A Book Review.

Tejaswini Ganti. BOLLYWOOD: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2004; 254 pp.

Article Copyright © R. Amit Kumar. Do not use without permission.

Published in: Visual Anthropology. Routledge. (Mar 2008, Vol 21, Issue 2, p181-182)

For abecedarians of popular Indian cinema - coming out of Bombay (now Mumbai) film industry and produced primarily in Hindi language with a mix of Urdu, English and Arabic– Tejaswini Ganti’s book Bollywood lives up to its titular expectation: it is a guidebook to popular Hindi cinema. The book is for a general, quick one-evening study of Hindi cinema clearly written keeping a western audience in mind. Besides a well-written chapter on production and distribution processes of Hindi film industry which brings in some freshness and insights, in this book, Ganti does not add much to the already available theoretical, socio-cultural, and historical knowledge on Indian cinema. Rather what she does well is provide concise, to-the-point, easy to follow information and analysis in a small size book on the modes of functioning in the Bombay film industry.

Anthropologist Ganti does an ethnographic study of Hindi film industry based on fieldwork, participant observation, interviews and discussions in Bombay film industry with producers, directors, actors, screenwriters, stars, choreographers etc. Not many scholars working on Indian cinema uses this kind of fieldwork as a primary method of their research, thus, when Ganti writes about the film industry and its modes of operation, freshness and tactile depth oozes out of her writing.

The book opens with a solid introductory chapter riding on a short note on the recent prominence of Hindi cinema in global arena. Ganti quickly dissociates “Bollywood” from the rest of the film industries in India. She gives a broad understanding of cinema in pre and post independence India based on political, economic, and social changes. She does a good job in explaining how “the State” played and continues to play a vital role not only in the form and content that comes out of Bollywood but also in the day-to-day working habits of the professionals in Bombay film industry.

In the second chapter Ganti gains momentum with her own research and provides fabulous insights into how the production and distribution functions in India – neither vertically nor horizontally integrated, diffuse, a chaotic place where anyone with large sums of money and right contacts can make a film. She stresses the importance of connections, kinships, and networks. She also describes in good detail the importance of several factors that are central to Bombay industry’s modes of operandi, such as unofficial black money, stars, secretaries aka agents, Bombay industry’s own random classification of its audiences, film music, remakes and adaptations. Then there are other important insights Ganti provides in this chapter: the impact of state taxation on the film industry; chaotic and illegal ways of financing films; most movies flop every year; Bollywood makes far lesser number of prints than Hollywood because of its market reach; scripts are written in English because professionals from various linguistic backgrounds come together in Bombay; and most films are still dubbed.

The rest of the chapters are weak and could have been organized and approached differently. Overall the book’s strength is in its first two chapters, after which, it falls flat and loses its readability. These last chapters read as brief biographies of key figures in Indian cinema, small plot description of “key” Hindi films (which seems only a critic’s choice of what to include and what not), excerpts of few selected opinions and interviews from Bombay industry professionals, and a compilation of important dates and events over the hundred year history of Indian cinema.

More than the plot descriptions, analysis of visual styles and character types in some of the important films would have worked better. Also, there are films which break the norms of Bollywood filmmaking in their visual style, in their use of music, song and dance sequences, and also in the use of character types by straying away from usual hero, heroine, and villain formulae of Bollywood. Ganti uses Bollywood as an umbrella term for films coming out of Bombay and fails to acknowledge any differences in the kinds of films that come out of this industry, which I believe, is because in this book Ganti pays less attention on providing much analysis of film texts.

However, it is noteworthy that rather than using texts as a referential point to make arguments about the Indian cultural context, Ganti focuses on the film industry and its modes of functioning. She identifies the cultural, social, political economic and historical contexts in which Hindi films are produced and consumed.