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

flashy. Or they were autocratic and feudalist in their attitudes. It’s not so now. The rich are rich, but they are not bad. The whole concept has changed. Previously, rich was bad and poor was good, right? Rich is not bad anymore, and that’s not how they’re going to be portrayed either” (Roy, interview, October 2000). Roy’s statement about the moral values associated with wealth and poverty is a reference to earlier eras of Hindi cinema, where the main villains in films were frequently moneylenders, rural landlords, and wealthy businessmen, while peasants, workers, or others of modest economic means were the heroes. Whereas wealthy businessmen were frequently the symbols of exploitation, injustice, and even criminality in Hindi films from the 1950s through the 1980s, by the mid-1990s they were more commonly depicted as benign, loving, and indulgent fathers.
    The narrative focus and valorization of wealth was also explained in terms of the aesthetics of production design. During my interview with screenwriter Anjum Rajabali in 2000, he narrated an anecdote in response to my observation that all signs and references to poor people had disappeared from contemporary films. He told me that he had come up with an idea for a script with the mill closures in Bombay as the backdrop—he thought he could base the protagonist in one of the bastis (slums), trying to fight the mills being shut down. He convinced a director with his idea, and so he and the director went to a producer to pitch the story. The producer was absolutely aghast and exclaimed, “But we can’t make a film like this! We can’t have such poor people. They’re so poor—it won’t look nice!” Then the producer asked, “What will Ajay Devgan [the star that they had in mind for the role] wear?” When Rajabali responded, “I don’t know, jeans, a kurta, and chappals [sandals],” the producer was horrified and exclaimed, “Ajay Devgan can’t wear chappals! What if we set it in Canada? Then everyone can look nice.” Rajabali complained, “No one in the industry wants to show a slum anymore.” He told me that in his previous screenplay, Ghulam , when the producer asked him if it was set in a slum or a lower middle-class colony, he answered “lower middle-class colony,” for the sake of expedience since, “slum has become a really bad word.”
    With Rajabali’s story in mind, I asked Roy her thoughts about why most contemporary Hindi films did not depict slums or working-class milieus as they had in the past. She surmised that the directors she worked with had grown up in a very privileged setting and were basically interested in replicating or improving upon that world. She explained that they would not have much interaction with, or desire to represent, people of lower class backgrounds because it would contradict the directors’ aesthetic sensibilities: “Okay, if there has to be an interaction between someone from the basti [slum] and someone from an upper-class society, there will still be a slight amount of crudeness to it, because people who come from a basti will not have the same sophistication as someone from the upper society. I don’t think they ever want to get into that, everything has to be very, very classy” (Roy, interview, October 2000). Roy’s statements illustrate how the discussion about quality and aesthetics in cinema is imbued with judgments about social class.
    With the erasure of poor and working-class protagonists from filmic narratives, love stories from the mid-1990s were also quite different from earlier eras, which frequently had class difference as the source of parental disapproval, which therefore played the central conflict in films. With protagonists of the same class background, the source of dramatic tension and narrative conflict in films from the mid-’90s was internalized and centered on the conflict between individual desire and duty to one’s family. The plot manifestations of this conflict