only famously spearhead the New Wave but also play a crucial role in the mainstream industry’s changeover from the 60s to 70s. We shall turn to this in the third chapter. 18 Editorial, “Soaring Star Prices”, Filmfare Vol. 6 No. 23, November 8, 1957, 3. 19 See Filmfare Vol. 6 No. 18, August 30, 1957 and Filmfare Vol. 6 No. 22, October 25, 1957. 26 at his laboratory, Filmcenter, around 1950 after sifting through several alternative processes in a bid to defy the monopoly of Technicolor. 20 Mehboob would soon shoot Aan on Gevacolor 16mm negative and print it at the Technicolor labs in London. It went on to receive a grand international premiere in London as an extravagant oriental swashbuckler, and became one of the first Indian films to receive wide distribution in the West, even being dubbed into French. 21 The success of the film back home was also tremendous. Aan was booked for a straight 52 weeks in Bombay’s premiere Liberty cinema, then the first time in Indian history that a film would have such a long run. Patel and Ezra Mir would produce a colour film called Pamposh shot in Kashmir by Carlos F. Marconi, in part to prove the credibility of the Gevacolor process and Filmcenter’s ability in handling it.22 Exchanges between Indian and foreign personnel became highly common in the period, particularly in colour film productions. To assist Indian cameramen as they adapted to the new technology, Gevaert-AG sent their technical experts to India. After two of their experts went back, unable to come to terms with the haphazard work cultures of the industry, Gevaert sent the burly J. F. H. van der Auwera.23 He would however adapt remarkably well to the eleventh-hour attitude, and stayed on as a colour consultant for a series of Indian films right up till the 60s. Sohrab Modi’s lavish Jhansi Ki Rani was shot with the help of a foreign film crew, on the largest outdoor set of its time constructed in Chembur.24 Its battle scenes were shot on location in Bikaner.25 Ernest Haller, Oscar-winning cinematographer of Gone With The Wind, shot the film with M. N. Malhotra and Y. D. Sarpotdar assisting him. The organized working of the foreign crew – which had constructed as many as 42 sets and still managed to finish shooting in time – ignited hopes that the Indian industry would imbibe not only technical knowhow but their enviable efficiency.26 Foreign films were also being shot in India, to capitalize on the success of The River: for e.g., Rod Amateau’s Monsoon in Bombay, the William Berke-T.R. Sundaram co-production 20 Details of Patel’s biography from Luminous Lint, http://www.luminouslint.com/app/photographer/A_J__Patel/A/, and his efforts at introducing colour in India from Sanjit Narwekar, “How One Man’s Efforts Made Colour Popular in Indian Cinema,” The Wire, March 8, 2017. https://thewire.in/115056/how-one-man-efforts-made-colour-popular-in-indian-cinema-ambalal-patel/. Both accessed on May 6, 2017. 21 See Karan Bali’s entry on Aan at http://upperstall.com/film/aan/ and the entry at indiancine.ma https://indiancine.ma/GJT/info , both accessed on May 6, 2017. 22 Gulzar, Govind Nihalani, Saibal Chatterjee, eds., Encyclopedia of Hindi Cinema (Delhi: Popular Prakashan, 2003), 255. 23 Narwekar, “How One Man’s Efforts Made Colour Popular in Indian Cinema.” 24 Filmfare Vol. 1 No. 3, April 1952, 3. 25 Screen Vol. 1 Issue 31, April 1952, 9. 26 V. Shantaram, “Indian Films in ‘Fifty One” in Filmfare Vol. 1 No. 1, 22. 27 Jungle in Madras.27 George Cukor’s Bhowani Junction sought permissions to shoot in India, but facing red tape, shifted locations to Pakistan. Filmistan studios produced Bombay Flight 470 (a.k.a. Three Headed Cobra), shot and directed by an UK crew, in Gevacolor. Indian technicians in turn went abroad to learn the new colour processes. M. N. Malhotra trained under Jack Cardiff and Fredrick Young at the Technicolor labs, and came back to photograph Prem Nath’s 1954 Prisoner of Golconda, a costume historical, and The Holy Cave, a recording of the lavish Buddhist Synod in Burma, both in Gevacolor.28 Other films like the mythological Jai Mahadev, Wadia’s Arabian Nights-type fantasy Hatim Tai and G.P. Sippy’s Shahenshah were being shot or planned in Gevacolor around the same time. This trend extended beyond the Bombay industry. B. N. Reddy of Vauhini studios, Madras, revealed in a party thrown by Ambalal Patel at his Malabar Hill house that he was planning a colour film with relative unknowns in the cast. 29 Filmfare had noted back in 1952 that “too many producers are thinking of making colour pictures these days.”30 The connection between the shift to colour and the falling fates of the industry was spelt out explicitly by Sohrab Modi. He disagreed with naysayers who maintained that the time was inopportune – such a shift would require considerable capital expenditure on new technology and a much bigger scale of production. 31 The market, he surmised, had tired of the ‘sex appeal of the top female stars’ and there had been a shift in cinema-going habits. Bourgeois families had come to occupy the better parts of the theatre as the dominant audience segment in the cities, and they demanded a greater degree of realism in the story as well as a better ‘presentation’ of filmic material. Colour was therefore the right investment at this time, Modi felt: an innovation that would push Indian filmmaking to better standards. Modi’s predilection for historical epics in the Mughal-Rajput mould was a natural fit for colour photography, which magnified the scale of courtly splendour and opulence. He went on to predict, a little too optimistically, that in about three years’ time, colour would succeed in wholly restructuring the industry: ending the star system and bringing back the studio-retainer model (because the producer would be unable to bear the luxury of paying the freelancing star given the increased budget of the colour film), as well as break the dominance of the exhibitor (whose expenditure on updating projection machinery would make him 27 Filmfare Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1952, 24 ‘An Indian Camera Ace in Burma’, Filmfare Vol. 3 No. 23, November 1954, 12-13. 29 Filmfare Vol. 01 No. 08, June 1952, 5. 30 Filmfare Vol. 03 No. 23, November 1954, p. 16 and Encyclopedia of Hindi Cinema, 255. 31 Jhansi Ki Rani cost Rs. 60 lakhs, when the average cost of producing a film just two years back, as noted by the Film Enquiry Committee, was 2 to 3 lakhs. Sohrab Modi, “The Future Belongs to Colour,” 12. 28 28 economically meeker). While these turned out to be wishful, colour would inaugurate, with Aan’s worldwide success, one major strategy of selling to the world market relevant to this day: the marketing of ‘oriental’ filmic spectacles (now under the name of Bollywood) as a generic category in itself. Film Festivals and Encounters with the World A different encounter with the world was heralded by the burgeoning film society movement and the nation-wide International Film Festival organized in 1952 by the Films Division. The festival provoked widespread embarrassment at the domestic films being produced. To stage India’s claim as a modern nation freshly out of the clutches of colonialism, it was felt that a new image in tune with the moment of political internationalism had to be projected to the outside world.32 As Moinak Biswas has argued, the encounter with neo-realist cinema was decisive in restructuring the whole field of Indian cinema, giving birth to not only the art cinema of Ray and Ghatak but formulating the new popular form of the social realist melodrama.33 The concurrent involvement of actors, writers and directors from the PWA and IPTA circles had already brought about a new social consciousness – a tendency of the bourgeois melodramatic form to socially extend its reach to the poor, the working and peasant classes, in response to the visible churning through the 1940s, in face of the popular discontent during Civil Disobedience, the Bengal famine, the Tebhaga-Telangana revolts and Partition. Particularly significant was the stripping away in different degrees, of denominational value in the cinematic representation of space, to reveal more desacralized, descriptive registers in the cinema-city.34 Nonetheless, the limitations of the feudal family romance (Madhava Prasad’s characterization of the dominant form of the social film in this period) ensured that the popular cinema would nonetheless continue to operate through certain moral valuations of urban spatial archetypes, denominational space thereby arresting a 32 Steve Neale has already made this argument of an aesthetic internationalism in the context of the flowering of new cinemas all across the World, but especially in Europe, in the 1950s and early 60s. See “Art Cinema As Institution,” Screen 22 (1) (1981): 11-40 . 33 Moinak Biswas, “In the Mirror of An Alternative Globalism: The Neorealist Encounter in India,” in Italian Neorealism And Global Cinema, eds. Laura E. Ruberto and Kristi M. Wilson (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007), 72-90. 34 It is this quality of the new social realism that allows Ashish Rajadhyaksha to produce a detailed sort of map of Raj’s journey through Bombay in Shree 420 based on the figurations of its marketplaces, slums, nightclubs and so on; a feat that would be near impossible in the social film of even a decade back. See Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The Curious Case of Bombay’s Hindi Cinema: The Career of Indigenous ‘Exhibition’ Capital (part I),” Journal of the Moving Image 5 (2006), accessed May 6, 2017. http://jmionline.org/article/the_curious_case_of_bombays_hindi_cinema_the_career_of_indigenous 29 figuration of pure location.35 Extending the arguments made by Biswas, we might say that the responsibility of enacting a change in spatial representation would therefore fall upon two filmmaking traditions. On the one hand, the emergent art cinema would mediate space through variations on the ‘landscape principle’ of realist representation (in Pather Panchali, broadly early Ray), even occasionally going beyond such limits (in Ajantrik, and broadly Ghatak). 36 Meanwhile the principle of social-spatial extension would be taken up by the organizer of the 1952 film fest, Films Division. I have argued elsewhere that one of the primary drives in the Films Division oeuvre (of the 1950s and 60s) was to archive the multiplicities of Indian reality across the country’s width and breadth, trying to situate this variety in relation to a centre whose political form was the nation-state. It is this principle of extension which would come to be problematized and interrogated in the political churnings of the late 60s within FD, giving birth to exchanges with the new cinema emerging from within fiction filmmaking.37 But we shall be taking up these thoughts specifically in the third chapter, in re-reading the “moment of disaggregation.” The prizes won by Pather Panchali in Cannes, Aparajito in Venice and Jagte Raho at Karlovy Vary were crucial in inaugurating a different strategy to reaching the world through the international film festival. The West Bengal government had partly funded Pather Panchali; when the Film Finance Corporation would finally be formed in 1960, this would provide the model of production financing that the State would initially follow until the FFC’s reconstitution with minor loans to productions being helmed by directors of some artistic repute. While the State would increasingly look to the film festival circuit as a crucial player in staging the vitality of its national culture, filmmakers themselves gained an alternative economic model to work in, relatively free of the constraints of the national scene. Foreign distribution rights could be used to leverage films made for the foreign market which had slim domestic chances. Dino de Laurentiis had picked up for Europe distribution rights for Jagte Raho at Karlovy Vary.38 Raj Kapoor was relieved since he would be able to offset the film’s bad domestic run. Kapoor managed to sell foreign distribution rights for some of his older films too. The limited number of theatres in the country, around 3000, meant that the producer depended on an inordinately long run of around 10 weeks to recoup his costs. There was a dawning realization on producers that film festivals were nodes into the network 35 Moinak Biswas, “From Space to Location,” positions 25:1 (2017): 9-28. Biswas, “In the Mirror of An Alternative Globalism,” 87. 37 Sudipto Basu, “Before Its Time: The Global Imaginaries of the Experiments at FD” (paper presented at the National Seminar of the Dept. of Film Studies, Jadavpur University Kolkata, November 3-4, 2016). 38 Raj Kapoor, “The Grand Prix and After”, Filmfare Vol. 6 No. 20, Sep 27, 1957, 27 & 29. 36 30 of international cinema, a place of intensive economic exchange: of completed films, distribution rights, future projects and personnel. Festival success could open one up to a world market, alleviating to a great extent the producer’s excessive dependence on nationallocal vagaries.39 The Exhibition Sector and its ‘Racket’ The international film festival nonetheless brought into relief the acute shortage of exhibition venues already noted in the first chapter. While the number of theatres had sizably grown by about 50% through the 40s, the Bombay Building Control Act 1948 ensured that theatre construction was abruptly halted, thereby perpetuating the dominance of the exhibitor over the whole industry. Substantially more theatres could, one, expand the market of Hindi cinema, two, could break the exhibitor’s dominance arising from scarcity. Temporary openair theatres (OATs) were pitched in the Maidan for the 1952 film festival shows, and many in the audience said they felt that these should be made more permanent. The OATs crucially solved the problem of ventilation that was pervasive in closed theatres – which the Patil Committee had discussed in considerable length – and seemed to combine, for at least one interviewed observer, the family weekend excursion with the cinema trip. Demands were voiced to keep the theatres constructed for the festival operative throughout the year. While almost everyone including distributors seemed to agree that it would be beneficial for the audience and the industry, exhibition sector interests promptly dissuaded such a step citing fire and safety hazards. They argued that they had sunk in considerable capital in theatre establishment, were heavily taxed, and had to pay for several licenses. The competition with OATs, which offered cheaper tickets and did not have to do any of these, would thereby be unfair. They were however not opposed to OATs being set up in rural areas, where the reach of distribution was already scant.40 Of course, by this time, the urban exhibition sector was itself figuring out ways to draw back the crowds. Faced with the virtual construction ban, the Western India Theatres Ltd. decided to refurbish three of its old theatres in Bombay and Calcutta, making provisions for air conditioning and better ventilation, even though it meant incurring a net loss in the annual balance sheet.41 In 1953, after being under construction for two years, “Bombay’s new luxury 39 Ibid. Screen Vol. 1 No. 24, Feb 29 1952, 1 & 7. 41 “Western India Theatres Ltd.: Speech of the Chairman, Mr. K. M. Modi”, TOI Oct 5, 1951, 7. 40 31 cinema Naaz” was inaugurated. 42 Built on the existing structures of West End theatre on Lamington Road – an area known since the 20s as the most decisive exhibition circuit in the city (with 7 make-or-break theatres) – it was inaugurated with A. R. Kardar’s “long awaited romantic drama” Dil e Nadan, and given a full-page feature in the Times of India. While the mystery of how it beat the construction ban is unclear – maybe some combination of its reuse of existing structures, the partial relaxation on construction controls in 1950 and some judicious pulling of strings – what is beyond doubt is that the owners hoped to spin a success along the same lines as Liberty with its plush renovations. Significantly, Naaz and Liberty were reserved only for Indian films, thereby confirming the conjecture that their construction was tied to a resolution of the contemporary crisis.43 The embourgeoisement of the cinema and the establishment of the family as standard film-viewing unit meant that an economy of comfort for the burgeoning middle classes needed to be catered to. Some others circumvented the construction ban by building in places like Dombivli, where the Bombay Building Control Act was not enforceable.44 Even in Lucknow, the proprietors of Manoranjan Cinema defied municipal regulations by contesting its right to issue a license.45 By 1954, TOI reported that the Bombay construction ban on new cinemas had been lifted unconditionally.46 However, a de facto ban continued to be in effect. While scarcity since the War had inflated theatre rentals, the exhibition situation in particularly Bombay became stark around 1955 when cinema rentals grew by Rs. 700 for smaller theatres and by Rs. 2000 for the major first-run houses. The average weekly rental for a major first-run theatre came to be around Rs. 10500. Additionally a sum had to be paid in some cases in undeclared cash. The exhibition scenario looked as follows. The total number of theatres in Greater Bombay in 1956 was around 71. Most of the important theatres were booked for a long run by a major film. Other theatres were “fed” with films by distributors hoping to reap good profits in other circuits by publicizing a good first-run in Bombay, which was the centre of the most important distribution circuit. Still other theatres were leased by the distributor from the 42 “Bombay’s New Luxury Cinema Naaz is Magnificent”, TOI June 20, 1953. The usual trend for luxury theatres had until then been to book Hollywood films, which was patronized by the most well-to-do educated upper class clientele. 44 The social background of the proprietor in the traditional Gujarati mercantile classes can be deduced by his name, Lala Keshi Ramji Shah. It perhaps gives an indication of the nature of exhibition capital seeping into the industry. “Enhancement of Sentence: State Petition Rejected”, TOI Sep 8, 1954, 3. 45 filmindia Vol. 18 No. 2, Feburary 1952, p. 12. 46 “National Film Board To Be Established Soon: Finance Corporation Plan Rejected”, TOI May 20, 1954, 5. 43 32 exhibitor. It had become hard for films without the backing of powerful distributors to secure exhibition slots.47 Exhibition continued to be the most profitable branch of the industry since the War, constantly inviting speculators from cotton, bullion and (increasingly in the 1950s) realestate. It is notable that the very real estate magnates in the post-war years investing in Statesponsored co-operative housing society construction – builders like G.P. Sippy and Shapoorji Pallonji – would spread their investments into film exhibition, or more rarely, throw it further back into distribution or production.48 It might be surmised that by the late 1950s, the tables had turned. The exhibitor now came to be the most powerful figure in the industry, outstripping even the distributor. Filmfare noted in 1957 that the sharp increase in theatre rentals had put the distributor in severe risk of incurring losses, given his substantial publicity outlay and the impossibility of securing multiscreen releases due to the exhibition bottleneck. A distributor revealed that only about 10 of 100 films could recover their publicity costs at the time. The exhibitor, on the other hand, took around 60% of the box office collections without any investment save in estate.49 Since the distributor was still by and large the financier of films, this caused much of the Bombay industry’s financial instability at the time.50 While the Rent Control Act of Bombay allowed no profit greater than 3% for usual property-owners; a loophole ensured that cinema-owners were exempt from this limit. It effectively allowed the lessee-exhibitor to make 100% returns while owner-exhibitors made 25% of their capital outlay. There were in fact occasional frissons between these two levels of estate-holding: i.e. between the landowner whose rent was still dictated nominally by the Rent Control Act, and the lessee-exhibitor who had virtually a free run to exploit the facilities he had leased, if required by subletting it to distributors en bloc for a film’s run.51 As the Chairman of Bombay Talkies, J. P. Tiwari, had 47 Editorial, “The Exhibition Racket”, Filmfare Vol. 6 No. 11, May 24, 1957, 3. Pallonji famously produced K. Asif’s lavish Mughal e Azam, which was stuck in production hell for a decade until its 1960 release. The presence of real-estate investors in exhibition circuits was remarkable in light of the other material connection between housing and theatre constructions: the government had leveraged one against the other in distributing scarce materials, yet they came to be controlled by the same business interests. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The Curious Case of Bombay Cinema,” 9. 49 Editorial, “More about the Exhibition Racket,” Filmfare Vol. 6 No. 12, June 7, 1957. 50 Editorial, “The Exhibitor and the Industry”, Filmfare Vol. 6 No. 13, June 21 1957. 51 We might judge this by a court case between Western India Theatres Ltd. and the proprietors of Strand Cinema. The landowners tried to argue that the specialized nature of fittings in a cinema theatre – especially its projection equipment – did not come under the provisions of furniture and fittings as defined by simple leases, thereby requiring composite leases (not under the purview of the Rent Act) with higher rent values. The lesseeexhibitors argued in turn that the specialized nature of theatres did not nonetheless mean that its equipment would not come under the understood bracket of ‘furniture and fittings’, and hence a simple lease could be 48 33 observed in 1952, exhibition was a game of renting and re-renting existing infrastructure in many combinations of profit-making on various levels. The exhibitor enjoyed an almost unlimited license in varying his rental charge to the producer according to present demand.52 The purely extractive nature of the “exhibition racket” was further underlined by the lack of upkeep of the theatres, noted repeatedly by Filmfare. 53 It is precisely the free reign of speculative capital in this field of the industry’s operations that invited the government’s censure and repeatedly led to increases of entertainment tax (and other duties). The proposed Film Council and Finance Corporation: their fates As we chart the fates of the planned Film Council as well as the other FEC Report recommendations, it becomes clear that the powers-that-be of the film industry, its producers and financiers – represented chiefly by the Film Federation of India – would increasingly take a divergent path from the mandate of state reform. At the same time, the State would continue to waver hesitantly many times over the question of restructuring the industry as a whole. K. M. Modi, at the 1951 Annual Meeting of Western Indian Theatres Ltd., noted the need for the industry to resolve things on its own end, independent of the Film Enquiry Committee’s constitution. He welcomed the formation of the FFI as a belated merger of productiondistribution-exhibition interests, asking it to guide the industry’s future, even in the lack of helpful state intervention. The FFI would soon, in early 1952 itself, voice its rejection of the statutory roles outlined in the Film Council proposal, demanding that it should only be an advisory body.54 To the industry, its practically unchallenged powers in the event of war or emergency were disagreeable. S.S. Vasan would become crucial in fighting against the Film Council and the government’s “excesses” as president of FFI for two terms. Vasan casually dismissed the persistent idea voiced by personalities like Shantaram, Satyajit Ray and Zia Sarhady, as well as conservatives, that plagiarism (of Hollywood plots, themes and styles) was the root of the aesthetic crisis besetting the film industry; averring instead that all of human civilization has progressed through infinite plagiarism. 55 He tried to settle the prevalent “entertainment vs. education” debate: insisting that S.K. Patil had already decided followed as before to fix a standard rent. “Fixing Standard Rent of Cinema: Court Rejects Objection”, TOI, June 25, 1956, 3 and “Furnished Premises Under Rent Act”, TOI, July 22, 1956, 5. 52 J.P. Tiwari, “Plight of the Indian Film Maker”, Filmfare Vol. 1 No. 8, 1952, 8-11. 53 “The Exhibitor and the Industry,” Filmfare Vol. 6 No. 13, June 21 1957. 54 Y. A. Fazalbhoy, “Indian Film Industry and Film Enquiry Committee's Report,” TOI, Feb 24, 1952, V. 55 “Plagiarism in Indian Films”, Filmfare Vol. 4. No. 23, November 11, 1955, 15. 34 that entertainment was film’s primary role; further, arguing that the film industry could not be hoped to engage in education when it was so heavily taxed as entertainment.56 In 1954, the Government decided to consider the Patil Committee recommendations. 57 However, it backed out of all the strong interventions suggested by the Comittee. It rejected the Council idea under persistent pressure from the film trade on its undesirability. Given the attendant task of reconciling the by-now widening gaps between interests in the production, distribution and exhibition sectors, the Government said it would find difficulties in wielding authority. Keskar instead proposed the setting of a National Film Board with purely advisory roles, having two subsidiaries: a Film Production Bureau (replacing the proposed Hollywoodstyle Production Code Administration) and a Film Institute. The Central Board of Film Censors, he said, was also to be brought under the Film Board in due time. The FFC plan was rejected citing exigencies of the Five-Year Plan. Vasan welcomed the decision, but expressed “slight misgivings” about the adjacency of a statutory body like the Censors with a proposed advisory body like the Board.58 However, soon fearing that the Board could turn into an allcontrolling body – essentially the Film Council by another name – the FFI executive body would deem it unnecessary, and press for the constitution of an FFC on “mutually agreeable terms” (rejecting the Patil Committee’s restrictive conditions on financing). Normalization of taxes was yet again suspended at the time citing the need for the Centre to consult with state governments. Patil, who had repeatedly exhorted the government to implement the Film Enquiry recommendations, soon complained that the Film Board proposal was “very clumsy” with no parallel anywhere in the world and that, with the rejection of the Film Council, the “whole structure of the Report’s recommendations had almost toppled down.”59 To apprise the government and the industry of its troubles, Patil called for the organization of a Film Seminar in February 1955 at the Sangeet Natak Akademi. Vasan, speaking there as FFI president, drew up a five-point programme for the State to consider: a.) allow theatre construction, b.) reduce entertainment tax, c.) subsidize “educational, aesthetic or artistic films”, d.) help manufacture of raw film and equipment in India, and e.) loosen the grip of censorship.60 Two things become clear from this list of demands. One, essentially Vasan was asking for help from the State without any of the regulatory control mechanisms attached as 56 “Legislation to Control Films Opposed”, TOI, December 14, 1954, 7. “National Film Board To Be Established Soon: Finance Corporation Plan Rejected By Government”, TOI, May 20 1954, 5. 58 “Mr. Vasan Hails Delhi Statement”, TOI, May 21, 1954, 7. 59 “Action on Film Inquiry Body Recommendations”, TOI, May 27, 1954, 3. 60 “Film Seminar in Delhi: Solving Problems of Film Industry”, TOI, Mar 1 1955, 9. 57 35 in the Film Enquiry recommendations. Two, that the impetus for aesthetic reform had to be sized down into subsidy for a limited number of special projects, while economic reform, it was demanded, only be limited to revoking the negative limit-conditions sapping the industry (especially taxation and theatre construction). Vasan and Patil would both ask for inclusion of the cinema into the Second Five-Year Plan in 1955. As the legislature geared up to pass a bill for the National Film Board, Vasan executed a lightning merger in 1956, persuading the Film Producers’ Guild to join the Federation – culminating in a Supreme Council of Film Producers – in order to fight the State’s projected interventions.61 FFI henceforth became the only legitimate representative body of the industry in negotiations with the State for a while. The Cinematograph Amendment Bill introduced in the Rajya Sabha in December 1956 brought back the Finance Corporation plan on a small scale, even as it confirmed a retreat from thorough control and regulation of the industry, most of the Board’s functions being of an advisory nature. 62 The FFC, Keskar revealed, would have an initial capital of Rs. 1 crore.63 However, the Bill would be withdrawn abruptly in August 1957 citing yet again an economy drive,64 eliciting doubts from certain quarters if the Government was at all interested in implementing the Film Enquiry recommendations.65 In early 1959, the Film Finance Corporation was finally passed “on a modest scale” (i.e. with a reduced initial capital of about Rs. 25 lakhs) through the Cinematograph Amendment Act. The Film Council/Board idea was dropped in the bill citing the “chaotic state” of the industry, even though Keskar called on the industry to form such a Council on its own. The Film Council idea would again be raked up briefly in 1962 by a Parliamentary Estimates Committee before being strongly reconsidered against the background of the near-shutdown of the film industry in 1968. We shall pick up the threads already laid out in the following chapter. 61 Editorial, “Consolidation at last,” Filmfare Vol. 5 No. 1, January 6, 1956. “Establishment of Film Board: Bill Soon,” TOI, August 18 1956, 9. 63 “Film Board & Finance Body To Be Set Up: State Aid To Develop Industry”, TOI, September 21, 1956, 1 64 “Film Finance Body To Be Set Up: Minister Assures Industry A Better Deal”, TOI, February 19, 1959, 1. 65 “Current Topics”, TOI, August 23 1957, 6. 62 36 REVISITING THE ‘MOMENT OF DISAGGREGATION’: THE 1960s AND ITS AFTERLIFE The series of box office failures in the 1950s had forced out of the industry many eminent producers and directors. Mehboob and Bimal Roy died in debt.1 Rising production costs due to economic inflation (resulting from dependence on foreign aid, e.g. food grain import aided by the US), the failure of economic planning, and from 1966 the devaluation of the rupee, led to a steady decrease in the number of ‘studio-owner’ and ‘regular’ producers from 1963 onwards. The exhibition and distribution sectors seemed to be mutually squeezing the flow of capital into production.2 Following up on a trend we saw in the second chapter, there was an increasing shift to colour filmmaking on grand scales noticeable in the first half of the 60s: partly in response to falling box office fates and profit margins, but also tied to the new economies of consumption, desire and travel which seemed to be emerging around an affluent middle class. 3 This however meant very high production investment and the corresponding increased chance of making a loss. In this chapter, we shall try to make sense of the ground-shifts that happened due to the trickling down of finance in production. The industry cracked under its pressure, leading to a “film war” being waged between the three sectors of production, distribution and exhibition. My attempt in this chapter is to show that the ‘moment of disaggregation’ proposed by Madhava Prasad touched upon the dynamics of the Bombay film industry itself. Briefly, what Prasad proposes is that the dominant textual form of the post-Independence social film (the ‘feudal family romance’) faced a crisis in the political turmoil of the late 1960s.4 He contends that the ideology of the classic social held the disruptive charge of the modernity in tension within a feudal value system, the textual form mirroring the unresolved coalition of the national political consensus. This consensus, imploding under pressure from the fervent political mobilizations of the 60s, led to a segmentation of audiences and a 1 “The Stars In Their Place,” Times of India (TOI), April 7, 1968, 7. Valentina Vitali, Hindi Action Cinema: Industries, Narratives, Bodies (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), 134-135. 3 For an account of the cycle of global travel films like Sangam, Evening in Paris, Love in Tokyo etc., see Ranjani Mazumdar, “Aviation, Tourism and Dreaming in 1960s Bombay Cinema,” BioScope 2(2) (2011): 129155. DOI: 10.1177/097492761100200203. 4 M. Madhava Prasad, “The Moment of Disaggregation,” in Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000 Paperback Edition [1998]), 117-137. 2 37 splitting of the social into three generic modalities.5 However, since the forces unleashed by crisis were re-contained by an authoritarian populism, only a limited transformation of the political field occurred. Accordingly, the social film and the reformist impetus entered into a new consensus formation, particularly by channelizing popular transformative will into the action cinema of the 70s (best embodied in the star persona of Amitabh Bachchan), reinscribing it within the ideology of the state. My analysis however shifts from the textual-ideological reading done by Prasad into a detailed industry study of Bombay cinema. I try to account for the changes occurring at this moment ‘from within’, shifting the focus from the discursive practices of the text to the histories of capital, infrastructure and labour which make up the industry. The discontent generated by the ‘moment of disaggregation’, I demonstrate, disrupted the uneasy coalition of producers, distributors and exhibitors that had until then managed to fight off the spectre of state-led reform as one (under the name of the Film Federation). While the state continued some of the same policies of censorship and harsh tax-extraction it had done earlier, the startling thing about the 1967-68 crisis was that the fight decisively shifted into a ‘civil war’. While drawing on Prasad’s argument, I query him on at least one count: the ‘moment of disaggregation’ is, I speculate, the passing of the very political form of the developmental welfare-state. This has important repercussions for (film) historiography in so far as the subsequent history of the nation and the film-industry cannot continue to be read as a negative reflection of the failed project of national modernization. Towards that end, I propose (to an extent speculatively) that from the 1970s onwards, the Bombay film industry has to be read in terms of a triangulation of indigenous speculative capital, a subaltern male labour force and the smuggling mafia which begins to invest in it substantially. The first section traces the two successive shutdowns in 1967-68. In 1967, the industry could still put up a united front against the state; by the 1968 crisis, this coalition had broken down. The second section reads Mrinal Sen’s Bhuvan Shome as a symptom appearing in the aesthetic and discursive field of the passing of the welfare-state form, coinciding with the last notable attempt at state-intervention in Bombay cinema. The conclusion looks at the possible configurations guiding the industry from the 1970s on. 5 The three generic forms are: an action cinema containing the disruptive charge of political mobilization within the reconfigured form of the social, a middle-class cinema built upon codes of identification with a depoliticized middle-class, and a developmental social realism attempting to reform the feudal fabric of the rural through a ‘militant’ representative figure of the developmental nation-state. 38 The “film wars” of 1967-68: infrastructural crisis, dissent and self-regulation While the progressive increase of entertainment taxes had been one of the persistent complaints of the Indian film industry throughout the last two decades along with the looming threat of censorship – symptomatic of, in S.K. Patil’s crisp formulation, the state’s “police-and-clergyman attitude” towards the industry – 1967 saw the situation blow out of proportion. Fresh on the heels of a similar tax increase in Rajasthan, the Maharashtra proposed a sliding tax slab varying from 40 to 70% of the gross ticket price depending on the seating class, paid flat irrespective of actual ticket sales.6 This was, ironically, a fifty percent reduction of the planned tax hike which, if executed, could make the tax levied on a Rs. 5 ticket as high as 163%. Exhibitors responded by including the calculated tax within the gross ticket price, leading to the strange paradox of a “tax [being imposed] on tax.”7 Since taxes always fell on the consumer, the hike spelt a possible fall in attendance figures. Tied to the excessive taxation of cinemas was the still stark shortage of exhibition venues, despite the government granting in the meanwhile some construction licenses.8 While already in 1960, the Bombay state’s ban on film theatre construction had been lifted – the Cinematograph Exhibitor’s Association had back then responded by asking its members to launch renovation and building projects9 – the increase in the total number of theatres in the country had only been from 3238 in 1951 to 3925 in 1968 (including touring theatres).10 Most theatre-owners now charged flat rentals, instead of sharing profits on a percentage basis. This led to stark inequities. According to a mid-1967 Filmfare report, theatre rentals had soared to two, even three, times the amount as a decade before, averaging around Rs. 21000 per week, with most exhibitors now demanding fixed weekly payments irrespective of the actual sales on tickets.11 The exhibition bottleneck was further amplified by the blind complicity of some producers, who took to dragging films to fake ‘silver jubilees’ (i.e. 25 week runs) in a strange form of futures investment. 12 The scarcity of venues therefore ensured that ‘exhibition 6 Editorial, “Fresh Burden,” Filmfare Vol. 16 No. 14, July 7, 1967. Editorial, “A Mockery Of Relief,” Filmfare Vol. 16 No. 17, August 18, 1967. 8 “Films to Promote National Integration,” TOI, May 4, 1962, 7. 9 “Renovation of Old Theatres: Call To Cinema Exhibitors,” TOI, June 10, 1960, 5. 10 Figures are from S.K. Patil et al., The Report of the Film Enquiry Committee (New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1951), 129 and “Building of More Cinema Houses: Shah’s Assurance,” TOI, April 3, 1968, 7. 11 Editorial, “Cinema Rentals,” Filmfare Vol. 16 No. 16, August 4, 1967. 12 The trick was this: facing bad footfalls, producers would buy tickets for their films en masse and distribute them as complimentary passes. These costs would then be carried over in the producer’s account books into the next venture as expenses. He would then approach top stars and distributors with the claim of being the producer of a ‘silver jubilee film’, in the hope that an investment into top star-capital for the next film would produce a 7 39 capital’ 13 (Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s phrase), already shown in the previous chapter to be steadily gaining dominance just a decade before, had effectively outstripped parity with the other sectors of the industry. The state, which never really looked upon the film industry without suspicion, simply matched the extraction of this exhibitor class with a symmetrical exaction by hiking the entertainment tax sharply. The film industry “facing extinction” came together in its turn, with its various representative organizations, to demand a full closure of cinema halls from September 1, 1967 demanding a steep decrease in entertainment tax rates.14 The Finance Minister alleged that the industry had been too “hasty” in taking such a drastic step. To this suggestion, B.K. Karanjia, Filmfare editor, responded that perhaps the industry had been too late, that it should have shut down in protest back in 1951 when the Film Enquiry Committee had asked for a normalization of entertainment tax at a straight 20%.15 This feeling of ‘missing the moment’, of an reform opportunity perpetually slipping by, runs throughout the history of cinema-state interactions in India, as we have noted. Cinemas nonetheless re-opened 9 days after on September 10 following talks between the Maharashtra Government and an industry delegation on promise of tax relief.16 Within two months however, on being rewarded with only a “niggardly” cut, several trade bodies jointly expressed disappointment and threatened non-operation yet again.17 In December that year, following a series of minor tremors felt in the city during the Koynanagar earthquake, cinemas within Greater Bombay were forced to hold only two daily shows, closing down at dark. Attendance figures fell steadily, the industry losing around Rs. 1 to 1.5 lakhs daily.18 Natural calamity seemed to forcefully re-enact scenes from the very crisis unfolding within the film industry in its interactions with an inert governmentality.19 On the other hand, production facilities were fast closing down due to these economic uncertainties. In April 1967, the 27 year-old Kardar studios became threatened with shutdown big hit and recoup all previous losses. A lot of such films naturally failed. See Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s explanation of the phenomenon in “The Stars in Their Place,” TOI, April 7, 1968, 7. 13 Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The Curious Case of Bombay’s Hindi Cinema: The Career of Indigenous ‘Exhibition’ Capital (part I),” Journal of the Moving Image 5 (2006), accessed May 6, 2017. http://jmionline.org/article/the_curious_case_of_bombays_hindi_cinema_the_career_of_indigenous 14 “Tax-weary cinemas will remain closed from September 1,” TOI, August 13, 1967, 1. 15 Editorial, “Hypothetical? Hasty?,” Filmfare Vol. 16 No. 19, September 15, 1967. 16 “Cinemas to reopen from Sunday,” TOI, September 7, 1967, 1. 17 “Govt. assurances not kept, says films industry,” TOI, November 1, 1967, 5. 18 “Enforced idleness hits city cinemas,” TOI, December 14, 1967, 5, 19 Foucault’s coinage to describe the modern mode of governance in welfare-states, the bureaucratic management of the social whole (population). See Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, 87-104. 40 by a High Court order, the 22nd such closure in Bombay within a decade.20 Some like Ranjit Studios and Prakash Studios had passed into the hands of the workers themselves. This trend had already begun in the previous decade in the twilight of the ‘studio system’.21 Kardar’s closure was all the more remarkable given that the studio was by all means well-equipped, even for colour shooting, with as many as 12 production units.22 A lot of such threatened production units had taken to migrating to the Southern film industries.23 I&B minister, K.K. Shah, revealed in a seminar that he had asked the Maharashtra government to build studios in order to fulfil the shortage resulting from these closures. The Maharashtra government would soon broach a plan to open a new Film City in Aarey Colony, but studio-owners largely demurred citing that they would need to invest three times as much capital to shift to the new location. Labour costs had already increased three times while studio earnings remained much the same, straining the meagre resources of studio-owners. Studios were also unable to liquidate bad debts arising from the many productions which remained incomplete due to the economic situation; their number had soared to as much as 80% of all attempted projects.24 Film production in Bombay had trickled down in 1967 to around 90, of which only 3 or 4 had turned hits.25 Studios were additionally subject to the vagaries of quick changes in ownership and escalating real-estate speculation in adjoining lands, making maintenance, upgradation and expansion practically impossible. While the advocates of the film city proposal argued that only a modernization of studios carried out from scratch on virgin land was the only way to solve the present infrastructural crisis, the plan would lie around until 1977 before being implemented.26 Fresh trouble hit in early January 1968 when the distributors of several circuits in North India proposed that they would now only enter into contracts with producers on an advance payment basis (with none of the flat minimum guarantee producers were getting), essentially asking producers to share in the risks of distribution-exhibition. The Indian Motion Pictures 20 Among the more prominent studios which had closed down in the period were Bombay Talkies (Malad), Central Studios (Tardeo), J.P. Tiwari’s M. & T. Studios (Andheri) and Sohrab Modi’s Minerva Movietone (Sewri). Also threatened with closure, along with Kardar, were Basant Studios (Chembur). See “Film Colony Proposal Fails To Attract Studio-Owners,” TOI, July 7, 1968, 5. 21 Workers at Mohan Studios took over as a co-operative when the ownership decided to close around 1953, and subsequently signed their productions as Mazduristan. See “The Fortnight in Films,” Filmfare Vol. 2 No. 17, August 21, 1952, 7. Bombay Talkies too would pass into the hands of its workers, who made the 1954 film Baadbaan under the direction of Phani Majumdar. 22 “Film producers urge Govt. to help retain studio,” TOI, April 18, 1967, 10. 23 Ibid. 24 “Film Colony Proposal Fails To Attract Studio-Owners,” TOI, July 7, 1968, 5. 25 “"Self-regulation" plan of film industry: quality-cum-economy,” TOI, March 6, 1968, 1. 26 “Aarey car depot may become Parjapur depot,” DNA, March 6, 2017. Accessed May 7, 2017. http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report-aarey-car-depot-may-become-parjapur-depot-2343558 41 Producers’ Association (IMPPA) and the Film Producers’ Guild of India (hereafter, Guild), already facing tough times, decided not to sell films on these terms, putting around 1500 cinemas in North India in a potential lockdown situation.27 In early March, determined to push back further and execute a complete infrastructural restructuring, the two producers’ bodies (representing around 350 producers) included 20 studio-owners and 12 processing laboratories into a joint action committee directed towards the industry’s self-regulation and the enforcement of a common code of conduct.28 Bombay distributors soon joined too. The action committee decided to go for broke.29 Feeling that the only way to restructure the industry and pressurize its various interests into accepting their demands was to start from a blank slate, the committee passed the following resolutions: to suspend production indefinitely from March 31, to stop delivery of new films to distributors throughout the country from March 23. Additionally, the move took on, as TOI noted, the shape of a “strike by employers against employees.” More than 1500 studio employees were faced with layoffs. The long-voiced demand to set an upper cap on the pictures in which a top star or music composer could work was finally fulfilled, the limit set at four. The common code of conduct also struck at the wide latitude given to star conduct: they would be required to achieve strict regularity and punctuality on sets, would have to pay for their own additional expenses, most importantly stick to the dates agreed in contracts.30 In an attempt to force open the exhibition racket and wrest back power, producers demanded that their films be shown on a percentage basis instead of the flat rental system (as was done with foreign films), pending which film prints would be withheld.31 B.R. Chopra’s Humraaz, whose Punjab screening Chopra pleaded he could not block, was successfully stopped by heavily intervening.32 A “film sena” of cine workers and small-time producers with unofficial links to the action committee had meanwhile begun to demonstrate in front of distributors’ offices. 33 On March 20, the public was witness to the strange spectacle of the whole of filmdom – matinee idols and movie moghuls among hundreds of technicians and workers – 27 “Northern theatres may have no new films to show: industry row,” TOI, January 12, 1968, 1. “"Self-regulation" plan of film industry: quality-cum-economy,” TOI, March 6, 1968, 1. 29 The action committee seemed to be fulfilling the demands for internal restructuring asked for by the state at several points, when the latter repeatedly demurred from implementing the Film Council fearing its lack of expertise and a huge backlash. 30 “No new films after March 31: "strike" by Bombay producers,” TOI, March 13, 1968, 1. 31 “Release of films only on producers' terms,” TOI, March 16, 1968, 7. 32 “Protest against "exorbitant" rentals charged by cinema-owners,” TOI, March 21, 1968, 5. 33 “Producers' links with "film sena" regretted,” TOI, March 16, 1968, 5. 28 42 going from theatre to theatre demanding an end to “exorbitant” rentals.34 Crowds thronged the 26 truck caravan and the Jinnah Hall where a public meeting was held. So unruly was the crowd that speeches at the hall were occasionally interrupted by the smashing of window panes. It is this charge of the crowd and its shapeless energy that very often threatened to undo all order and regulation. Those who spoke sometimes expressed an undertone of fear: existing hierarchies were being challenged too much; the old consensus was crumbling down. These fears were after all not unfounded. The film industry’s labour force had already begun to assert itself. The escalating discontent throughout the country in the post-Nehruvian phase was of course bound to reach the cinema (itself a majorly labour-driven industry), not only as a challenge to existing forms of narrativity (as Madhava Prasad argues) but also as an implosion of the industry’s infrastructural fabric. The crumbling of the Nehruvian political consensus generated not only such landmark political events as the 1966 hunger marches, the Naxalite rebellion in Bengal, the anti-Hindi agitations in South India and the Shiv Sena’s xenophobic campaigns, it also ricocheted off into a hundred little demonstrations reflecting the general mood of popular unrest and assertion, often oriented towards very local demands. Right across the media industry, for example, George Fernandes would lead an agitation of All India Radio workers demanding better pay. 35 The spectre of a complete industry shutdown naturally brought the voices of cine workers to the surface. They began to demand rights through forms of labour organization loosely affiliated with the vibrant leftist trade union movement in Maharashtra. Another subterranean trend had already been in play from at least the early 50s in the form of gang control of unorganized film industry labour, especially in the supply of junior artistes and extras through various associations. 36 Junior artistes, especially women, had long complained of the exploitation they faced at the hands of the supplier; had occasionally protested against their presence, but apparently to no avail.37 Gradually, it seems, a sort of symbiotic relationship had been struck between the suppliers and at least the male 34 “Protest against "exorbitant" rentals charged by cinema-owners,” TOI, March 21, 1968, 5. “Sweeper gets more than an artiste,” TOI, November 21, 1967, 7. 36 A particularly concrete case of gang involvement is borne out by comparing two articles/reports. Krishna Kumar, a dance director and vice-president of Junior Cinema Artistes’ Association, was murdered in order to avenge the murder of one Hari Kashmiri, member of a rival junior artistes’ organization, allegedly by Kashmiri’s fellow members. Some months later, a merger was effected between these two to form the Cine Junior Artistes’ Association. Navin Yagnik, its President, revealed that it had been “cemented by the blood of two leading social workers, Hari Kashmiri and Krishna Kumar.” See “Murder of Dance Director: 6 Cleared of Charge,” TOI, April 16, 1952, 3 and “Stars Without Names,” Filmfare Vol. 1 No. 10, July 11, 1952, 9. 37 See the articles written by extras in Filmfare Vol. 1 No. 10, July 11, 1952 and “Artistes Demonstrate,” TOI, March 29, 1961, 5. 35 43 workforce.38 That such a control over particularly the lower rungs of film-industrial labour was still held in the 60s by the burgeoning Bombay gangs is hinted by one point in the code of conduct proposed by the producer’s action committee: their refusal to employ more than 50 musicians in a song, when the current habit was to employ 100 or 150 under compulsion. It is the latter trend signifying ties between labour and the “parallel state” in Bombay which would become more prominent as the Bombay film industry passed increasingly into the hands of the smuggler-mafia from the 1970s on. But we shall come back to certain speculations along this line later. For now, let us chart some of the demands being made from the side of labour during the year of unrest, 1968. In January, cine workers had urged the Maharashtra government to arrest the exodus of production units to other states fearing widespread unemployment. They petitioned that the Government should provide free land in the suburbs as well as other infrastructural credit to those who wanted to set up studios. Those studios which had recently closed, like Ranjit and Kardar, were asked to be reopened and handed over to workers’ co-operatives.39 On the heels of the shutdown declaration, the Federation of Western India Cine Employees insisted that workers be insulated from the ongoing tussle between producers, distributors and exhibitors. 40 A temporary truce between payrolled workers and studio managements was quickly arrived at, with a fund to tide over during the shutdown period. But this would still leave around 6500 casual workers and technicians without security. Studio workers, represented by the Bombay General Workers Association, pledged to stand by the producers in their attempt to “clean up the house” on condition that their salaries would be paid in full when the studios reopened. 41 Under the IMPPA-Guild action committee’s orders, all the studios decided not to lay off their workforce.42 In the series of talks that followed in the early days of the shutdown in April, exhibitors from the Delhi-U.P. Circuit agreed to the action committee’s demands.43 Tripartite talks between producers, distributors and exhibitors elsewhere, including in Bombay, however remained 38 In 1974, the Mahila Kalakar Sangh, a newly formed association of female junior artistes, would complain to the police of being beaten up and receiving violent threats from the Cine Junior Artistes’ Association (mentioned before). It is safe to assume that gang control of informal labour in the industry had remained, if not strengthened, in all these years. See “City & Suburbs,” TOI, July 31, 1974, 3, 39 “Check Film-makers’ Migration: Workers,” TOI, January 6, 1968, 1. 40 “Cine workers’ plea,” TOI, March 20, 1968, 5. 41 “Film employees' fund with help from producers,” TOI, March 29, 1968, 7. 42 “Film artistes plan holiday: crisis continues,” TOI, April 2, 1968, 6. 43 “Shooting of films stops today,” TOI, March 31, 1968, 1. 44 inconclusive despite an offer of 10% reduction in theatre rentals by cinema-owners.44 The failure resulted in a decision to picket theatres still attempting to show Hindi films despite the shutdown. Producers, directors and stars marched from hall to hall, often staging in the ironic scene of a film’s producer demanding that his film not be screened. Some film reels were snatched as protection.45 In a major blow to the FFI’s credibility, IMPPA and Guild resigned from it citing its inability play a role in the present crisis.46 This was a significant moment in the disaggregation of the old consensus: we remember that the Federation had been formed as a consolidation of various film industry interests in their collective fight against heavy state intervention. Producers, distributors and exhibitors could not under the circumstances be represented as one. What differentiated the complete industry shutdown of 1968 from the nine-day theatre shutdown of 1967 was that it was no longer a question of the film industry ranged against the state, but an internecine struggle to wrest complete control under conditions of infrastructural scarcity. B.D. Bharucha, president of Cinematoraph Exhibitors’ Association, tried to re-unify the industry citing high entertainment and show tax as the chief cause of the crisis, but his calls went unheeded. 47 The tussle had definitively been displaced from outside to inside, within the industry’s body itself. A further split was soon manifest within cine workers: a Mazdoor Dal was formed especially by the non-payrolled staff at film studios, demanding that producers and studio-owners fulfil their obligations and disburse the relief funds being raised for cine workers.48 The Dal alleged that producers had gone back on their promise of providing financial aid to the unemployed, whereas the Film Sena, composed of studioworkers affiliated to the IMPPA-Guild action committee, had been given money to run free kitchens.49 The state meanwhile intervened. K.K. Shah, the I&B minister, promised that the government would help in the construction of new theatres. 50 He mediated talks between producers, distributors and exhibitors, urging them to end the shutdown soon. Demands for a nationalization of the industry – most definitely, its distribution and exhibition sector – were made yet again in the legislature, with Shah threatening that he would be forced to take a 44 “Film stars pledge to back producers,” TOI, April 4, 1968, 10. “Movie Montage,” Filmfare Vol. 17 No. 9, April 26, 1968. 46 “IMPPA and Guild quit federation,” TOI, April 5, 1968. 47 “Closing of cinemas urged as solution to problems,” TOI, April 3, 1968, 7. 48 “Memorandum on cine workers’ plight is given,” TOI, April 17, 1968, 9. 49 “Film Sena, Mazdoor Dal at loggerheads,” TOI, April 19, 1968, 6. 50 “Building of more cinema houses: Shah’s assurance,” TOI, April 3, 1968, 7. 45 45 “strong line” if the industry did not arrive at a consensus soon.51 Perhaps it was the threat of nationalization that galvanized a solution. Three weeks into the crisis, a truce was worked out between the three industry sectors at Shah’s residence. Cinemas in Bombay re-opened on March 24 after a 19-day closure with a pact on sharing theatre collections between exhibitors, distributors and producers on a percentage basis was worked out.52 Other clauses protecting both sides against losses were also agreed upon: a “hold-over” figure which would enable exhibitors to change films at short notice if attendance fell, a “theatre protection” which would guarantee a theatre-owner running costs if a film failed. In the mood for “selfcriticism”, producers agreed to stop dealings in black money, put a ceiling on production costs and set up instruments for self-regulation.53 The truce was however only temporary. While cinemas reopened, film production could not resumed be for lack of arriving at an agreement within the production sector. The IMPPAGuild action committee itself was cracking up at the seams. It was felt by some that the Film Sena, which had become the implementing body of the action committee, was overstepping its bounds. In a meeting with Morarji Desai, then deputy Prime Minister, a Sena deputation pledged to supply names and details of black money transactions within the industry, taking on a vigilante role.54 When the Film Sena purportedly thwarted an agreement that was just about to be settled with distributors from the Central India circuit, four promiment members of the IMPPA involved in mitigating the ongoing crisis quit, deciding instead to form a new body of producers “upholding the interest of those who had a permanent stake in the industry.”55 A large chunk of the producers in the IMPPA, they said, had not made any films; the quitting members themselves “wanted to make movies and not dabble in politics.” They alleged that Film Sena leaders had repeatedly frustrated attempts to resolve the disputes; had “made it practically impossible either to consolidate recent achievements, or to solve remaining problems.”56 In mid-May, the production ban was finally lifted. However, this did not immediately lead to a rush of production activity. Studios continued to lie idle because many of the stars had 51 “Shah hints at strong line with film industry,” TOI, April 18, 1968, 10. “Cinemas open: pact on sharing theatre collections,” TOI, April 25, 1968, 6. 53 Distributors agreed to give a maximum of Rs. 7.5 lakhs as minimum guarantee per territory to producers. ibid. 54 “Film Sena to fight black money deals,” TOI, May 9, 1968, 7 and “Film Sena deputation,” TOI, May 16, 1968, 7. 55 The producers were G.P. Sippy, Subodh Mukherji, S.D. Narang and Sunil Dutt. See “Film Sena’s actions force 4 to quit IMPPA body,” TOI, May 24, 1968, 1. 56 “Sippy, Sunil Dutt refuse to withdraw resignations,” TOI, May 25, 1968, 5. 52 46 taken long vacations during the shutdown.57 Uncontracted workers across the industry, who had not been given any security during the two months, demanded substantial pay raise and clearing of dues by threatening to stop work just as studios resumed production.58 The relief fund set out for them had in any case hardly been adequate.59 However, the renewed calls for a Film Council from both within the industry (by B.K. Karanjia, for example) and the legislature, pending quick crisis resolution, would by July force a resumption of normalcy.60 An agreement was reached between the action committee and the distributors from central India.61 The Film Council proposal was discussed by K.K. Shah with a delegation of producers, film journalists and others, but it soon ran into the usual disagreements. Producers demanded that they be given more representation.62 In 1969, a bill for setting up the Film Council was proposed after several blueprints were circulated with film bodies. 63 However, by 1970, the plan would be rejected in the face of another “impending crisis” owing to over-production. The more practical proposal which could, to a large extent, mitigate the exhibition crisis – state subsidies for construction of theatres – was not granted, even though the demand had been raised.64 The Film Council idea would be periodically raised thereafter until the 1980s, when it was completely abandoned. Ultimately it proved to be, as Y.A. Fazalbhoy had hinted in his 1952 commentary on Patil’s recommendations, a sort of imagined panacea for all the industries ills: a ‘superbody’ with proposed statutory powers in too many fields, but no actual powers to license the producer, and no defined economic plan of its feasibility.65 The Patil Committee Report unwittingly registered the impossibility of arriving at a solution because it could not properly make out the contours of its very object of study. Aesthetic intervention: New Cinema in the shadow of a failed reform By this time, the state’s investment in cinema would take a different path: that of aesthetic intervention. The once-conjoined demand of infrastructural health and aesthetic reform (i.e. the contention that a better cinema could only be made by a “healthy” restructured industry) 57 “Readers’ Views: Idle Studios,” TOI, May 30, 1968, 8. “Another Crisis?”, Filmfare, Vol. 18 No. 8, April 11, 1969. 59 “Journalists’ Appeal,” TOI, May 10, 1968, 3. 60 See Editorial, Filmfare Vol. 17 No. 14, July 5, 1968 and “Film Industry urged to set house in order,” TOI, July 6, 1968, 9. 61 “Film producers & distributors end dispute,” TOI, July 10, 1968, 1. 62 Editorial, Filmfare Vol. 17 No. 15, July 19, 1968. 63 “Film Council Bill in next Parliament session,” TOI, June 16, 1969, 9. 64 “No migration of film producers, says minister,” TOI, July 25, 1968, 5. 65 Y.A. Fazalbhoy, “Indian Film Industry & Film Enquiry Committee’s Report,” TOI, February 24, 1952. 58 47 had by now split into two. The Film Finance Corporation, formed in 1960, had until then been strapped with too small a budget. Small loans were advanced to producers whose films had “a chance of commercial success” to cover a small part of their budget, favouring certain eminent filmmakers like Ray, Bimal Roy, and Shantaram.66 However, faced with a series of bad debts, the FFC was restructured with B.K. Karanjia at its helm.67 He decided that it made no sense to compete with commercial producers for films with good market potential.68 A new policy was devised for producing low-budget, black-and-white films primarily for the emergent politicized ‘arthouse’ audience and foreign film festivals, employing young talent coming out of the Poona Film Institute and encouraging experiments by notables like Mrinal Sen. The difference was that the new FFC took personal interest in the films being produced, and was not content to merely extending loans. However this admirable experiment was to be short lived, as FFC policy post 1975 would take a turn towards financing commercial films. We now take a minor detour through Bhuvan Shome. I hope to read in it the traces left behind by the ‘moment of disaggregation’. It seems crucial to me that one should mark the moment not only as one of failure, but as a time loaded with its own creative possibilities. In the film, this creativity is quite literally a renunciation of certain practices of governmentality, an opening onto a world of vitality. As the film that inaugurated the New Cinema movement, Bhuvan Shome remarkably became a record of its particular era. The very opening shots call forth a new encounter with the unknown, a world in flux: the rail lines zipping past seem to revolt against the frame’s edges. On the soundtrack, a throbbing vocal-instrumental Indian classical track is overlaid with the chugging of the railway engine in a play of synchronicity and dissonance. The frame suddenly cuts to a neutral grey of what looks like the sky, the soundtrack carrying over from the previous shot. The continuous chugging rhythm seems to ‘wait for’ the train to enter this frame, but Sen playfully denies this expectation. This grey is merely, it turns out, the neutral background for the title credits. To the initiated viewer, this is of course an instantly recognizable strategy, a combination of image and sound from the contemporaneous experiments coming out of Films Division. Particularly relevant is SNS Sastry, whose 1967 short And I Make Short Films practically gives Mrinal Sen all the contrapuntal, humorous strategies which inform Bhuvan Shome: deliberately mismatched sound-on-image, mixing and intercutting of classical music with 66 Committee on Public Undertakings (1975-76), Seventy-Ninth Report: Film Finance Corporation Ltd. (New Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat, 1976), 7-8 67 For figures of losses incurred, see “A good year for films aided by FFC,” TOI, September 10, 1970, 8. 68 “No Black Money!,” TOI, December 17. 1988, A2. 48 technological noise, sudden freeze-frames, the framing askance of shots where the human body often loses its centrality, cutting based on rhythm and tone to elicit strange connections and contrasts. Incidentally, not only does Bhuvan Shome employ the music composer Vijay Raghav Rao who worked with Sastry, it directly ends with a shot where the camera travels along the length of another camera’s long lens and peeks into it: a shot obviously recycled from Sastry’s seminal 1967 film. The various connections between the Films Division and the new wave are important not only because they emit a dense intertextuality and are of interest to the cinephile, but because they are of the same moment and impetus. Some auteurs like Mani Kaul straddled both the FFC and FD, both of which would become a common ground for the first films of graduates from the FTII. More importantly, it was Indira Gandhi’s reign as Prime Minister which seemed to bracket off this period of state-sponsored accelerated experimentation in film and the media, particularly involving the young into its fold. We are reminded that it was her personal interest in appointing Jean Bhownagary, then working at UNESCO, as Chief Advisor (Films) from 1965-67 that enabled the experimental phase at FD. Coupled with the simultaneous forays into launching satellite television at ISRO, it seems plausible to say that the aspiration at that point was to achieve a dynamic ‘global image’ (which I mean not only in the metaphoric sense of the nation staging its modernity internationally, but a certain quality of the image itself which aspires to the world). That it coincides with the demise of the welfare-state model in India is of course the irony.69 Bhuvan Shome, the ‘Big Bad Bureaucrat’70 of the railways, is decidedly a misfit, uneasy in the ‘borrowed garb’ of the colonial-era sahib to whom he aspires. He rejects the dangers of tough game like tiger, and chooses bird-hunting. His outward journey into a desert landscape of Gujarat only nominally connected by rail already mimics the FD filmmaker’s fiat to collect and archive ethnographic images from the country’s margins. The camera in these films seems to hungrily, restlessly, exhaust space, perpetually on the move, satisfying some sort of 69 The complicity of avant-garde filmmakers at FD like Sukhdev in taking a pro-Indira stance and making propaganda during the Emergency years seems to mark off at least one fate of this experimental phase. Even Sastry made a very ambiguous (subversive) ‘tribute’ called Our Indira. See the entries on sarkari shorts at http://filmsdivisionindia.tumblr.com/post/79882448149/our-indira-director-sns-sastry-year-1973 and http://filmsdivisionindia.tumblr.com/post/84428227316/voice-of-the-people-year-1974-director-s , both accessed May 7, 2017. 70 Satyajit Ray’s famous seven-word description of Bhuvan Shome is “Big Bad Bureaucrat Reformed by Rustic Belle.” See “An Indian New Wave?,” Our Films, Their Films (New Delhi: Orient Longman impression, 2009 [1976]), 99. 49 primordial urge to see more.71 This is a logic of expansion. Spatial expansion, of course – a representative figure of the state (the bureaucrat-filmmaker) goes beyond the limits imposed by the project of modernization, leaves the railway country, explores the unmapped – but also an expansion of the limits of the familiar and known. We might, in a sense, call this a move from architecture (built space) to landscape (undifferentiated, unmarked space), or more simplistically, a move from culture to nature. Shome’s long arduous journey to the hunt through parched sunny lands in a rickety bullock cart driven by a country bumpkin takes him farther and farther away from the regularity and smoothness of the rail journey his body is accustomed to.72 When the oxen run, the cart seems to jostle nervously, almost throwing him off. Shome saab’s body seems to be ‘learning new dialects’, new ways of looking and moving once he is out here.73 Left to his own wits at the end of the ride, Shome flounders comically in his hunt. Eventually, he comes to be aided by Gauri, a village-girl with a smattering of urban experience and education, with whom Shome develops a sort of convivial, almost sensual, relationship. Gradually he has to start unlearning culture: first stripped off his shikari attire, made into a spurious ‘local man’, his urbanity swapped for a tribalism of the nomads, then forced even to relinquish the human and dress up as a tree for camouflage (in the middle of a dry desert!), to get close to the birds. Meanwhile he discovers that Gauri is engaged to Jadhav Patel, the very same ticket-man who had been recently reported to Shome for taking bribes. Shome, who was in the beginning of the film determined to punish the errant junior, has a change of heart because of this excursion into the thoroughly unfamiliar. When he does return to his stolid sarkari office, he is a new man. He sternly reads out the report, then tears it apart in a moment of largesse, excusing Patel for ‘one last time’. Once Patel is out of the room and Shome is left alone, it is as if the very architecture of the room has been overturned. The habits dictated by it are now clearly relinquished. In a clear riff on The Great Dictator, he tries to climb out of 71 K.K. Mahajan was among the first in India, with the new breed of FD cameramen such as M.N. Chaubal, to introduce the lightweight handheld camera, thereby inventing in the local context an entirely fresh aesthetic of free-floating exploration. The camera sees without feeling the need to narrativize entirely what is seen, it is the sensation of the new in the image that they aim for. 72 At one point, the cart-driver stops in front of a line of ‘rustic belles’ carrying water to their villages: a visual cliché in cinematic figurations of the rural. There’s a slight hint of a feudal economy of violence as the driver hints that it is common for the urbane babus he ferries to ogle at (and maybe solicit) these women. Shome’s thoroughly urban middle-class Bengali upbringing of course prohibits such a shameless indulgence. The bureaucrat, the representative figure of national modernity, still seems to be unaware of feudal reality, unsure of how to deal with it. While Bhuvan Shome is a premonition of Shyam Benegal’s oeuvre – the iconic body of work from the New Cinema moment – its dealing with the feudal fabric is rather innocent. For a discussion on Benegal, see M. Madhava Prasad, “The Developmental Aesthetic,” in Ideology of the Hindi Film, 188-216. 73 Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film, 124. 50 the window, then gives up, throws files into the air, picks up a stick and playacts as if it is his shooting rifle (Sen freezes the frame, then cuts Sastry-style with a freezeframe from his ‘hunting’ trip), then suddenly clears his table, playfully resting on it like a fanciful Adenoid Hynkel. The final voiceover by Jadhav Patel, reporting in a letter his good luck with Shome saab to Gauri, reveals that he has been transferred to a big railway station, where he now has better chances of ‘earning extra’. What we have, therefore, in this ‘moment of disaggregation’ is a gesture where the state’s representative, and we, see the futility of its reformist gaze. Inspite of the hint of sexual attraction between Shome and Gauri, the film does not engage in the libidinal relay typical of Benegal’s films. The reformist gaze is in fact inverted: it is the bureaucrat who changes in his contact with the rural, not the girl’s husband! One might now place Bhuvan Shome beside a similar impetus in the FD experiments, which engendered films traversing the whole range from head-on critiques of developmental projects – such as Sastry’s Burning Sun and I am 20 (which still speak to a possible reformism) – to more circuitous, open-ended explorations of the contradictions and discontents of Nehruvian-socialist modernity – such as Pati’s Explorer and Trip, Sastry’s And I Make Short Films and Sukhdev’s India 67. This critique is often mounted by delving into urban underbellies and rural hinterlands, opening up to sensate worlds that are either heavily technologized or reservoirs of a throbbing vitality, often segueing from the one to the other. At any rate, both Bhuvan Shome and the FD experiments seem to acknowledge the limits of a bureaucratic ordering of the nation-state, and its entailing repression of sensation. They open up instead to what is fleeting, accidental and contingent. It is therefore not entirely a gimmick, as so many have complained, that Mrinal Sen stops the shot dead very often, inserting at one point, as he was wont to do at the time, raw actuality footage of the Naxalite protests in Calcutta.74 Another (Sastry-like) ironic shot starts with the bust of a cabaret girl on a popular Hindi film poster and then tilts down to reveal a lithograph stuck below her waistline by the Cine Worker’s Union of Bengal demanding pay rises and other benefits, part of the same zeitgeist as the student protests and the concurrent cine workers’ struggles in Bombay. The soundtrack meanwhile thunders with a recording of a 74 Such shots were also used in Calcutta 71, giving rise to a curious situation where Sen would be called upon by friends and relatives of students who had been killed or made to disappear in the police crackdown on Naxalites. This footage which had probably been shot around the same time as Sen made Bhuvan Shome in 1968-69 unwittingly came to be the last witnessing of the presence of a ‘missing people’. See Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2009), 251-253. Ebook version at https://indiancine.ma/texts/ashish%3AIndian_Cinema_in_the_Time_of_Celluloid/text.pdf, accessed on May 7, 2017. 51 leftist rally. There is an archival impulse here obviously, a pressing need to respond and remain witness to turbulent times, but there is also the premonition that it is the noise of the protests, the groundswell of outrage, which must be archived. When Shome and Gauri go to the desert for hunting, we see the same aniconicity take over: the bureaucrat has made the full traversal from the regulated space of architecture to the flow of shifting dunes. The camera tilts and pans to register this dynamism of the ground. In the long shots with which K.K. Mahajan often frames the movement of the human figures across the landscape, the figures are frequently ‘lost’ to the ground, erasing the sense of perspective. And when the flock of birds by the riverbank take off, they make shape-shifting formations constantly confusing attempts to map them in Euclidean terms.75 The shift back to ‘civilization’, the railway offices into which Bhuvan Shome returns, is now overlaid with the memory of this expansive flowing landscape: the regular desks of the office stacked with files suggest an explosion of too much dead information, the rooms look positively cavernous in the low angle tracking shot with ceiling fans lazily moving overhead in a line. The rigidly mapped architecture of the office, with its codification of acceptable behaviour, is suddenly made quirky as Shome performs his act of redemption, the tearing apart of the report that could dismiss Jadhav Patel, then plays around like a clown. The bureaucrat now knows a life beyond files and reports! His act of forgiving the subordinate, followed by the subsequent admission of Patel continuing with his ‘extra income’, thereby marks the moment when corruption is accepted as endemic to the system. Henceforth, the law and its implementation shall begin to maintain a mutually agreed-upon pact of performance: reports shall be written, files shall be made, but with the full knowledge that they have questionable truth- and use-value.76 It is the final retreat of the developmental state, the point at which it gives up the pretense of a nation-building project, and becomes only a guarantor of power. Might we not chart the same arc of history in the state-cinema relations we have been studying for so long? 75 This recalls immediately a particular cut in Pramod Pati’s Explorer (1968), which shifts from such a flock of birds to waveforms on an electronic monitor. 76 This is the fate of nearly all the reports on the film industry written since 1969: the Khosla Committee Report and 1980 Report on National Film Policy. None of their recommendations were implemented. By 1980, the policy turn towards globalization and private capital had practically made the possibility of state reform seem archaic. 52 Conclusion Some ending comments are now in order. As I have argued via Prasad, the project of aesthetic intervention by funding a ‘parallel cinema’ was a failure to make a thoroughgoing transformation of the whole field of the cinema industry. 77 But there is something that complicates our reading of Hindi cinema’s infrastructural history as a history of failure. For it is a fact of some mystery that the Bombay film industry has throughout its existence faced complaints from within and outside of the deepening crisis it is in because of the lack of organization, the dubious nature of its finances, various infrastructural shortages, haphazard working methods, and yet, it has managed to survive throughout, even flourish in certain respects. Perhaps there is a story of a certain ‘success’ that we miss because we tend to teleologically read through the ideal of a reconstructed ‘clean’ whole coterminous with the ideal of the modern nation-state. Let me therefore indulge in some calculated speculations on the post-69 future of the industry. The consensus arrived in the relations between the production, distribution and exhibition sectors would soon break. The state’s unwillingness to intervene in the exhibition sector ensured that producers still had to make do with the inequities discussed before (the ‘squeeze’ was particularly felt by FFC filmmakers, whose successive losses ensured the change in policy direction in 1975-76). 78 In 1970-71, the capping of the number of projects in which a star could act generated some debate, but it was finally discarded.79 The government kept on increasing taxes and duties as before.80 Under these circumstances, the rise of smuggling mafia might give one clue to the changing patterns of ownership and investment into the industry. What I am proposing is this: the film industry, with its propensity for attracting speculative capital and a huge loosely organized male labour force, became imbricated in the new socioeconomic formations taking shape in Bombay in the 1970s. The economies of consumption of the late 60s (narrativized and celebrated in the global travel films) – in which such smuggled goods such as electronics and gold bullion played a major part – gave rise to alliances between indigenous capitalists, who had already been reinvesting real-estate, 77 M. Madhava Prasad, “The State in/of Cinema,” in Wages of Freedom: Fifty Years of the Indian Nation-State (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 130-132. 78 Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, eds., Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press/BFI Publishing, 1998 [1994]), 162. 79 “Limit roles to 6 at a time, film actors told,” TOI, October 20, 1970, 7 and “Film Producers' Guild, artistes scrap curb,” TOI, September 9, 1971, 3. 80 “Entertainment tax Surcharge deplored,” TOI, November 24, 1971, 6 and “Film Industry Baffled By New Tax Order,” TOI, November 25, 1972. 53 bullion, and jewellery surplus into film exhibition, and the smuggling-extortion gangs then gaining ground.81 Already, we have seen, there were indications that the control of extras and junior artistes was in the hands of gangs right from the 1950s up to the 70s. The affinities between subaltern gang labour and the cinema only increased in the two decades. A substantial number of smugglers who had ‘surrendered’ at the behest of J.P. Narayan in 1977 wanted to join the film industry. 82 The 1970s also saw gang control spread to legitimate businesses such as construction (including, of cinemas) which absorbed black money into the regular economy.83 By 1974, they had entered film financing through agents, particularly into “B” productions, distribution and exhibition.84 Haji Mastan was reported to have “extensive interests in the film industry” including a distribution concern and four film theatres. Mastan and other top smugglers additionally maintained connections with the ruling political class, whose election campaigns he often sponsored. 85 On the other hand, he commanded the respect of a folkloric hero among the subaltern Muslim.86 The films tell this story too. The figuration of the outlaw figure as a hero, to whom the subaltern Muslim ‘donates his desire’,87 in the 1970s films of Amitabh Bachchan (such as Deewar and Zanjeer) make little sense without considering two factors. One, it attests to the presence of such a messianic anti-state figure within the industry’s larger constellation, including in its self-mythologizing. Two, the film draws upon presence of the subaltern who makes up the (film-) industrial workforce, and who must be represented to remain contemporaneous given the political charge of the moment. Speculative indigenous capital of the mercantile classes, subaltern labour and the musclepower of mafia gangs therefore formed the triangular complex running the film industry from the 1970s. The state-making nature of the indigenous capital (Rajadhyaksha’s “anglo-bania links”) therefore erodes over the years, especially in the ‘socialist years’, drifting away from the state on to an alliance with the parallel economy/state emerging around India’s financial capital-city. The film industry comes to be located within this complex, replenished by the 81 One hint of this alliance is borne by the names of those arrested for smuggling connections – Nainmal Poonjaji Shah, Champalal Shah and Rajabali Hirjee Meghani – all men from the traditional Gujarati/Marwari mercantile backgrounds which make up the sort of indigenous ‘exhibition capital’ Ashish Rajadhyaksha talks about. “Connections at top level,” TOI, September 27, 1974, 7. 82 “Smuggling was there even during emergency,” TOI, July 28, 1977, 4. 83 “Monsoon no bar to smuggling,” TOI, October 30, 1973. 84 “Smugglers' stranglehold on films may now ease,” TOI, October 10, 1974. 85 “Connections at top level,” TOI. 86 “Smuggling – What’s That? – Mastan,” TOI, May 29, 1977, SM2. 87 Prasad, “The Aesthetic of Mobilization,” Ideology of the Hindi Film, 138-159. 54 continuous flows of capital and labour across region, nation and globe through Bombay. 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