Bollywood and Globalization

The Global Power of Popular Hindi Cinema

David Schaefer, Kavita Karan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136196157
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The field of Bollywood studies has remained predominantly critical, theoretical and historical in focus. This book brings together qualitative and quantitative approaches to tackle empirical questions focusing on the relationship between soft power, hybridity, cinematic texts, and audiences.

Adopting a critical-transcultural framework that examines the complex power relations that are manifested through globalized production and consumption practices, the book approaches the study of popular Hindi cinema from three broad perspectives: transcultural production contexts, content trends, and audiences. It firstly outlines the theoretical issues relevant to the spread of popular Indian cinema and emergence of India's growing soft power. The book goes on to report on a series of quantitative studies that examine the patterns of geographical, cultural, political, infrastructural, and artistic power dynamics at work within the highest-grossing popular Hindi films over a 61-year period since independence. Finally, an additional set of studies are presented that quantitatively examine Indian and North American audience consumption practices.

The book illuminates issues related to the actualization and maintenance of cinematic soft power dynamics, highlighting Bollywood's increasing integration into and subsumption by globalized practices that are fundamentally altering India's cinematic landscape and, thus, its unique soft power potential. It is of interest to academics working in Film Studies, Globalisation Studies, and International Relations.

Part I

Transcultural contexts and soft power

1 The big stick behind “soft power”?

The case of Indian films in international markets¹

Sunitha Chitrapu

A country’s resources, such as population, territory, natural resources, economic size, military forces, and political stability, are said to be its tangible foundations for power (Nye 1990). Nye adds that “intangible power resources such as culture, ideology and institutions” (Nye 1990: 166–7) are the sources of soft power. According to Keohane and Nye, soft power has been defined as “the ability to achieve goals through attraction rather than coercion” (Keohane and Nye 1998: 86). In other words, soft power is the power of persuasion that does not involve the tangible resources enumerated earlier.

The media are thought to play a role in soft power because it “is strongly affected by the cultural content of movies and television programs” (Keohane and Nye 1998: 87). Hence, the international acceptance of American ideas and values is seen to be related to the spread of America’s popular culture. Nye’s ideas have influenced Indian policymakers to include popular culture, such as Indian films, in the promotion of India’s soft power.² As the Director General of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations said in an article published in an Indian newspaper: “The primary focus now is to carry India’s soft power – the power of its popular and traditional culture – to all the Asian countries” (The Deccan Herald 2009: para. 3).

Given the government’s practice of using Indian popular culture in promoting its soft power, an examination of the global reception of India’s films assumes some importance. Media economics scholars researching film exports identified economic factors such as population size and wealth (addressed in detail in a later section) as determinants of film exports (see Jayakar and Waterman 2000; Oh 2001; Waterman and Jayakar 2000; Waterman and Lee 2002; Wildman and Siwek 1988).

This chapter attempts to map Indian film flows and to that end asks some questions fundamental to Indian film flows, such as: To which countries are Indian films exported? What is the appeal of Indian films in the countries to which they are exported? What are the economic factors underlying India’s film exports?

Economics of the international media trade

Films, like other media products such as television programs and music recordings, exhibit certain economic properties. They are “public goods,” which makes them non-rivalrous in their consumption (Hoskins et al. 2004) – meaning that their consumption by one consumer does not interfere with their consumption by another consumer. Thus, unlike the candy bar mentioned in economics textbooks, which can be consumed by only one individual, one person’s consumption of a film does not preclude its consumption by another person. This means that, once the cost of producing a film has been incurred, the marginal cost of reaching each additional consumer is negligible.

Additionally, films exhibit high first-copy costs. This means that all the costs for the production of a film need to be borne before it reaches its first consumer. Taken together, these two qualities—consumption without rivalry, and high first-copy cost—lead to economies of scale, where larger markets help the producer spread his high first-copy cost over more consumers (Hoskins et al. 2004). Keohane and Nye note the importance of scale economies in media industries when it comes to soft power, observing,

First, important barriers to entry and economies of scale remain in some information-related aspects of power. For example, soft power is strongly affected by the cultural content of movies and television programs. Large, established entertainment industries often enjoy considerable economies of scale in content production and distribution. The dominant American market share in films and television programs in world markets is therefore likely to continue.

(Keohane and Nye 1998: 87–8)

Producers, then, have an incentive to make their products attractive to the widest possible audience (Wildman and Siwek 1988). To do this, film producers in large markets find it worth their while to incur high production costs (Waterman 1988). A film with a higher production budget is expected to have better-known actors, scriptwriters, directors, and other creative professionals, as well as better editing and special effects (Waterman 1988; Wildman and Siwek 1988).

In general, market size is a key variable that affects both the quality and variety of products that rely on high fixed costs to increase their quality (Dixit and Stiglitz 1977; Fujita et al. 1999; Krugman 1980, 1991; Shaked and Sutton 1987; Sutton 1989; Waldfogel 1999). This is the case with media products where larger markets support more successful products (Berry and Waldfogel 2003; George and Waldfogel 2003; Waldfogel 1999). Expensive media products produced in larger markets are attractive to both their domestic audiences as well as to foreign audiences, leading to what has been termed a “domestic opportunity advantage” (Wildman and Siwek 1988: 68). Pool observed that high-quality media production required the foundation of capital, specialized personnel, and production expertise that was only found in “great organizations and centers” (Pool 1977: 148). The relationship between the population, the size of economy, and patterns of international media trade has been reported right from the earliest examinations of media flows (see Nordenstreng and Varis 1974; Varis 1984).

Cultural proximity is the second factor that has been theorized as playing a role in determining the market size for media products. Empirical evidence suggests that audiences prefer media products that are close to their culture. For example, Latin American audiences preferred domestically produced rather than imported television programs (Antola and Rogers 1984). Similarly, ratings charts in European countries showed the popularity of domestically produced television programs and the inability of satellite channels to survive entirely on imported programs (Tracey 1993). Cultural proximity has been explained through demographic variables, such as socio-economic class, which control the cultural capital of the audience (Straubhaar 1991, 2003, 2008; La Pastina and Straubhaar 2005). According to Straubhaar and Viscasillas, “the viewing behavior of those audiences reflects a search for cultural proximity in national and regional programming that can provide a base for cultural industries to grow” (Straubhaar and Viscasillas 1991: 68).

Cultural proximity provides the impetus for a competitive domestic movie and television program industry. There is a comparative advantage to the domestic industry that arises from a large market with a common language (Collins 1993; Renaud 1993). According to Hoskins and Mirus, the preference for domestic programming thus gives rise to a “cultural discount” by consumers on imported products, which occurs because

a particular program rooted in one culture, and thus attractive in that environment, will have a diminished appeal elsewhere as viewers find it difficult to identify with the style, values, beliefs, institutions and behavioral patterns of the material in question.

(Hoskins and Mirus 1988: 500)

Hoskins and Mirus (1988) also note that entertainment programs suffer a minimal discount while location-specific programs such as news programs attract a greater discount.

The home market model

The home market model of international media trade (Hoskins and Mirus 1988; Waterman 1988; Wildman and Siwek 1988) takes into account the combined effect of market size and cultural proximity on a country’s position in the international media trade. The model assumes that audiences prefer domestic media products to imported ones, an assumption borne out by mass communications research (Antola and Rogers 1984; Straubhaar and Viscasillas 1991; Tracey 1993). A second assumption is that audiences prefer more expensive media products to less expensive media products, a view accepted as being supported by anecdotal evidence. The model predicts that the size and wealth of a market have an effect on the competitiveness of its domestic media products. Population, gross domestic product, and producer revenues have been used to measure market size and wealth, while the market share of domestic media products has been used to measure the competitiveness of domestic media products (Biltereyst 1992; Dupagne and Waterman 1998; Jayakar and Waterman 2000; Lee and Kim 2010; Lee and Waterman 2007; Oh 2001; Waterman 1993; Waterman and Jayakar 2000; Waterman and Lee 2002; Waterman and Rogers 1994). It has been argued that the combination of a large single-language market with a large cultural discount on foreign language movies is what leads to America’s dominance of the international movie trade (Wildman and Siwek 1988).

Economics of the Indian film trade

As seen in the previous section, large countries producing more films have larger budgets. They also have a greater share of their domestic markets and a greater share of foreign markets when the films are exported. In this section the economics of Indian language film production and the export of Indian language films are discussed.

Indian film production

The Indian film market fits some of the patterns predicted by the home market model, but presents very contradictory trends to others. For instance, India produces more films than any other single country in the world. In 2005, India produced more films than the 25 countries of the European Union (Screen Digest 2007b). As expected from a country with so large a film output, Indian films dominate the domestic market to an extent that is equaled only in the USA. Indian films, like American films, have a domestic market share of 94 percent (Screen Digest 2007a). Indian films are present in Arab, Asian and African countries (Thussu 2007).

However, contrary to what we would expect from an industry that is so hugely successful domestically, the average budget of an Indian film is only a fraction of the average budget of a film made in the US, UK, Germany, France, Japan, Spain or Italy. In 2006 the reported average budget of an Indian film was only US $0.1 million (Screen Digest 2007a, b). The comparative figures for the top film markets in that year are: US (US $30.7 million), UK (US $11.6 million), Germany (US $8.5 million), France (US $7.1 million), Japan (US $5.1 million), Spain (US $4 million), and Italy (US $2.8 million).

A second trend that runs counter to expectations is that of the low international revenues earned by Indian films. According to the consulting firm KPMG, in spite of glowing reports in the popular press Indian films earned only 1 percent of global film revenues (Bhardwaj 2006). In the UK, despite press reports of Indian films having tremendous opening weekends, the total theatrical revenue earned by the 62 Indian films which entered the charts of the top 200 films in the UK in 2007 was only approximately US $29 million, or 2 percent of the total theatrical revenues earned by the top 200 films in the UK in that year.³

Investigating these contradictions is important if we want to understand India’s position in the international film trade. A partial explanation for these contradictions is India’s linguistic diversity. The Indian film market is not a monolithic national market, but rather a regional mosaic where films are made in different languages in different centers of production and cater to different linguistic markets (Chitrapu 2009). The numbers of films produced in any given Indian language are statistically significantly related to the number of speakers of that language and to the size of the economy of the state in which that language is spoken (Chitrapu 2009). Thus, larger linguistic populations in India support the production of a larger number of films in their language (such as Hindi, Telugu, and Tamil). Smaller linguistic populations are able to support the production of fewer films (such as Gujarati, Assamese, and Manipuri). South Indian states, with their higher economic wealth, are able to support more film production than other Indian states. Anecdotal budget information collated from press reports (since official data on Indian film budgets is not collected by any official agency) also shows that larger linguistic populations support larger budgets for films in their languages. Thus, Hindi films have the highest film budgets (US $1.5–5.6 million), followed by Tamil and Telugu films (US $1.1–3.4 million), Malayalam (US $0.7–1.8 million), Kannada (US $0.34– 0.91 million), Bengali (US $0.17–0.25 million), and Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Assamese, and Manipuri (below US $0.25 million), as seen from 2007 budget figures (Chitrapu 2009). Thus, despite the large national population, Indian films are restricted by the number of speakers of the language in which they are produced, who play a role in the revenues that flow into film production in their language. These characteristics of the Indian film market are to be borne in mind when examining the export of Indian films to other countries.

Indian film exports

Applying to Indian films the home market model prediction that films from larger markets which are made with larger budgets will be exported more than films from smaller markets which have been made with smaller budgets, we observe the dominance of Hindi films, both within India and among Indian film exports. As we have seen from the estimates of Indian film production budgets, the largest budgets in India are those of Hindi films. Thus, it comes as no surprise that Hindi films are the most popular Indian films on the charts of countries to which they are exported, as an examination of the charts in the US, UK, Malaysia, and Australia reveals (Chitrapu 2009). Even in Malaysia, where 85 percent of the Indian population is of Tamil origin, nearly a quarter (27 percent) of the Indian films on the popularity charts were Hindi films (Chitrapu 2009). Official statistics cited in Pendakur and Subramanyam (1996) lend quantitative support to this dominance in the 1980s and early 1990s, where Hindi films constituted 62 percent of films exported through the government enterprise the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC; formerly the Indian Motion Picture Export Corporation) (Tamil films made up about 24 percent of the films exported in these years).

Scholarly attention to Indian films in international markets also focuses on Hindi films (for instance, see Eleftheriotis 2006; Iordanova 2006). It is the Hindi film stars such as Sri Devi and Amitabh Bachchan that Larkin (1997) refers to in his work on Indian film exports to Nigeria. Even in Senegal, where Fulani audiences claim a cultural connection with the Tamil speakers of southern India, Hindi films rather than Tamil films were reported to be popular (Vander Steene 2009).

When we apply the home market model’s assumption regarding the role played by cultural proximity in the acceptance of media products – that is, that audiences prefer media products that are closer to them culturally – it comes as no surprise that In...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Editors and contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Bollywood and globalization: researching popular Hindi cinema through the lens of film flows
• Part I: Transcultural contexts and soft power
• Part II: Cinematic content and soft power
• Part III: Cinematic soft power and audiences
• Index