Researched over a decade, spanning 1996–2006, Producing Bollywood is an ethnographic account of the economic imperatives and cultural codes that came to change production practices of the Bombay film industry as it transformed itself into Bollywood. The transition to Bollywood, according to Tejaswini Ganti, is not only to be observed in the widely noted textual politics of the glossy, big-budget, multi-starrer films on the lives of the wealthy and their globally portable domestic spaces that emerged with India's turn to neoliberalism. Rather, Ganti takes us behind the scenes to reveal Bollywood as a set of business and production practices that mark the changeover of the Bombay film industry from an informal, family-based business that imagined its market as primarily national into a corporatized venture aimed at global and niche urban audiences.

Ganti's ethnography reveals this changeover as the fulfilment of a “drive for distinction and social acceptance” (p. 4), that is, gentrification, among above-the-line Bombay filmmakers. Her thesis is that the industry has smarted under its low status since Independence when the Nehruvian developmentalist state dismissed Bombay cinema as vulgar and crass, not fit for a nation on the way to self-reliance. Now, finally, under the neoliberal regime, Ganti concludes, this desire may have found its consummation. As global and finance capital have entered the Bombay film industry to finance projects aimed at the newly segregated spaces of the multiplex, it has become possible for filmmakers to divorce the masses, follow niche markets in the metropolitan centers whether nationally or globally, and still remain profitable.

In one of the more revelatory insights of the book, Ganti repeatedly traces a great deal of disdain among the filmmakers for the “masses.” She describes the “face work” and “boundary work” performed by filmmakers to distance themselves from their mass audience. For instance, Ganti notes the recurrence of the narrative of “accidental entry,” that is, entry into the industry is described as entirely fortuitous. Another such narrative is the “creative freedom” allowed by the “mature” audiences of the multiplexes as opposed to the “masses” or the “interiors” of Bombay cinema. As Ganti notes, “to lament too much that Hindi filmmakers are ignoring the masses or the diverse film-going public, based on the content of the films, would be to replicate the essentialist and literalist theories of the Hindi film industry” (p. 358). Indeed, the success of films like Dabang, which have the elites whistling and stomping in the exclusiveness of the multiplexes, reveals that it is not the content, but the audience that marks a cultural item as low or high.

Although, as the author claims, it is out of the purview of her book, textual analysis would have helped reveal that Bollywood films like Dabang have also sterilized the content for this audience—emptying Bombay cinema of its populism and a certain voicing of justice on the part of the urban male proletariat, its most favored audience. Salman Khan in Dabang, for example, epitomizes the amoral, self-seeking, and entrepreneurial subject of neoliberalism. As he famously claims in the film: “I am only half a Robin Hood. I take from the rich, but keep it for myself.”

This book elaborates on the continuing neoliberal trajectory of two Indias. The gentrification of Bombay cinema is an important site for observing such bifurcation as citizenship is invented as an exercise in buying; the middle class presented as the poster child of progress and innovation; cinematic narratives blur with advertising, product placement, and aspirational life style; and the multiplex erects barrier between the “masses” and the “classes.”

Yet, I found the analysis of neoliberalism to be cursory and muddled. For instance, although the book claims to look at the political economy of Bollywood, it deals more specifically with what can be called industry practices. The objective of political economy, or more specifically the critical political economy of media industries, is to study patterns of ownership and control as a way to understand the production and subversion of relations of capitalism. Seen from this perspective, the book offers few insights into the corporatization of the film industry and its relation to the nature of labor in cultural production, specifically the question of artistic freedom. For instance, how do filmmakers feel about conforming to the new economic imperatives, such as adhering to subjects that will appeal to younger, upper class, globalized imaginaries, and marketing practices like product placement and ancillary distribution? To dismiss these constraints merely as “fictions” about audiences generated by filmmakers is to deny the economic realities of the power of money over the creative process.

The absence of any mention of alternatives to profit-centered production, such as state subsidies, as with the Parallel Cinema of the 1970s, or political movements, as with the left presence in popular Hindi cinema, forecloses any comparison with trends outside of capital. Is the book's thesis simply that neoliberalism has produced conditions in which the desires for distinction for above-the-line creative producers may be finally realized? That may well be how the participants describe the shift to neoliberalism, but surely there have to be contradictions both in the desire and its achievement for an industry whose product is popular culture. One may ask, for instance, if, as Ganti claims, the lack of social respectability of Hindi cinema stemmed from the disdain the developmentalist state had for this cinema's commercialized nature, then how can neoliberalism, that is, the rule of the market and the ultimate victory of commercialization as a way of life, be the guarantor of respectability? In other words, underlying the developmentalist state was a certain indignation against the commercialization of culture. To reduce the entire history of popular Hindi cinema to the desire for distinction among its makers is to grant too much to capitalism and its inherent logic of differentiation.

Such criticisms notwithstanding, this is an important contribution to studies of Hindi cinema, as it traces and observes a fundamental transformation while it is going on.