Free Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry by Tejaswini Ganti Page A

assured that these jhopad-patti wallahs [slum-dwellers] will not come and sit next to them, and with the air conditioning on and all, they’ve realized ki [that] film-going is a pleasure. (Nahta, interview, September 1996)
    Differential pricing of tickets, based on seat location, meant that class hierarchy and separation had always been maintained inside the cinema hall. Nahta’s observation that the most expensive seats in the theater were priced so high that wealthier viewers were assured that slumdwellers would not be sitting next to them, however, demonstrates that the narrative of improvement in the mid-’90s was less about the quality of cinema, than about the quality of the viewing experience for middle and upper classes, who were seeing all of the films on video anyway. With the steep increase in ticket rates, the “front-benchers”—who according to the press were “extending to the dress-gallery” (Jain 1991: 28–29) by the early ’90s—had been priced out of these areas and put firmly back in their place in the cinema hall; therefore, the celebrated “return” of audiences to theaters in the mid-1990s was really about reinforcing social hierarchies and re-inscribing social distance into spatial distance within the public space of the cinema hall. The advent of multiplexes several years later, with their extremely high ticket rates, means that elite viewers do not even have to acknowledge the existence of poorer viewers, as they are simply priced out of the movie theater; thus, with respect to theatrical exhibition, a literal process of gentrification has been taking place.

Gentrified Films
    If the return of middle-class audiences to the theaters was interpreted and explained as a sign of cinematic progress, what were the features of this new and improved cinema? Many scholars have discussed how films from this time period were very different from anything that had come before. 21 Aesthetically, films in this period exhibited vastly improved production values that included digital sound, foreign locations, extravagant song sequences, and lavish sets. Much greater attention and emphasis began to be paid to the clothing, styling, and physique of stars, as well as the overall production design of films. Narratively and thematically, themost noticeable differences had to do with the representations of class, youthful romance, and the Indian diaspora. 22
    A very visible contrast between the successful films from the mid-to late 1990s and earlier Hindi films, focusing on families and romance, was the nearly complete erasure of class difference and the tremendous focus on wealth. All signs of poverty, economic hardship, and struggle were completely eliminated from these films, and the protagonists, rather than being working class or lower middle class as they were in earlier films, were incredibly rich—usually the sons and daughters of millionaires. Sachin Bhaumick, one of the most prolific and successful screenwriters, who began his career in the Hindi film industry in 1956, commented on what he found peculiar about HAHK: “India is such a poor country, but the picture, mein koi economic crisis nahi hain [there isn’t any economic crisis in the film]. Not a single character is poor. All of them are happy, and all of them are rich, and all of them have no monetary, economic problem” (Bhaumick, interview, October 1996). Not only was there an absence of poverty, the moral valence about wealth had also shifted within these films. Sharmishta Roy, the art director for some of the biggest hits of the late 1990s and early 2000s, who played a key role in defining a new visual style that became identified as the hip and cool new Bollywood, discussed how the representations of the wealthy had changed in Hindi cinema: “People we show as rich now. . . we don’t show them as flashing their money. You see when we used to have zamindars [wealthy rural landlords] in our films, they were very rich and they were