Duke University Press Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry

Producing Bollywood offers an unprecedented look inside the social and professional worlds of the Mumbai-based Hindi film industry and explains how it became "Bollywood," the global film phenomenon and potent symbol of India as a rising economic powerhouse. In this rich and entertaining ethnography Tejaswini Ganti examines the changes in Hindi film production from the 1990s until 2010, locating them in Hindi filmmakers' efforts to accrue symbolic capital, social respectability, and professional distinction, and to manage the commercial uncertainties of filmmaking. These efforts have been enabled by the neoliberal restructuring of the Indian state and economy since 1991. This restructuring has dramatically altered the country's media landscape, which quickly expanded to include satellite television and multiplex theaters. Ganti contends that the Hindi film industry's metamorphosis into Bollywood would not have been possible without the rise of neoliberal economic ideals in India. By describing dramatic transformations in the Hindi film industry's production culture, daily practices, and filmmaking ideologies during a decade of tremendous social and economic change in India, Ganti offers valuable new insights into the effects of neoliberalism on cultural production in a postcolonial setting. Review "Producing Bollywood is a riveting read. It draws carefully thought out connections between cultural formations, changing discourses of legitimacy and nation building. It is to Ganti's credit that she is able to bring rigorous ethnographic tools to bear upon fieldwork materials put together over a decade and more.... Overall, this is a timely and much needed insight into the intersections of the political economy of production, consumption and legitimization of mass cultural products. It should interest readers and students of Mass Media, Film Studies, Culture Studies, South Asia, Anthropology and Ethnography."--Sushmita Banerji "Studies in South Asian Film & Media" " Producing Bollywood is a lucidly written and thoroughly researched ethnography of a film industry whose products are deeply interwoven in the ordinary life and politics of hundreds of millions of people."--Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria "American Ethnologist" "[O]ffers extraordinary insight into the production processes of the late 1990s.... [T]he thoroughness and comprehensive review of trends in this book must be highly commended."--Rodney Jensen " Media International Australia" "Filled with first-hand accounts of the inner workings of the vast Mumbai-based Bollywood film industry collected through numerous interviews and extraordinarily extensive fieldwork undertaken over the course of more than a decade of research, Producing Bollywood meets a previously unfilled need on the part of those engaged in studying Indian cinema and culture by letting a large part of this varied and diverse industry speak, as it were, for itself."--Gabriel Shapiro "Contemporary South Asia" "Ganti's book is a commendable pioneering initiative. It will be useful for students, researchers, and those interested in South Asian film studies."--Sanjukta Dasgupta "American Anthropologist" "In Producing Bollywood, the first truly comprehensive ethnographic account of the Mumbai-based film industry, Tejaswini Ganti crafts an ode to an India in deep transition, via the multifaceted lenses of a glamorized and iconic subsection of its Hindi-language filmmakers and actors. . . . [A] landmark study."--Ritesh Mehta "International Journal of Communication" "Tejaswini Ganti's Producing Bollywood is perhaps the most comprehensive and in-depth account of the Hindi film industry to date...Despite being 440 pages in length, Ganti's accessible writing style makes this ethnography a joy to read." --Harjant S. Gill "Visual Anthropology Review" "The book is rich in anthropological and historical data, theoretically astute, accessible, and great fun to read. It is a must for any