Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry Read Online Free PDF Page A

couple of hours, she replied in a matter-off-act way, “Well, you know those journalists came all the way from Chicago to meet Shiv- ji . ” Thus, within the hierarchy of who is able to gain access to the Bombay film world, being South Asian and from New York defers to being white and from Chicago (or probably anywhere, actually).
    Despite being displaced by white journalists, I was on the whole pretty successful in gaining access to the A-list of the film industry. My access to this elite social world was determined by a number of factors: my own social, class, and national location; my occupational trajectory; and my gender. The ease and rapidity with which I was able to gain access to the elite of the Hindi film industry was a result of contacts emerging from my own social networks as a diasporic South Asian living in New York City. I could not have cultivated these particular networks if I had remained in India. Though my own family in India would be identified as solidly middle class, with every member of my parents’ generation having attended college and mostly pursuing careers in engineering or medicine, being from the southern state of AndhraPradesh and residing mainly in the cities of Calcutta and Hyderabad, the chances of me encountering individuals with close contacts to the Bombay film world, who would facilitate this sort of ethnographic research, would have been very remote.
    My fieldwork was primarily enabled by two main sets of contacts— one set located in the film industry itself and the other located in the larger social world of filmmakers. My preliminary contacts within the film world were two daughters of a Hindi film screenwriter, both of whom I had met when I was living in Philadelphia as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. The younger of the two was a feature writer for the prominent English-language news magazine India Today , who mainly wrote about Hindi films and the film industry. She had a master of journalism degree from Northwestern University, after which she moved to Philadelphia to live with her sister and worked at Harper’s Bazaar in New York. The older sister was then an aspiring director (she’s had several films released since), who had trained at Temple Film School, directing television serials in 1996 and being mentored by a leading Hindi film director. Their mother had been a screenwriter for Hindi films since the mid-’80s. My other main contact was a personal friend from Bombay who I had met in New York, as a result of both of our husbands being faculty in the same department at NYU’s Stern School of Business. She had grown up in Bandra, a northwestern suburb of Bombay, with actors, directors, producers, and screenwriters as neighbors, and had gone to school with some actors as well. Her mother-in-law was actually on the Central Board of Film Certification located in Bombay, one of the ten boards that certifies films for exhibition. Her father-in-law had been an accountant and her brother-in-law a travel agent to some filmmakers.
    It was really through these two clusters of contacts, which included their families and friends, that I made my way through the film industry. In fact, since I had never been to Bombay before, it was only because of these personal contacts that I was able to start meeting members of the film industry as soon as I arrived in Bombay. What I noticed right away was that social networks and kinship determined entry and access at every stage. Film journalists have frequently gone to high school with certain film stars, which is how they are afforded access, or why a particular journalist deals exclusively with a few stars. Being from Bombay, growing up in certain neighborhoods, going to the same schools, or being part of the same club affords an access to the film industry that is not readily available to most Indians from other parts of the country, unless they are part of the social and kin networks of the industry.
    While having my