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Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry
Producing Bollywood Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry Author:Tejaswini Ganti Producing Bollywood tells how the Bombay-based Hindi film industry became Bollywood, the global film phenomenon and potent symbol of India as a rising economic powerhouse. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Bombay between 1996 and 2006, Tejaswini Ganti analyzes the social worlds and professional practices of leading Hindi filmmakers. ... more »She contends that the Hindi film industry has gentrified in response to India?s neoliberal restructuring, the filmmakers? aspirations for social respectability and professional distinction, and their efforts to manage the uncertainty of large-scale filmmaking. Until the 1990s, Hindi film was associated with India?s working classes. Since then, as members of the Hindi film industry have identified with and sought acceptance from elite segments of Indian society, exclusionary discourses of respectability, professionalism, and corporatization have proliferated. Distributors have come to value metropolitan and overseas markets at the expense of equally populous provincial markets. 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.« less