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

initial contacts paved the way for my research, the key to my sustained and continued access to this world is my position as a scholar in the American academy. During my early fieldwork I was able to meet a large number of people because I was carrying out academic research and receiving a PhD for ostensibly studying about films and filmmakers. People always asked in a slightly incredulous tone: “You mean you can get a PhD in this in America? ” For a form of popular culture that had always been criticized as vulgar and low-brow by the English-language press and English-speaking elites, and for a social group whose dominant image was that of being uncouth, uneducated, and unintelligent, being the object of an academic researcher’s study granted the cultural legitimacy and symbolic capital craved by many filmmakers. Many people told me the reason they were granting me interviews was because I was writing a thesis—or a book—with academic rather than journalistic intent. I discuss the valorization of formal education in chapter three ofthis book, which sheds further light on why a twenty-something graduate student in anthropology from New York was able to meet some of the biggest celebrities in India, even the world.
    The final factor shaping my fieldwork, particularly regarding access, has to do with being a woman, but not necessarily in the conventional understandings about gender and fieldwork, where women have had more access to women’s worlds and men to male spaces and male worlds. The Hindi film industry is extremely patriarchal and male-dominated, and the sites and spaces of production until the early 2000s were highly masculine. Paradoxically, being a woman helped me gain access, as I piqued curiosity and interest, often standing out as being one of the few—and sometimes the only—women on a film set. My curiosity value was enhanced by the fact that I had traveled from New York to study the industry, rather than having tried to join it as an actress. Contrary to common understandings about the gendered dimensions of fieldwork, I actually had a harder time meeting women, specifically the actresses.
    While being a woman in this predominantly male world also had its disadvantages, primarily regarding issues of sexual harassment, it afforded me a perspective on the gender politics of the film industry and the concerns around respectability, which are intrinsically gendered. For example, my own ease of mobility through the sites of production and sociality within the industry led to assumptions and speculations by some filmmakers and journalists about my intentions and personal scruples; the fact that I was a married graduate student from the United States did not solve, but actually exacerbated, these judgments. For example, a middle-aged screenwriter called me a “bad penny ” when he saw me at an actress’s birthday party, while a film journalist present at the same party informed me bluntly that I had come to Bombay to “party rather than do research. ” A photographer at whose studio I spent many days observing photo shoots for film magazines would continuously chide me, “You’re not really married; you’re just wearing that mangalsutra to fool us. ” 48 When I expressed my frustration with such comments, attitudes, and unwelcome advances to a young director whom I had befriended, pointing out that I was always very modestly dressed and behaved, he said that no matter how I dressed or behaved, the fact that I had “left my husband for a year to do research of all places among film people ”
    would lead to judgments about my “character. ” That my behavior did not conform to accepted conventions of how a respectable married woman should behave, sheds light on filmmakers’ own perceptions about the film industry as a morally hazardous space.

STRUCTURE IF THIS BOOK
    This book is comprised of nine chapters that detail the production culture of the Hindi film industry, focusing on