Notes on Contemporary Film Experience: Bollywood, genre

diversity and video circuits

Ravi Vasudevan

There has been a significant shift in the symbolic position

of the cinema in the Indian government’s imagination of

industry, if not of culture. For half a century, the film

industry had sought recognition as an industry like any

other, a recognition which would provide it with benefits and

exemptions, as in reduced costs of raw material through

lowering customs and excise duties, and eligibility for loans

from national banks. In 1998, the government provided the

cinema with this recognition, and followed up soon after with

orders that would enable film companies to apply for loans.

In a new, globalized context where a liberalizing India was

alert to new avenues of production and export such

acknowledgement indicated a new outlook. This was best

signaled by Indian investment in information technology as a

major, global phenomenon. Arguably, on these terms, the

cinema had done more than its fair share to attract a more

positive attitude not only by the state but corporate groups

as well. For in these years the film industry had developed a

systematic exploitation of revenue streams. These ranged from

the long-term significance of music rights to returns

emerging from a more contemporary swathe of delivery formats

in television, video and, more recently, mobile telephony.

Not only was film and film-related properties the object of a

more diverse and calibrated understanding of the film

economy; a host of ancillary forms came into view in an

expanding business spectrum, especially in advertising and

fashion, in the repositioning of cinemas in urban malls and

as lynchpin of a new consumer economy, and through the

internet, where website drew upon the fascination with Indian

cinema.i

As is now fairly well established, the widespread and

commonplace usage of the category Bollywood emerged in this

changed situation for the cinema. It is particularly common

in foreign territories such as the USA and UK, where it has

even substantially influenced academic discourse in an

ahistorical way, such that the term is read back in time.

Arguably, the term has acquired a momentum and persistence

that makes any straightforward empirical riposte, or even

expression of a more general cultural unease about its

allegedly foreign provenance inadequate. Indeed, perhaps it

would also be to court chauvinism, as if only those located

in India have a privileged claim to naming the cinema. For

the purposes of this article, and following Ashish

Rajadyaksha, I use the term to designate the contemporary

constellation of business forms that draw on or link with the

cinema to generate revenues both domestically and

internationally.ii My focus in this essay is to address

changes in film culture firstly by attending to the cinematic

dimension of this constellation, and more specifically, the

range of narrative forms which have emerged in its wake. I

have elsewhere analysed the family diaspora movie, the

industry product which in `Bollywood’s’ initial years seemed

to sum up its bid to reap returns from foreign markets, but

here I look at the more diverse field of cinematic production

that has emerged in the wake of industrial transformation.iii

I use the early career of Ram Gopal Verma, a key figure in

industry innovations of the early 2000s, to explore the

emergence of genre diversity. I consider how such new content

relates to or reframes our evolving understanding of

`bollywood’ and film culture today. I conclude with a brief

consideration of the other key feature of contemporary film

experience, the phenomenon of pirate video circulation, and

how this layered character of the contemporary requires new

theorization of a discourse of publicness which exceeds

standard definitions of the public sphere.

The emergence of genre diversity

In Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s account of contemporary cinema, he

argues that a large number of films were never ever intended

to fit the `Bollywood’ label. By this he implies a film’s

ability to address the family and cultivate `family values’;

to inculcate a certain civil discipline; and, perhaps most

important of all, that it provide a platform, launching pad,

window and mise en scene for a wider commodity universe. The

validity of the first criterion, that Bollywood addresses the

family, appears confirmed by the emergence of a counter-

rhetoric in a sector of the Industry. Thus figures such as

Ram Gopal Verma insist that they have nothing to do with

sentimental movies produced by people such as Karan Johar. iv

And arguably, Verma has consciously circumvented conventional

family films from the beginning of his career, starting with

films such as Shiva, (Ram Gopal Varma, 1989) and moving onto

gangster movies and the new genre films associated with his

production company The Factory. The families in gangster

films such as Satya (Ram Gopal Varma, 1998) or Company (Ram

Gopal Varma, 2002) have accommodated themselves to the world

of crime and the possibility of their bread earners’

annihilation; and in others, young people, couples on the

edge, loners, outsiders and single women assume centre stage.

Whether this more diverse content production puts Verma’s

work beyond the pale of Bollywood is another matter, which I

will come back to a little later.

Verma’s productions have since their inception also been

strongly associated with narrativizing city experience, not

only in his gangster movies such as Shiva, Satya, Company and D

(Vishram Sawant, 2005, produced by Ram Gopal Verma), but also

in women-centred narratives. These traverse a variety of

genres, from the popular format of Rangeela/Colour My World (Ram

Gopal Varma, 1995), through to the more focused and

streamlined thriller Ek Hasina Thi/There was a pretty woman…, (Sriram

Raghavan, 2004) and the horror movie Bhoot/Ghost (Ram Gopal

Varma, 2003). In fact, the particular transformation of film

form is well indexed by juxtaposing Rangeela on the one hand,

and Bhoot and Ek Hasina Thi on the other. This counterpoint will

also serve to indicate the way genre itself emerges from the

more omnibus format characteristic of popular cinema.

Rangeela

Rangeela could be considered part of the older popular format.

The film is defined by a number of song and dance sequences,

tends to be `loud’ in its characterization, and is

digressive, highlighting performative and dialogue driven

encounters. Its story revolves around two characters, Mili

(Urmila Matondkar), a hardworking film extra, and Munna,

(Aamir Khan) a streetwise conman or tapori involved in black

market activity, including the sale of cinema tickets. Mili

and Munna grew up together, and it is only when Nimmi comes

to the attention of a major male star, Kamal (Jackie Shroff),

and makes it in the movies, that Munna comes to realize he is

in danger of losing her and that he loves her. Aamir Khan

communicates energy and playfulness in this and other tapori

roles such as Ghulam/The Slave (Vikram Bhatt), elaborating his

repertoire from the sophisticated urbanite to the city’s

`lumpen’ denizens. The point of the performance is the broad

caricatural strokes and a certain vulgar jouissance in the

use of costumes, crotch clutching dance moves and a cock-of-

the-walk confidence. Mili, on the other hand, works with a

more plausible range of realistic effects to evoke a

struggling lower middle class character, and conjures up a

sense of ordinary, hardworking life, as in a scene showing

her involved in sweaty physical exercise on an isolated

stretch of Bombay beach. She could obviously try various ways

of improving her situation and achieving acknowledgement, but

the film introduces the possibilities of self-reflexivity by

making her a film extra with ambitions to succeed as an

actor.

This self-reflexive ambition is announced at the outset of

the film. The ordinary and everyday rhythm of the city is

both gestured to and worked over in the inventive opening

credit and first sequence of the film. City sounds - cars,

motorbikes, film music amplified by loudspeakers – provide

the soundscape for the titles, which also capture the history

of the Bombay cinema through snaps of iconic stars. At the

conclusion of the credits, what we have seen and heard is

retrospectively situated as emerging from the street of the

film’s narrative world: a young woman steps away from a

bioscope, a peep show mechanism of archaic vintage, which in

turn accounts for the slide show of star images we have just

witnessed. This also initiates the narrative thematic of

actor/extra, which, unusually, is quite carefully carried on

in the body of the song sequence. The young woman is Mili,

and we move with her through the syncopated, stop-start,

abrupt tonal shifts of the song Rangeela Re. Different `types’

i For an elaboration of this context, see Ravi Vasudevan, `The Meanings of `Bollywood’, Journal of the Moviing

Image, no. 7, 2008, and `The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema, Ranikhet, Permanent Black,

2010, Chapter X

ii Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ` `The Bollywoodization of Indian cinema: cultural nationalism in a global arena’, in

Inter-Asian Cultural Studies, 4 (1) April 2003, special issue on `Cinema, Culture Industry and Political Societies’, and

republished in Preben Kaarsholm, Cityflicks, Calcutta, Seagull, 2004.

iii Ravi Vasudevan, `Father India and the Emergence of the Global Nation’, Contributions to Indian Sociology,

forthcoming; and The Melodramatic Public, Chapter XI

iv Recently Ram Gopal Varma created a farcical flutter by announcing he was looking forward to KANK because he

loved horror films. Karan takes a deep breath. "I'll speak on this for the last time and then move on. In my opinion Ram

Gopal Varma is one of the finest filmmakers of our country. His Satya, Company and Sarkar make a trilogy of terrific

gangster films.

When he has so much work on hand I wonder why he keeps obsessing with what I do! I know he doesn't respect my work. But

could he please keep quiet about what I do’. From Suibash K. Ghai,`I wll not marry: Karan Johar’,

http://123india.santabanta.com/cinema, consulted on 18 January 2008

compose the scene, some quite recognizable as part of

everyday urban life, such as the uniformed office worker in

pants, white shirt and tie, workers at a construction site,

and young men and women in casuals. But as the song builds we

have a series of interesting cut-aways and new types of body

formation. These include militarized units, women in tartan

carousing in a scene meant to evoke a Scottish countryside

perhaps, and an assembly of taekwondo or judo practitioners.

All of these constitute shifting components of the massified

ornament. There is no irony in any of this, and if there is a

consistent theme, it is the premium being placed on physical

fitness, crucial to Nimmi’s job as extra but also her sense

of self. She is the lead dancer in all these formations, and

is arraigned in a series of large-scale, but thinly populated

spaces, for example a large warehouse, somewhat denuded

streets, and perhaps most striking of all, an empty railway

platform. Here Mili is placed at the forefront of a group of

girls positioned on railway tracks, their hand movement

suggesting an assembly line. The `let’s dance!’ refrain of

the song is here punctuated by a reprise/reply to the

original star/spectator-fan relationship signposted by the

slide show, with Mili imploring that her name acquire fame,

that she not be consigned to anonymity.v Here and elsewhere

the lyrics function in counterpoint to the lightness of

Urmila Matondkar’s presence.

v `Itne chehron mein apne chehre ke pehchaan oh ho pehchaan oh ho, Bade bade naamon mein apna bhi naamonishan oh ho

pehchaan oh ho’

The female protagonist engages a cityscape which seems open

and available to her, though the incursion of a scarred

street tough into the gallery of types causes the free

flowing girl to momentarily flinch. Urmila’s pixie-like looks

suggests a gamine who presents herself unselfconsciously in a

wardrobe of tight fitting clothes. The childlike star appears

natural representative, didi or fond elder sister to a gaggle

of kids and playfully orchestrates them to take on a pile of

commandos who accommodatingly back down and slither away.

Characteristic fantasy inversions of entertainment formats

pace Dyer facilitate the upstaging of military logistics and

state form by a regime of play. Spectators attuned to the

South Asian regional tussles of the 1990s, to culminate in

1998 with India’s explosion of a nuclear device and followed

swiftly thereafter by Pakistan’s riposte, might be quite

relieved to see the dispersal of military force within the

popular assemblage. Topical and prescient too is another

articulation of childhood, presented as a condition targeted

not by parents or teachers or other disciplinary entities but

by the market. A child performs in rap style, complaining of

his being assailed by multiple advertisers and competing

brand names, mentioning Horlicks, Complan, Cadbury and Amul

by name.

Varma has distanced himself now from the film, despite the

fact it was a great success at the time. Presumably this is

due to the fact that the film looks a little dated because it

is so much part of the older song dance format, less

streamlined in its rhythm, a little choppy in its pacing and

cutting of shots. However, it is an index of the rapid

changes of the contemporary period that the film can at once

feel dated and, at the same time quite novel, in that its

collage of images addresses so many of the impulses that

define the present. These include female professional

mobility; intimations of the city as a space of flows and

transformative energies; playful invocations of militarized

cultures and their contest; and, through the segments

involving child performers, a sense of the looming presence

of the market, commodity elaboration and, as the child says,

the tension arising from `choice’. It is even transitional

from the point of view of the city of Bombay. Thus it was

shot in the Central Business District of Belapur, part of the

Navi or New Mumbai, which was designed to take off some of

the weight of business and government transactions in the

main city. The particular empty look to the city scenes that

I have remarked upon is indicative of this transitional

moment in the life of the city, as a not yet occupied city

space provides the stage for the figuration of new energies

and vistas in the cinematic imagination of the city.

I have spent some time going over this opening to indicate

the contrast it offers to Varma’s later, technically

accomplished and narratively streamlined work. This too is

extremely recent, and arises from work undertaken under the

rubric of the Factory, the company Varma set up to generate

new genres and deploy new talent. Perhaps for the first time

in the Bombay film industry this new genre production appears

strongly oriented to reproducing a Hollywood standard in

terms of narrative integration, character-driven, point of

view story-telling, and even, occasionally, the elimination

of the `distractive’ features of song, dance and comedy

sequences. However, one should also note that its reference

point is not only the Hollywood film. David Desser, for

example, has emphasized that South East and East Asian horror

films have been an important resource for contemporary Bombay

genres.vi What is suggestive here is not merely the impacting

of novel global configurations on the local cinema, but the

ways in which such models are crucially related to a

reflection on the very conditions of their emergence. High-

end genre production is critically related to the development

of the new urban vistas, the mall, multiplex and new

lifestyle cultures that are burgeoning forth in sectors of

Indian cities. They are niche-oriented, especially seeking to

capture teenagers and young professionals as audience. Rather

than being domestically oriented in a conventional sense, as

in repeating the earlier format of the cinema as an omnibus

attraction, they often consciously steer clear of such a

model. Ironically, one could argue that the Bollywood family

movie hones closer to the traditional format, not only in

terms of its emphasis on morality and family values, but also

in continuing to offer attractions such as comedy sequences

along with their continued investment in elaborate song and

dance scenes. vii

Bhoot

Two films from the Factory indicate the shift in form. Both

Bhoot, 2003 and Ek Hasina Thi, 2004 feature Urmila Matondkar, the

heroine of Rangeela. Both, however, work with a very definite

sense of the modernized, mediatized, and consumer-driven

city. In Bhoot Vishal (Ajay Devgan) takes a condo in a high

rise Bombay apartment block. Our first view on his wife,

Swati, (Urmila Matondkar) takes place at the very moment that

she is looking upwards, at the extending vertical vista

provided by the high-rise. (Figure 1, Bhoot, Ram Gopal Verma,

2003, Vertical Engagement) Clear orientation of vision, and

of the narrative field, becomes crucial here, quite in

contrast to the dispersed, multi-sited engagements the

heroine of Rangeela has towards her city. As the film proceeds

we will observe that the spatial frame introduced by the high

rise constitutes a form of separation from the city and even

a mode of entrapment. The couple’s entry into the high-rise

requires the negotiation of a surly guard, akin to some kind

of lumpenized boundary entity. The modernist abstraction of

the flat, defined by clean lines, split-level flooring, and

an expansive view, meets with Swati’s approval, but the idyll

of the yuppie couple is swiftly infiltrated. An eerie, off-

balance maid, Kamla Bai (Seema Biswas) arrives, seeking

employment. None of this seems to unsettle the couple, and

later, as they make love in the stair well, we experience a

rhythm of discontinuous perception. As the light from the TV

screen reflects off the lovers’ bodies, shifts in time are

vi `Gloablization across Asia’, Paper presented at `Globalism and Film History: A Conference’, Insitute of

Humanities, University of Illinois at Chicago, April 2006

vii As I have suggested, though it keeps to the overall parameters ofthe melodramatic mode, even the `Bollywood’ family movie has exhibited acertain dynamic. See `Father India and the emergence of the global nation’ above

relayed to us by a montage of abrupt sound transitions in the

television news programme. Having separated themselves from

the world in the apparent security of the high-rise, the

world is now available in televised format. The initial sense

of foreboding is augmented by unmotivated camera placements

characteristic of horror films. Finally, we are given

narrative `pay-off’ when the camera turns from Swati, making

her way up the stairs after a drink of water, to catch the

image of an apparently malevolent female spirit who looks at

her receding figure.

The abstraction of the couple from the city sets the terms

for a narrative involution. If the mid 1990s Rangeela

presented a city and a woman character on the cusp of new

forms of experience and modes of engagement, these new films

capture a substantially altered vista and subjectivity. The

narrative carries us away from the city into an apparently

desirable isolation. But this freestanding vector of

experience has already developed a history, one of previous

occupants, their violent deaths and traumatic spirit

activity. The `return of the repressed’ scenario is

suggestive, as if addressing the perils of the urban form so

rapidly re-fashioned in the last decade, and subjecting it to

a narrative probing and a disinterring of buried histories.

Varma’s film seems to participate in a particular circuit of

horror films here, originating in Japan, as in films such as

Dark Water, (Hideo Nakata 2001) and resonating with them

rather than their Hollywood versions (whatever the source of

his inspiration). The resonance lies specifically in this

itinerary of dying cities or new cities that are already

shrouded in death and a history of violence.

Ek Hasina Thi

This was not just a one-off effort, and was carried in a

different direction in Ek Hasina Thi, directed by Sriram

Raghavan for Verma productions and the Factory. If Bhoot was

centred on the high-rise condominium, then Ek Hasina Thi takes

us in the direction of the `bhk’, the bedroom-hall-kitchen

dwelling associated with young single professionals. Contra

the collage effects of Rangeela, EHT’s city has a realist

veneer, if one cleaned up and shot through with a certain

idealized rendering of modernized office, market and

residential dwellings. Its protagonist, Sarika Vartak,

(Matondkar) is a modest employee in a travel agency, whose

everyday life is composed of traveling to work by an

autorickshaw, shopping in grocery stores retailing the

modernized end of consumer choices, and returning in the

evening to her tiny but well managed bhk. (Figures 2-4, Ek

Hasina Thi, Sriram Raghavan, 2004, Sarika’s Life) Sarika’s

parents are a lower middle class couple who live in a smaller

town, and she navigates the normal irritants of single living

for a woman, especially intrusive male neighbours. The film

operates a fairly rigorous narrative economy, with no

performance sequences distracting our attention from the

story of how the girl’s innocent desire for the attractions

of a dashing Karan Rathore (Saif Ali Khan) leads to her

manipulation, framing and incarceration. This dark story

converts into one of a character discovering unknown

resources to turn the tables on her oppressor. However, the

new life style is realistically evoked and suggests a more

adventurous, sexually curious engagement with the city by the

film’s woman protagonist. Romance, noir and female revenge

stories converge in a narrative amalgam which, novel as it is

for Indian film circumstances, may appear somewhat

predictable to Euro-American audiences used to melodramas of

plot reversal of the Sydney Sheldon type and elements of the

`erotic thriller’.viii For this reason, this new genre cinema

may be generating a very specific and contextual engagement

with new urban conditions in Indian metropolises. Ironically

enough, in films such as Bhoot and EHT, this cinema reflects

in its diegetic space the very conditions that have produced

it: the cleaning up of residential areas and the generation

of new consumer experiences, of which the mall multiplex is a

prime example. But the reflection hardly comforts the newly

mobilized spectator of these films, generating an uncanny

sense of the layered histories, and the danger, which

surround these new forms.

Beyond or Within Bollywood?

At this point, it is tempting to argue that the high-end

family film, with its emphasis on production values, fashion

design, marketing and advertising campaigns, and its

generation of virtual diegetic spaces – varying between a no-

place space of the metropolitan universal, or the

viii Linda Ruth Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2005,

for a diagnosis of a current in present day cinema which is strongly related to direct-to-home broadcasting and the dvd

market.

bombastically scaled interiors of the traditional household –

is part of what Rajadhyaksha has called the anti-cinematic

dimensions of contemporary Bollywood as commodity

constellation. In this logic, its primary function is to

provide a launching pad, mise en scene and seductive allure

to mobilize the spectator into a wider spectrum of consumer

desire. Above all, this cinema is subject to corporate

investment, regulation and diversified investment profiles in

an entirely novel way. But where does that place the new

genre cinema? I believe we should problematise the opposition

produced within industrial discourse. Here we will observe

that Verma’s Factory, the diaspora film’s self-proclaimed

other, is shot through with Bollywood corporate and commodity

form. In 2003, the Factory struck an extensive deal with

Sahara Manoranjan, a major corporate firm, to produce ten

films under contract.ix The film company’s budget, product

plans, technical hiring and casting were organized by the

ix From the promotional introduction to the Sahara One website: ` The Indian Movie Industry is on the threshold of

a revolution with a major shift in the business model – financing, production, distribution and audiences to corporates

(sic). Sahara One Motion Pictures… is in the business of producing, marketing and distributing feature films. We have

produced 35 films in various genres – comedy, action, thriller, romance, animation etc. since inception in 2004. Award

winning directors like Madhur Bandharkar, Shyam Benegal, Nagesh Kukunoor and commercially acclaimed directors like Ram Gopal

Varma, Boney Kapoor, Priyadarshan, Anees Bazmi, Neeraj Vohra has been on our panel.

The Company has won 5 National Awards – The Prestigious recognition in Indian Cinema for Shyam Benegal’s Bose –

the Forgotten Hero and Madhur Bandkharkar’s Page 3’ http://www.sahara-one.com/somp.htm consulted on 25 October 2007 This

blurb captures a mix of the motives in current industry speak, including corporate culture, but also a gesture to the world

of the arts, still distinguished from that of commerce. Pritish Nandy Communications, which has become known for Bombay

English films, also supported those associated with the art cinema world such as Sudhir Mishra in Hazaaron Khwaishen Aisi

and Chameli. Here too the possibility of generating artistic excellence within a commercial model is emphasized in the

company’s promotional discourse: ` Even though it functions clearly in the domain of commercial cinema, its films have won

some of the highest awards in the world. It is also the first production house to make global co-poroductions and use

international crew to make Indian films.’ http://www.pritishnandycom.com/pnc-moviezone.html consulted on 25 October 2007

firm K Sara Sara, originally started by non-resident Indians

based in Hongkong and New York. As Verma put it at the time:

These NRIs are interested in putting money in idea-based

film projects. Projects where every component, including the

budget and cast, is determined by the plot rather than the

other way around. These three NRIs -- from Hong Kong and New

York -- function according to the same corporate discipline

that I believe in. So we are having a new love affair with

films." x

K Sara Sara in turn had a deal with Cinemaya Media to

facilitate distribution of Factory films in the United

States. Varma’s EHT was co-financed by 20th Century Fox.xi And,

as for entanglement with product placement and the wider

commodity imagination, Varma’s Road prominently featured a

Tata Safari as part of a promotional deal with the automobile

company in its bid to cultivate public interest in the new

sports utility vehicle (suv).xii Priya Village Roadshow, the

major player in the contemporary transformation of cinema

spaces into multiplex cum malls, also had an agreement with K

x Subhash K. Jha, `Ramu’s K Sera Sera’,

http://www.rediff.com/movies/2003/jan/21news.htm Varma and K Sera Sera

parted ways in 2006. `I’ve parted ways with K Sera Sera But I’m Not Bankrupt: Varma’, August 26 2006,

http://news.webindia123.com/news/Articles/Entertainment/20060826/433276.html, consulted 17 January 2008

Sara Sara and Varma Productions to undertake distribution of

Factory films for its multiplex network.xiii Clearly, in terms

of industrial form, commodity enterprise and contemporary

niche marketing, the Varma output is as much part of

corporatization as any diaspora-oriented film. And, while

consciously marketing a different type of product from the

output of a Karan Johar or Aditya Chopra, his films aim to

crossover into foreign theatrical distribution as well. Here,

the self-proclaimed design is to show that Indian films have

greater variety than what has been on offer so far, even

while they maintain a distinctive worldview and story telling

style.

xi This was scheduled to be the first of a three-part deal, but was finally the only film made due to Fox’s

differences with Varma. For an account of Hollywood collaborations with Bombay film, see `A Passage to India: Par curries

favour Bollywood, Variety website, 22 March 2006,

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117940214.html?categoryid=13&cs=1, consulted 20 December 2007

xii The product placement deal also facilitated `cross promotional publicity’, giving Varma access to commodity-

advertising slots and Tata association with the glamour of the cinema world. `Tata Engineering takes the Road less

travelled’, Business Standard 21 September 2002, featured on the Indica/Tata motors website,

http://www.indica.co.za/tata_motors/media/20020921.htm, consulted

18 January 2008

xiii PVR Pictures in joint venture with Factory `Delhi-based Priya Village Roadshow (PVR) Pictures has entered into a

joint venture with Verma Corporation Ltd and K Sera Sera's production company, Factory. ..The new venture, called PVR /

Factory, will have exclusive distribution rights in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Uttaranchal for the upcoming films of Factory.

Factory will produce and release nine movies in the next 18 months. The new company will also distribute films of other

producers as well.

The three companies will have a profit-sharing relationship between them on the distribution of a list of films such as Ab

Tak Chappan, Murder at 2 o'clock, Vishnu Prasad Gayab Ho Gaya, Darna Zaroori Hai, James, Vastu Shastra, Naach, Time Machine

and D.’

http://www.domain-b.com/marketing/general/2004/20040227_marketing_review.html Marketing Review 27 Feburary 2004, consulted on 25 October 2007

The irony is that financiers and corporate groups with

shadowy histories have undertaken many of the crucial moves

here.xiv The porousness between corporate firms, apparently

defined by transparent financial protocols and audit, and a

world of illicit deals suggest the complications concealed by

contemporary discourses of financial probity and industrial

regularity. This rather more complicated picture suggests how

practices opposed at the level of product output and public

self-presentation may in fact overlap at the level of

corporate practice, including perhaps the shadowy other side

of corporate probity. Further, research into the contemporary

industry indicates that many production practices have not

altered, including the notional function of a finished

script.xv However, there are other points at which the

distinctions made by industrial players also signal

significant changes Here, Varma’s enterprise appears to have

opened up a different network of industrial access than those

controlled by filmmaking dynasties, their families, business

partners, hangers-on and protégés. The audaciously named

Factory appears to fly in the face of the cultural prestige

and singularity of dynastic capital. Gesturing in its name to

xiv Thus Sahara India limited, a corporate firm which has been crucial to these recent developments, and a major

financial player and mediator in the political world, as for example its role in the development council of Uttar Pradesh,

India’s most populous state with the highest representation of parliamentary seats, had had an earlier controversial history

in public chit funds, popular investment forms which were used to finance large ventures. Bharat Shah, the diamond merchant

who financed a number of major Hindi film successes at the cusp of the millennium, was arrested for his links with the

underworld, and is still under investigation. In another context, T series, the major corporate firm of the contemporary

music industry, owed much of its success to an earlier history illicitly manufacturing and distributing music cassettes

xv This refers to ongoing work conducted by Ankur Khanna for the Sarai programme, in interviews with new industry

practitioners such as script writer/director Jaideep Sahni. See also Khanna’s `The Censor Script Writer, in `Complicating

the City’, Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts , 264-268

a high turnover of product and serial manufacture, as well as

a relentless will to product differentiation, the Factory has

also been the harbinger of a sense of possibility for new

entrants in the industry.

In turn we may observe how a systematic elaboration of financial

strategies and revenue streams cut across different types of

film-making practice. While corporate groups such as UTV and

Pritish Nandy Communication have supported off-beat ventures and

the new English language Bombay cinema, small players too have

initiated film projects on a mix of personal finance, bank loans,

state film finance and independent financiers. These include film

institute graduates, modest theatre professionals who bring with

them a new investment in scripts and performance, as well as

media professionals of different types. As with the high-end

players, a crucial exhibition site is the multiplex: for them,

not because of a context in which expensive tickets are part of

an escalating consumer imaginary, but because of niche marketing,

which may capture audiences which the rundown cinemas with poor

maintenance, low financial resources and reliant on cheap rentals

and reruns are unable to provide.xvi Further, the question of an

elaborate regime of rights provide the basis for multiple revenue

streams, involving music, DVD, satellite premiere and broadcast

rights, and video-on-demand. Here, the foreign market is

important to film-makers across the board. While the

proliferation of box office evaluations in websites and trade

xvi This argument draws on work in progress by Debashree Mukherjee, a research associate with the Sarai programme,

who has conducted extensive field work and participant observation in tracking a small budget independent film venture from

conception through finance and shooting. See for example her entry in `Complicating the City’, Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts,

259-260, 261-262

papers needs to be treated with great caution, we will notice

much of the genre cinema I have referred to getting foreign

distribution. While their performance might be modest in

comparison to the spectacular hits such as Hum Aapke Ke Hain Kaun,

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, or Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna,

these returns matter given the differential in ticket costs and

exchange rates. Further, the DVD and video-on- demand side of the

market is not estimated in these accounts. As early as 2003, the

trade magazine Screen noted the conflict between producers and

distributors over the timing of the video release of a film. This

obviously related to the losses producers would sustain if the

sale of video rights, especially in foreign markets, was stalled

to extend theatrical runs. The paper reported that this was also

crucial for small and medium budget films.xvii The moves of key

players such as Eros International in this sphere has involved

tie ups with significant VOD companies catering to markets in

Hollywood and the Asia Pacific region, and facilitated access to

new audiences, even within the diaspora. xviii

Cinema and Film after the proliferation of copy culture

Arguably, rather than look at the formal circuits of film culture

to gauge key contests and differences in film cultures and

publics, we need to look at new forms of experience emerging from

the global video and tv networks for film circulation. These

include pirate economies which, despite the development of

substantial legislation, legal apparatuses and policing to

xvii Screen, 23 May 2003

xviii http://www.erosplc.com/eros/news/ for details of deals with cable companies in

the USA and the UK, consulted 19 January 2008

protect intellectual property right, continue to flourish and are

a crucial component of everyday film consumption. They rest

alongside the differentiated circuits of the cinema, ranging from

the continued presence of degraded cinema sites for reruns in

plebeian neighbourhoods, and the formation of a mall-multiplex

culture. This new phenomenon seeks to braid the spectator into a

network of branded consumer culture characteristic of the

contemporary, multinational-driven constellation of the commodity

world. However, as we have observed, in the Indian context these

also offered avenues for the exhibition of a much more

differentiated range of output and thereby a new lease of life

for cinema as a public form. The pirate circuit, accessible in

neighbourhood markets, appears, at first glance, to be in direct

competition with the mall-multiplex, as along with media hardware

and software, customers can buy electronic goods, clothing,

footwear and other merchandise which closely follow the movements

in fashion and design generated in the branded economy. However,

is the parallel video circuit in competition with cinema, and

does it pose the cinema its gravest challenge, as the film

industry claims? What theoretical problems does this pirate

economy pose for a socially and politically embedded theory and

history of the cinema, and of cinema publics?

The pirate economy provides an alternate picture of globalization

from that provided by the spectacular end of the economy.

Inhabiting an overlapping imaginary and circuit of desire, it

constructs a distinct sphere, defined by access to copies of goods,

images, and sounds. Further, it emphasizes not only access to

content, but to the very technologies of listening and viewing,

as in the case of cheap cassette, cd and vcd players, the

everyday presence of the cable operator, and softwares for

copying and downloading film and music content. Along with the

broader availability of technologies of communication in

neighbourhood call offices and internet cafes, and the

proliferation of mobile telephones in popular work cultures,

there is a strong sense here of unprecedented technological

presence in the everyday life of ordinary consumers.

We are dealing here with a culture of the copy which is

distinctive from earlier histories of the copy in regimes of

mechanical reproduction. Walter Benjamin was dealing with a

rather different constellation than the one we are confronted

with. Benjamin looked to the copy as disrupting the aura and

sacred status of the authentic and irreproducible image, whether

that engendered through ritual forms or cultures of art, and he

saw this shift facilitating possibilities of access that would

transform political and social conditions, and bring the mass as

subject into history.xix Here, the mechanically reproducible

object, such as film, is itself subject to a second order copy

that moves it from physical into immaterial object, cheap both in

terms of copying costs but also in terms of substituting

digitized delivery for the infrastructurally elaborate and

expensive transportation of the film print.

The public congregational dimensions of the cinema have been

displaced in this enactment, as have viewing circumstances that

xix Walter Benjamin, `The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, translated by H.

Zohn, edited and introduced by Hanna Arendt, New York, Shocken, 1969

invite immersion in the screen. This circuit of film viewing

takes place at home or in the slum settlement, is subject to the

distractions of domestic circumstances and ambient noise, and the

interruptions of advertising that are more generally the

condition of the domestic apparatus of television. While the

possibilities of access were initially bought at the cost of the

degradation of, to use a neologism, the original copy, much

higher quality pirated copies are now commonly available.xx

Nevertheless, the film copy, circulating outside the standard

formats of public congregation presents us with a somewhat

ambiguous version for the contemporary of Benjamin’s reflections

on the copy. It would be problematic to consider such

transformations in the sphere of media access as `resistance’.

However, in its very existence as technology and circuit for the

movement and consumption of cheap commodities, the digital video

exposes the limits, problems and fears of the dominant

institutional format and its modes of profit-making. And it also

engenders ways of rethinking the functions and possibilities of

new technologies of sound and image.

I offer some very tentative suggestions about these here,

deriving from the relationship of old and new forms of film

experience to the culture of the copy. Earlier histories of

xx Sarai research into the culture of the copy, its technologies, modes of circulation and its involvement in

contests over intellectual property has laid out this new terrain of research. Eg the following work, all from media

researchers@sarai., `Complicating the City’, in Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts, Delhi, CSDS, 2005: Bhagwati

Prasad, `Culture of the copy: publics and music’, [Commons-Law list] 271-273; Khadeeja Arif, `Pop In’, 273-274, for costs

of copying, and changes in organization of copy cultures. For indicators about the copying network, Anand Taneja, `My

friendly neighbourhood video pirate’, 275-276. For the movement in property forms and the legal contests involved, Lawrence

Liang, `Porous Legalities and Avenues of Participation, Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts, 6-17; and Ravi Sundaram, `Uncanny

Networks: Pirate, Urban and New Globalisation’, Economic and Political Weekly 39 (1), January 3 2004, 64-71.

global connections in popular culture have signposted the

importance of the version and the copy in the attractions offered

by cinema. Dubbed cinema and local film versions suggest

something of the porosity facilitated by the movement of the

cinema, and how it unsettled local cultural conventions,

hierarchies and genres, as in the case of the action and stunt

film.xxi The relationship between spectator and star indicates

another very specific and important instance in the culture of

the copy. SV Srinivas has written extensively on the relationship

between fan and star, in tracking the obsessive circuits of fan

engagement, including the aggressive protection of star image and

status in contests between fan clubs. Of paramount significance

is the desire of the fan to freeze the heroic image of the star,

trying to prevent the alteration of screen roles from a normative

cluster, as if wanting to fix and give back a stable aura to his

persona.xxii

If this is an instance of the bid to assert the uniqueness of the

persona, on the other hand, there is the apparently commonplace

issue of star imitations, featuring mimics of stars from Dev

Anand down to Shah Rukh Khan, often in parodic ways. There are

now however instances of an emergent anxiety about the status and

integrity of the star image. As Lawrence Liang has shown, this

anxiety derives from the way intellectual property discourses

have penetrated a series of new cultural spaces and offered new

xxi See for example SV Srinivas, `Hongkong Action Film in the Indian B Circuit’, Inter Asia Cultural Studies, 4 (1)

April 2003, 40-62, on Jackie Chan films and their circulation in Andhra; and Rosie Thomas’s work on Fearless Nadia, the

Greek Australian stunt actress Fearless Nadia.

xxii SV Srinivas, `Devotion and Defiance in Fan Activity’, in Vasudevan, Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, Delhi,

Oxford University Press, 2000

ways of thinking about profit realization. The major Tamil

matinee idol, Rajanikant, insisted that he would prosecute

imitators who sought to draw upon his medley of mannerisms in

their imitations. He sought to `patent’ the image. It has been

argued that the unprecedented anxiety of the star involved

circumstances where his image had gained increased global

circulation (his film Muthu had been a surprise hit in Japan). If

there was an enhancement of the value of his image in the

potential reach of its cinematic circulation, a different type of

value accrued in terms of his much-anticipated move into the

political sphere. xxiii

There is obviously a fine line being negotiated here, addressing

the possibilities of the `original’ not only being subverted but

perhaps even being upstaged by the copy. Intimations of the

uncanny and the allegorical may emerge in the act not only of

copying and degrading but exceeding the original. I would like to

turn back to the new media constellation of film to carry on this

reflection. The question of the illicit copy gains a particular

charge because of the simultaneous release and exhibition of

celluloid `original’ and digital copy. Here let us think about

the temporal linkages between the movement of the theatrical film

and the video copy. The main threat to the theatrical property is

the simultaneous release of the video through cable broadcast and

in video markets. To extend our analogy of the copy, we can see

the cinema as event – the point of the first release, a critical

moment for its gathering of audiences and actualization of the

value of novelty – being split into theatrical and domesticxxiii Lawrence Liang, `Conceptualizing Law and Culture’ Seminar525, May 2003

viewing situations. (The latter term is used loosely, for it is

common to use video copies for collective viewing situations,

whether this is inside or outside the home. This requires the

binary of cinema theatre vs home viewing to be reconsidered.).

The position of the cinema spectator is as it were copied and

distributed from its legal locale into a host of dispersed and

unregulated spaces. Public congregation gives way to the order of

a public dispersed in space but unified by the time of cable

relay.

The question of the simultaneous availability of the copy makes

time critical to the movement of the film commodity. This has

been realized in the production sector, where there is an anxiety

to disburse video rights at the same time as theatrical rights,

in the knowledge that the theatrical life is limited, and that

the profits to be had from video sales will diminish in the wake

of the pirated copy’s release. Trade information in fact suggests

that the production sector may even be complicit with the release

of pirate videos to get around this problem.xxiv Legal initiatives

also suggest the importance of timing; with production companies

now regularly anticipating pirate cable relays by seeking

injunctions against the major cable network suppliers. A cast in

point was the application for an injunction by Mirabai Films Pvt.

Ltd against the Hathway Cable Network to prevent the screening of

Monsoon Wedding. xxv

Global and regional circuits of film copying and digital

transmission inundate the unofficial market, challenge the

theatrical trade and reconstellate publics, copying and

dispersing viewing from its desired temporal sequence into a

simultaneity produced through a new regime of technological relay

and access. Difficult to monitor or regulate, the challenge of

the elaborate networks of copy culture threaten to upstage the

cinema’s integrity. Industrial strategies have sought to mobilize

video itself to undercut the sway of illicit networks by

reformatting cinema theatres in the B circuit for projection of

digitized video.xxvi The effectiveness of this strategy is yet to

be gauged. But what is surprising in the wake of these

transformations is the continued significance of cinema as a

public form. This is observable not only in the niche marketing

of the multiplex cinema, but also in the continued hold of B

theatres retailing reruns and cheaper productions. Further, even

the informal networks of video circulation acquire audience

congregative functions. Thus, small, informally run video

theatres cater to slum clusters and marginal urban spaces outside

the official grid of cinema theatres. xxvii

Perhaps we can get a grasp of these transformations and their

significance by moving to another locale, one which has

xxiv Such a view was often voiced in Sarai researchers informal interviews with film industry people and detective

agencies.

xxv Hathway Cable & Datacom Pvt. Ltd. And ANR. Vs Mirabai Films Pvt. Ltd. Supreme Court SLP © No. 14566 of 2003,

posted by Jawahar Raja for Sari Media City Project. The research of Jawahar Raja, a lawyer and Sarai research associate has

drawn out the importance of the injunction in the bid by film distribution companies to stop the simultaneous cable relay of

films.

xxvi Digital Cinema News: Digital Film Projection, Good and Bad News’, The Hindu, 7 February 2005, posted by Ankur

Khanna for the Sarai media city project.

xxvii Madhavi Tangella, `Sagar Cinema: a Poor Man’s Multiplex’, Sarai Independent Fellowship project 2005, postings

available on Sarai Reader List. See also Working Questions: the Sarai-CSDS Fellowship Programme 2002-2007, edited by Debjani

Sengupta and Vivek Narayan, Delhi, CSDS, 2007

historically lacked substantial film production. Brian Larkin’s

research into the Hausa community of Northern Nigeria highlights

the importance of copy and version cultures in the emergence of

the powerful video film industry that has developed in the area.

In a country lacking its own (celluloid) film industry, the main

object of film consumption was Indian popular cinema rather than

American films. While Indian films were not dubbed, in Larkin’s

account they appeared more readily accessible to local audiences

in terms of stories that addressed the dilemmas experienced by

modernizing societies, and also in the emotionality of their

portraiture of characters and situations. A local argot developed

around this cinema, with popular stars being given local names

conveying their particular appeal to audiences, and reiterating

the importance of the version in a global history of the cinema.

Larkin’s exploration of Bandiri music indicates the complex, and

ambiguous, terms of a culture of the copy and the version.

Equally suggestive is the new media context of film culture that

characterizes the contemporary situation in Nigeria. As

elsewhere, networks of illicit video copying and distribution

have developed, challenging cinema exhibition. What is

fascinating is the emergence of a legal video film culture on the

ground of these illicit networks. For the first time, substantial

local production of feature length films has emerged, avidly

consumed not only in households but also in video theatres.

Characteristic narratives include parables about modernity, its

dilemmas and pressures, but include the mobilization of cultures

of magic and witchcraft to resolve conflicts and problems. Here

the local vividly raises its head as narrative traditions and,

perhaps, allegorizing impulse. xxviii

Similar currents are now observable in India. Thus, work on

Mumbai, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Manipur, indicating perhaps

just the tip of the iceberg, point to a developing production of

digital films, largely drawing upon local resources and

circulated by video compact disks for local audiences.

Interestingly, such circuits are not always completely

distinctive from those of the larger film industry. In some

instances, field research has shown that actors and film

technicians are caught in the circuit between Bombay and the new

local set-ups, ever looking for the possibility of moving to the

industry. Nevertheless, these currents have their distinctive

engagement with their specific markets and audiences, and point

to the complex entanglement of cinema and cheap digital forms in

the remapping of film publics.xxix

These new energies, centred on the culture of the copy and new

production and consumption patterns has thus provided for a

renewal of the cinema in a host of avatars. They also complicate

existing formulations about the concept of the public. For too

long there has been a tendency to hold onto the idea that the

Habermasian public sphere has a conceptual power to capture the

full dynamics of discourses, discussions and practices which

xxviii Brian Larkin, `Bollywood Comes to Nigeria’, Samar 8, Winter/Spring 1997, and

http://www.samarmagazine.org/archive/article.php?id=21, consulted

18 September 2008;`Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy’, Public Culture, 16

(2), 289-314, Fall 2004

xxix A number of Sarai independent fellows have been working on this reconfiguration of film cultures. Daljit Ami,

`Celluloid and Compact Disks in Punjab’, 2006; Anil Pandey, `Desi Filmon Ka Karobar’, on Meerut, 2006; Ranjan Yumnam,

`Imphalwood: the Digital Revolution in Manipur’, 2006. For their postings, see Sarai Reader List, and for summaries of

Pandey and Yumnam’s work, Working Questions: the Sarai-CSDS Fellowship Programme 2002-2007.

function in a relationship of critical reason to frameworks of

power and authority, and of inclusion and exclusion in the sphere

of rights and citizenship. Despite bids to expand the terms of

the public sphere to encompass lives and cognitive forms

neglected in its original formulation, for example to women and

working class people, social and sexual minorities, such

exercises fail to contend with the body of practices, cognitive

fields and perceptual engagements which fall outside the ken of

rational-critical discourse. xxx These include not only discourses

which fail to abide by the modes of reason required to

participate in discussion in the public sphere, but also

practices which may exceed the legal, normative and even ethical

frameworks legitimated by a critically oriented public sphere.

One of these practices is surely the media sphere driven by the

culture of the illegal copy, of the illegal internet download,

and of the variety of spaces, including video markets, internet

cafes and the neighbourhood cable operation room through which

these cultural practices have developed.

Both in terms of contents and technologies, this media sphere

exceeds laws, conventions, and the possibilities of regulation,

so cheap and portable is the equipment involved. Even before the

contemporary dynamics opened up by digital technologies, the

cinema, based as it was on a regime of mechanical reproduction,

was implicated in a longer history of contests over the copy,

starting from the earliest period.xxxi At this time equipment and

film content circulated without hinder of property regulations,

xxx For a revision of the original public sphere idea, see Craig Calhoun edited, Haberman and the Public Sphere,

Cambridge, MIT Press, 1993

and it was in the second decade of the cinema’s existence that

patent and copyright law was deployed to regulate the trade.

Apart from these legal issues, early cinema in most countries was

subject to deeply ambivalent public attitudes to film’s status as

an art, an intellectual skepticism and moral criticism that was

fuelled by perceptions that this new entertainment form was given

to parasitism, cheap imitations, and that its practitioners

lacked aesthetic discernment in what they put together.

Addressing these features, Miriam Hansen argued for the idea of

an industrial commercial public sphere, given to hybridity,

indiscriminate assembly of contents from `traditional’ and

`modern’ forms, and a porous relationship to other entertainments

in dance and music halls, popular theatre and radio. This

conceptual move sought to replenish and extend public sphere

theory. This was primarily by showing that rather than flatten

audience engagement into one uniform aesthetic and perceptual

relationship, as was to be argued of the classical phase of

Hollywood cinema, the cinema in fact generated the vernacular

forms of engagement that could draw on a diversity of audiences

and audience dispositions. She argued that this was especially

notable in the cinema’s cultivation of a distinct tactile

involvement of audiences through its body genres, speech codes,

performance conventions, and the rhythms of perceptual

engagement. xxxii

xxxi Eg Andre Gaudreault, `The Infringement of Copyright Laws and Its Effects (1900-1906)’, Framework no. 29, 1985;

also Jane Gaines, Contested Cultures: the Image, the Voice and the Law, University of North Carolina Press, 1991

While Hansen, drawing on Alexander Kluge, went on work with the

idea of an alternative public sphere, her observations about

cinema as an industrial commercial public sphere appears to me to

be productive, and perhaps signals the limits of public sphere

theory. For this is a publicness which is not constituted by

reasoned discourse but rather by body, rhythm, ethnic

distinction, including typage, and the sheer diversity of

audience presence. It is cinema as a technology of mass

exhibition, public circulation and public access which provides

these possibilities, and with an unprecedented potentiality in

terms of the extent and inclusiveness of public engagement. As of

now, and perhaps in a more diversified set of formats than in the

past, the post-digital cinema reiterates this function, if

through very different modes of distribution and delivery. In

this framing, the public sphere remains relevant as a category,

but now acknowledged as inadequate to comprehensively engage the

range of public forms available to us both historically and in

the contemporary world. It is in fact part of a much wider

engagement, in which issues of public access and public practice

acquire greater significance, practices which include contests

over property rights. The possibilities that have opened up here

impact not only the conditions of film circulation and reception,

but also herald new dynamics in the field of film and media

production and creativity.

xxxii Miriam Hansen, `The Mass Production of the Senses’, in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams edited Reinventing

Film Studies, London, Edward Arnold, 2000; and ` Falling Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film as

Vernacular Modernism’ Film Quarterly 54 (1), Autumn 2000, 10-22. For summary of this argument, see above, Chapter One. On

the question of the industrial-commercial public sphere and alternative public sphere, Hansen, Babel and Babylon:

Spectatorship in American Silent Film, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1991, 10-11

References:

Books and ArticlesKhadeeja Arif, `Pop In’, Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts, Delhi, CSDS, 2005, 273-274Craig Calhoun edited, Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1993Jane Gaines, Contested Cultures: the Image, the Voice and the Law, University of North Carolina Press, 1991Andre Gaudreault, `The Infringement of Copyright Laws and Its Effects (1900-1906)’, Framework no. 29, 1985Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1991, 10-11`The Mass Production of the Senses’, in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams edited Reinventing Film Studies, London, Edward Arnold, 2000` Falling Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Filmas Vernacular Modernism’ Film Quarterly 54 (1), Autumn 2000, 10-22Ankur Khanna, `The Censor Script Writer, in `Complicating the City’, Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts , 264-268Media Researchers @ Sarai, `Complicating the City’, Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts, 259-260, 261-262Brian Larkin, `Bollywood Comes to Nigeria’, Samar 8, Winter/Spring 1997, and http://www.samarmagazine.org/archive/article.php?id=21, consulted 18 September 2008‘Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy’, Public Culture, 16 (2), 289-314, Fall 2004Lawrence Liang, `Porous Legalities and Avenues of Participation, Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts, 6-17Lawrence Liang, `Conceptualizing Law and Culture’ Seminar 525, May 2003Bhagwati Prasad, `Culture of the copy: publics and music’, Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts, 271-273SV Srinivas, `Devotion and Defiance in Fan Activity’, in Ravi Vasudevan, Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2000SV Srinivas, `Hongkong Action Film in the Indian B Circuit’, Inter Asia Cultural Studies, 4 (1) April 2003, 40-62Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ` `The Bollywoodization of Indian cinema: cultural nationalism in a global arena’, in Inter-Asian Cultural

Studies, 4 (1) April 2003, special issue on `Cinema, Culture Industry and Political Societies’, and republished in Preben Kaarsholm, Cityflicks, Calcutta, Seagull, 2004.Debjani Sengupta and Vivek Narayan, Working Questions: the Sarai-CSDS Fellowship Programme 2002-2007, Delhi, CSDS, 2007Ravi Sundaram, `Uncanny Networks: Pirate, Urban and New Globalisation’, Economic and Political Weekly 39 (1), January 3 2004, 64-71. Anand Taneja, `My friendly neighbourhood video pirate’, Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts , 275-276Ravi Vasudevan, `The Meanings of `Bollywood’, Journal of the Moviing Image, no. 7, 2008, and The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema, Ranikhet, Permanent Black, 2010, Chapter XRavi Vasudevan, `Father India and the Emergence of the Global Nation’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, forthcoming; and The Melodramatic Public, Chapter XILinda Ruth Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2005

Periodicals and websites

Screen, Indian Express Publicationshttp://123india.santabanta.com/cinemhttp://www.pritishnandycom.comhttp://www.sahara-one.comhttp://news.webindia123.comhttp://www.variety.comhttp://www.indica.co.za/tata_motors/media/20020921.htmhttp://www.domain-b.com/marketingHathway Cable & Datacom Pvt. Ltd. And ANR. Vs Mirabai Films Pvt. Ltd. Supreme Court SLP © No. 14566 of 2003, posted by Jawahar Raja for Sari Media City ProjectGloablization across Asia’, Paper presented at `Globalism and Film History: A Conference’, Insitute of Humanities, University of Illinois at Chicago, April 2006Online postingsDaljit Ami, `Celluloid and Compact Disks in Punjab’, Sarai ReaderList, 2006Anil Pandey, `Desi Filmon Ka Karobar’, on Meerut, Sarai Reader List, 2006

Madhavi Tangella, `Sagar Cinema: a Poor Man’s Multiplex’, Sarai Reader List, 2006Ranjan Yumnam, `Imphalwood: the Digital Revolution in Manipur’, Sarai Reader List, 2005