Cinema and Society in History

Business historians have long studied certain dimensions of the societal and cultural impact of business. The literature is particularly well developed in food. From introducing tropical fruits into the diets of Western consumers, to the “McDonaldization” of tastes and lifestyles, there is plentiful evidence on the role of business in influencing consumer preferences and habits.Footnote ⁵ However, it is also evident that corporate strategies operate within social, cultural, and historical contexts that condition the nature of that impact.Footnote ⁶ Both the importance of business, and the fact that impact is embedded in social and cultural context, is evident in the case of the global beauty industry. In his study of the globalization of the beauty industry from the nineteenth century, Geoffrey Jones stresses the role of firms in the homogenization of beauty standards over time, especially towards white beauty ideals. Yet he also demonstrates the continued wide variation between countries and geographies in their preferences for different beauty products, even when the same set of multinationals were predominant across various markets.Footnote ⁷

Business historians of cinema have written much less than their counterparts studying food and beauty concerning the societal impacts of their industry. This is understandable because it is conceptually challenging to establish causality in any rigorous fashion, given that media, culture and everyday life are so intertwined.Footnote ⁸ Yet this does not mean that the content of cinema and its impact on social issues should not be examined. Cinema is a different kind of commodity than food and cosmetics. It can be copied, distributed, played, and replayed. It is constantly and repeatedly consumed, rather than being ephemeral, and its impact might be assumed to be as, or more, substantial as a result.

There are indeed empirical studies undertaken in multiple academic disciplines that point to electronic media shaping, rather than just reflecting, people's views on a range of values and outlook. For example, a large econometric study demonstrated that when the conservative Fox News channel was introduced in the cable programming of U.S. towns between 1996 and 2000, the vote share of the Republican party in presidential elections increased substantially.Footnote ⁹ A long tradition of experimental research has shown that violent television programs seem to increase aggression, and that cinema content has influenced people's views on matters especially related to sexual assault.Footnote ¹⁰

A particular challenge in trying to explore the connection between the film industry and societal values is that the secondary literature on the industry pays limited attention to it as a business. In one recent survey, Miskell has noted the limited number of studies on the industry looking at business organizations, compared to numerous studies of “particular directors, producers, actors, or the development of specific genres or national cinemas.”Footnote ¹¹ Insofar as cinema has been treated as a business, the growth of Hollywood and its dominance of many international markets has attracted the most attention among business historians.Footnote ¹² More recently, the growth of other national cinemas, mostly in Europe, has also been explored. However, only one of the mere ten articles on the film industry that have been published over the last decade in the leading U.S. and European journals—Business History Review, Enterprise & Society, and Business History—has focused on the issue of impact.Footnote ¹³

The single article of these ten that discusses impact is Per H. Hansen and Anne Magnussen's nuanced study of Hollywood films between 1928 and 2016. They employ a narratives and sense-making approach to show how Hollywood films used narrative plots as a strategy to “legitimize certain practices and worldviews while marginalizing others.”Footnote ¹⁴ In particular, they demonstrate that Hollywood films became important vehicles for an audience's understanding of business in periods of uncertainty, crisis, and instability. This article builds on their pioneering contribution to the business history of the cinema.

Hollywood's specific portrayal of gender and race has been much studied from the perspectives of film, general, and cultural studies. The patriarchal nature of the industry after the silent film era—when female directors and screenwriters were visible, and women played multiple and complex roles—has been extensively analyzed. The oligarchic and profit-focused Hollywood studio system was dominated by men at all senior levels.Footnote ¹⁵ In 1975, the film critic Laura Mulvey coined the term “male gaze” to describe the lingering cinematic angle of a heterosexual male on a female character. She argued that the woman was represented as the “other,” or an object rather than a subject, in Hollywood movies. The narrative structures of Hollywood movies during the postwar decades, in her classic analysis, saw male roles as the primary driver of the story—the character with whom the observer could identify—while the female roles were presented as passive spectacle. In Mulvey's view, the women on screen became part of a commodity culture and created a dichotomy of “the woman as consumed versus the woman consumer.”Footnote ¹⁶

Hollywood also had a long-term and distinctive stance on skin color. Before the 1960s, Black and Asian actors were largely kept off screen, or condemned to be cast in minor, caricatured roles. Within the context of Hollywood's construction of race, however, a variety of white skin tones were shown from the 1930s. As an industry reliably focused on profits rather than art, Hollywood recruited female actors from Europe and Latin America with diverse skin tones and hair colors to greater appeal to local markets.Footnote ¹⁷

Hollywood's portrayal of gender and skin color reflected patriarchal and racist views that existed long before the film industry was invented. It is noteworthy, however, that the film industry contributed to the institutionalization of these views. The Motion Picture Production Code (better known as the Hays Code) launched in 1927 and enforced, through a ratings system starting in 1934, a ban on the showing of all manner of things, from nudity and drug trafficking, to childbirth scenes and white slavery.Footnote ¹⁸ The Hays Code strongly discouraged showing unmarried men and women in bed, or any criticism of marriage as an institution. The portrayal of same sex relationships was prohibited. However, it was the ban on showing miscegenation, or in the words of the code, “sex relationships between the white and black races,” which represented the visual inscription of race-as-color.Footnote ¹⁹ Censor boards based in southern cities, such as Atlanta, exercised additional pressure on Hollywood, censoring out, for example, any discussion of racism—especially those in southern cities.Footnote ²⁰ The Code remained in place until 1966.

It is important, then, to explore the long-term impact of business on societal values and preferences, but it is equally important to recognize the limitations of measuring that impact, principally because there were always other influences at work. This applies across industries, but the challenges become especially acute with the film industry. Hollywood monetized patriarchal and racist views long present in the United States, but it is inadequate to assert that content merely reflected and did not influence the beliefs of its viewers. Indeed, in the language of Hansen and Magnussen, it seems plausible that at the very least Hollywood legitimized patriarchal and racist sentiments. In fact, constant repetition of the content is likely to have emboldened, and certainly did not contest, such views. The article now turns to the less studied case of the film industry in India. It begins with a brief description of the organization of Bollywood, as this provides important insights on content creation.

The Organization of Bollywood in Independent India

Although the history of cinema in India has a rich literature, it has not featured strongly in the mainstream business history of the country. Despite its size, the cinema industry is not discussed in recent authoritative business and economic histories of India.Footnote ²¹ This is in part due to the fact that the fragmented and informal nature of the industry has made rigorous archival research on its finances and other business aspects more challenging than, for example, research on large business groups such as Tata and Godrej, which retain formal archives. Global consultancies like KPMG, EY, and Deloitte have produced reports on the media industry in India, but they focus on the post-2000 period, and offer only summary statistics, such as number of cinema halls across India and the production numbers of biggest grossing films.Footnote ²² Still, much can be discerned about societal impact from more general histories of the industry. Caste and region are usually the focus of attention rather than skin color, and while female characters are widely discussed, gender more broadly has been left to more specialist literatures.Footnote ²³

The history of the industry is well known. By 1925, Mumbai had established itself as the nation's cinematic capital, but there was and remained extensive filmmaking in other regional centers, using languages other than Hindi.Footnote ²⁴ The immediate postwar and Independence periods saw both growth and major discontinuities. The number of Hindi language films jumped from 73 in 1945 to 183 in 1947.Footnote ²⁵ For Indian cinema as a whole, the official Film Inquiry Committee in 1951 reported both the growth and the turbulent turnover of production houses.Footnote ²⁶ In 1946, the Committee found 151 producers, of whom 94 were no longer in business the following year. In 1947, there were 156 newcomers out of 214 producers. Only 54 producers among the 214 for that year survived by 1948.Footnote ²⁷ From an audience point of view, the Committee found that by the early 1950s, “film ha[d] a coverage of about 16 lakhs persons per day [1.6 million], and it [was], therefore, comparable in its influence to the daily press. … What [the radio and daily press] attain by repeated contact with the same subjects, the film achieves by greater coverage and by the simultaneous presentation of images both to the eye and the ear … arousing vivid psychological reactions in each individual.”Footnote ²⁸

There were four major changes that re-shaped Bollywood in the years from 1947 to 1991. First, the trauma leading to Independence greatly affected producers and actors. The violent partition of the country into India and Pakistan resulted in millions of people being displaced.Footnote ²⁹ Actors and directors in the industry before the early 1940s were often Westernized elites who had long resided in urban areas. This shifted after 1947, when the industry came to be dominated by migrants from the Punjab region who achieved elite status through the film industry.Footnote ³⁰ Punjab is located in the northwestern part of the subcontinent, and is a linguistic zone where Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims have co-existed over time. When Punjab was divided during the partition, many film directors, writers, and crewmembers fled to Mumbai, which became a cosmopolitan hub for displaced members of the creative classes.Footnote ³¹ The pre-eminence of Punjabis was ostensibly surprising, as their language was not spoken in Mumbai, nor was it the language of Bollywood movies. However, the Punjabi dialect was close to Hindi, making it easier for Punjabi actors to find work in Hindi-language films.

Moreover, displaced Punjabis were able to draw upon on capabilities developed in their home region during colonial times. In 1901, the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya was established as a music school in Lahore, where classical music training was made available to the public—no longer only to hereditary families who had previously guarded musical knowledge. The school produced famous musicians, singers and composers among its graduates.Footnote ³² Meanwhile, a land act passed in Punjab the same year reduced urban investment in agriculture, shifting resources towards large-scale investment in entertainment. This included building a theatre, first for the stage and then for film.Footnote ³³

Cultural factors arguably also facilitated the large Punjabi presence in Bollywood. As India's primary agrarian belt, Punjabis embraced colorful outfits, songs, and dance to commemorate productive harvests, and such exuberance became a stereotype of Punjabis. Punjabis have also been described as embracing traditional gender roles, especially males as rustic and sexual, and females as shy and domestic. The stereotype of the boisterous Punjabi male translated well into the emerging Bollywood culture.Footnote ³⁴

A second major change that re-shaped Bollywood during this period was the transformation from colonialism to independence. Film assumed an important role in nation-building in the newly independent country. The challenges of poverty and inequality faced by the new nation became a topic for filmmakers. One of the most successful films of the post-Independence decade was Andaaz (“Style”) (1949), a film depicting an upper-class love triangle that examined the common person's struggle between modernity and traditional social values.Footnote ³⁵

The Indian government was interested in the film industry, but only to the extent that it contributed to its vision of a post-Independence India. The Films Division of India (FDI) was established in 1948 as the main film-medium organization of the government. The FDI had a prodigious output, mostly documentaries and other films about rural upliftment, ideal marriage, education, and sanitation. However, FDI material attracted low viewership due to its poor distribution schemes, failure to inspire audiences, and often poor technical quality.Footnote ³⁶

Meanwhile, the government, which progressively introduced a planned economy with extensive state controls, refused to recognize commercial film—including Bollywood—as an official industry. This left film producers with no access to legitimate external finance. The industry was also heavily taxed. In many regions, local governments provided support to cinema, but Mumbai was located in a Marathi-speaking region, and the local government only supported films made in that language, rather than Hindi-language Bollywood movies.Footnote ³⁷ As a result, Bollywood never achieved the status of “national cinema” in India the way its parallels in other emerging markets—for example, China and Mexico—did. It received neither subsidies nor market protection from international films.Footnote ³⁸

Like Hollywood, Bollywood was a profit-focused industry, albeit one without access to the kind of finance seen in the United States. There were unforeseen consequences of its informal status. Bollywood became one of the main arenas in the Indian economy for investing and circulating unreported and untaxed income. It was infiltrated by criminal characters, in particular money launderers, who were even more focused on securing revenues than Hollywood financiers. Bollywood became a high-risk enterprise, and producers were reported to borrow money at monthly interest rates of three to four per cent.Footnote ³⁹

These financial challenges translated into a third major change in the Bollywood industry, which was the decline of the Hollywood-style studio system that had emerged during the interwar years. The studio system, including Ranjit Studios founded in 1929, and Bombay Talkies founded in 1934, was adversely affected by rising production costs during World War II. Without access to reliable means of financing, film studios were unable to offer individual film stars the sums they requested. As a result, the power of such large studios dwindled and the industry saw the rise of freelancing, in which stars were not contractually obligated to work exclusively with any studio or director. Often times, criminal figures funded these independent producers through money laundering. The rise of freelancing gave stars bargaining power to work with the director who could offer them the most money. Actors including Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar became box-office legends of Bollywood.Footnote ⁴⁰

Bollywood became dominated by these independent producers, who—although they overtook formal film studios—still lacked access to the level of funding seen in Hollywood. The whole system worked on an informal ad hoc basis. The prominent actor Shabana Azmi later recalled that when she entered the industry in the 1970s there was a “trickle-down way of financing.” She added that filmmakers “would get finance in little bits and pieces.”Footnote ⁴¹ Ticket prices were kept low so that viewers outside of major urban areas could access films, thereby limiting opportunities to generate cash through ticket sales. Although it could match Hollywood in the number of films made, Bollywood never matched Hollywood's total revenue figures, even after liberalization began in 1991.Footnote ⁴²

A fourth major change for Bollywood after 1947 was increased censorship. While Hollywood content was highly self-regulated, India had formal government censorship. This had existed in the colonial era, but its scope widened after 1947. The autonomy of regional censors was curtailed, and in 1951 the Central Board of Film Certification was established.Footnote ⁴³ The Censor Board blocked mention of politically sensitive topics, including Partition, and also, as discussed in the following section, restricted explicit sexual content.Footnote ⁴⁴ However, and in contrast to the Hays Code, the Cinematograph Act of 1952 made no mention of gender or ethnicity, and focused primarily on restricting content deemed a threat to the integrity of Indian sovereignty.Footnote ⁴⁵ In 1960, the government issued new directives censoring films that “lower the moral standards of those that see it,” but there remained no mention of gender or ethnicity.Footnote ⁴⁶

Censorship, financing challenges, and informality set the parameters under which Bollywood operated, and more importantly for this article conditioned content creation. The industry provided incentives to deliver movies featuring themes catering to the lowest common denominator. A highly standardized format emerged of romantic melodramas focused on issues related to marriage and class. Movies featured songs that were pop versions of Indian folk music combined with musical styles emanating from Broadway, scripted into Hindi. Songs provided filmmakers with a way to convey eroticism in a situation where government censors prevented explicit romance. The songs were a key component of a film, and assumed commodity status beyond their feature in films. The sale of a film's music became a key factor in the success of the film itself.Footnote ⁴⁷

The actor-director Raj Kapoor was a formative influence on post-1947 Bollywood. Born in 1924, he grew up on Peshawar's oldest and most famous road, Qissa Khwani, or Street of Storytellers. His father, Prithviraj, became a star in the emergent industry. Like many other Punjabis, the family settled in Mumbai after Partition. Kapoor acted as a child, and in 1948 started his own production house, R.K. Studios, which Rajadhyaksha judges to be “perhaps the most important of the new-era production houses.”Footnote ⁴⁸ He financed his first film, Aag (“Fire”), by borrowing from friends and family, as well as from his own domestic help, and mortgaging his car. Most of the actors were also friends and family.Footnote ⁴⁹ His next two films established his reputation. Barsaat (“Rain”), released in 1949, was shot in the (then) exotic location of Kashmir, which set a precedent for later films which often featured colorful exotic locations. In Awaara (“Vagabond”), released in 1951, Kapoor created an Indianized Charlie Chaplin tramp with a bowler hat, a blazer, black pants, and a rucksack on a stick.Footnote ⁵⁰

These films established a basic formula for Kapoor's films over the next three decades. The central story was typically built around one man and his relationship with his heroine and his family. There was little critique of accepted social norms, although there was an underlying critique of excessive wealth. The films typically emphasized the common person's struggle between traditional social values and the promises of modernity, including love stories between upper class and lower class individuals. The female lead was portrayed as a passive and demure figure, conservatively dressed, and coy until swept off her feet by the male lead. It was a format that worked well in many Middle Eastern markets. It also found favor in the Soviet Union, where Hollywood movies were banned and Kapoor's “poor man” focus was seen as politically correct.Footnote ⁵¹

Kapoor profoundly influenced Bollywood film as a genre, but from an industry perspective, his most significant contribution was the role he played in establishing what became one of Bollywood's most influential families. He was the nucleus of an extended family network that had no real parallel, whether in Bollywood or contemporary Hollywood, beyond a handful of acting families like the Fondas. Kapoor's brothers Shammi and Shashi were star actors between the 1950s and the 1980s. Shammi Kapoor married actor Geeta Bali. Raj Kapoor's son Rishi also joined the industry, debuting with his father's 1973 film Bobby. Kapoor's other sons, Randhir and Rajiv, also became leading Bollywood actors. In the recent past, beyond the chronological era covered by this article, Randhir's daughters Karishma and Kareena have become leading actors, along with Rishi's son Ranbir.

Bollywood, then, assumed a distinctive shape after 1947. Films were built around extended love stories in which song and music were key features. Although there was always some experimentation, and films became more technically sophisticated over time, the industry settled into a broad pattern of norms. This situation was reinforced by censorship that ruled out political or explicit sexual content. The fact that so much financing was informal and indeed criminal, encouraged replication of proven formats. Meanwhile, large barriers to entry arose due to the entrenched position of Punjabi family dynasties, of which the Kapoors were the leading example. Other Punjabi family dynasties included the Chopras, beginning in the early 1950s, the Roshans later in the decade, and the Johars in the mid-1970s.Footnote ⁵² Marriage and casting family members became, and remained, key strategies for maintaining power in the industry. This closed insider club provided the setting for stereotyped views to be endlessly recycled.Footnote ⁵³

Despite India's long history in cinema, Bollywood was largely re-invented during the postwar decades. It was in a unique situation, both successful as an industry but simultaneously distrusted by its own government. In 1971, India became the world's largest manufacturer of feature films, with 431 feature film titles across all languages. By 1979, the figure rose to 700, and by 1989 to 839.Footnote ⁵⁴ A UNESCO survey on national cinematography showed that India was the only non-Western country to have a larger audience for locally made films than for imported films. While international films remained relatively marginal in India, Indian films also secured large market shares elsewhere in Asia, and in Africa and the Middle East.Footnote ⁵⁵

The next section turns to the impact of Bollywood on India. Raj Kapoor often reflected on the central role of film in Indian society. He met with Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, to discuss how “screen celebrities could attract millions… [and how] it would result in immense good to the country.” Kapoor would likely have endorsed Hansen and Magnussen's view that cinema was a major vehicle for sense making. He told Nehru that he believed that “the screen and the stage were… an intimate part of India's life and culture.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The statement left unanswered what elements of Indian life and culture would be reflected in the cinema, and whether the mission of cinema was to embolden the views of its audience, or contest them.

Bollywood's Influence on Skin Color and Gender Stereotypes

As in the United States, Indian cinema developed in a society in which certain beliefs about both skin color and gender were already deeply embedded.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the case of India, light skin preferences can be discerned in works written in classical Sanskrit and regional languages. The powerful image of lighter skinned peoples called Aryans invading India and setting fire to the settlements of darker-skinned people, and of the presentation of fair-skinned women as gifts to dark-skinned fortunetellers, is documented in the ancient Hindu text Rigveda composed in Sanskrit around 1500 BCE.Footnote ⁵⁸ Around 1000 CE, as Islamic armies from Central Asia took over the northern parts of the subcontinent, a preference for lighter skin was also discernable, although historical evidence is unclear how far these political elites subjugated populations solely based on race.Footnote ⁵⁹

A stronger emphasis on skin color emerged during the sixteenth century as Europeans arrived in India for trade. Skin color was the most obvious marker of distinction between white Europeans and Indians. Early modern missionaries, traders, and travelers were the first to document such race-based prejudice. When the English East India Company (EIC) established its first outpost at Fort Saint George in Madras in 1644, they bifurcated the settlement, distinguishing between a “White Town” for colonial families and a “Black Town” for native Indians. By the nineteenth century, various colonial cities like Kolkata, Mumbai, and Ahmedabad were organized along racial grounds.Footnote ⁶⁰ Whiteness came to be deeply associated with power, status, affluence, and beauty. Indigenous ideas both fed into and drew from this emerging racialized colonial world.Footnote ⁶¹

As colonial power became entrenched through military campaigns, race-based privilege became institutionalized. Army rank and martial prowess was seen to reside in particular racial groups. After the end of EIC rule, when India became a Crown colony in 1858, the British Indian Army also set standards for the perfect human body. The ideal soldier was light-skinned, mirroring his colonial superiors. The politics of rank and file in the army cast the idealized male as tall, strong, fair-skinned, and possessing an aquiline nose and a defined jawline. Such features were more characteristic of populations residing in the northwest mountainous terrains of the subcontinent.Footnote ⁶² For colonial officials, these groups reflected contemporary martial race theories that gave men from these mountainous regions of India privileged access to army positions. This included Pathan tribesmen from modern day Afghanistan, and men from the various ethnic and religious backgrounds of the Punjab region including Sikhs, Muslims, Rajputs, and Dogras.Footnote ⁶³

The evidence on the evolution of gender norms in India appears less robust than that of skin color prejudices, but mostly supports a view that patriarchy was the norm. From the ancient Sanskrit textual tradition dating 500 BC to 500 CE, evidence points to men viewing women as property to be traded for alliance building between different warring clans.Footnote ⁶⁴ These legacies continued into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries during the Mughal period as women occupied the domestic sphere or harem as wives, mothers, and concubines. In this setting, royal women of the Emperor's household were held in high regard, and sometimes possessed their own resources, property, and aspirations.Footnote ⁶⁵ Unfortunately, there is relatively little evidence about the status of ordinary women, a point emphasized by feminist scholars including Ruby Lal, Susie Tharu, and Ke Lalita.Footnote ⁶⁶

A number of scholars have argued that patriarchy was enhanced by colonialism. In trying to prevent certain indigenous practices like widow burning, colonial law actually contributed to the isolation of females to the domestic sphere. Women became the site and repository of tradition, culture, and religion, in need of protection by Indian men, who themselves felt destabilized by colonial rule.Footnote ⁶⁷ As a result, it has been suggested that women were relegated to the domestic sphere and became the foci of discursive attention by Indian nationalist men, colonial authorities, and social reformers. This process has been articulated most clearly by Partha Chatterjee and Patricia Oberoi.Footnote ⁶⁸ Indian patriarchy was furthered by the colonial state's establishing of a two-tier system of law where secular matters fell under British legal norms while family disputes were relegated to personal law courts, assessed according to Hindu or Muslim personal law. This further limited the property rights of women, an aspect that has continued under postcolonial and modern law.Footnote ⁶⁹

It is apparent, then, that as the cinema industry grew in India, exclusionary regimes around skin color and gender were quite entrenched. From the start, there was a tendency to reinforce, more than to contest, such norms in most segments of Indian cinema. During the interwar years, there was considerable influence by both European cinema and Hollywood. For example, in the 1920s, the prominent director Himanshu Rai pioneered several early films in which he used foreign Eurasian actors playing female leads. They were given Indian names and were projected as ideal Hindu women on screen. These were black and white films, but the light skin contrast was apparent. Indeed, the Anglo-Indian actor Renee Smith was the female lead in a Rai trilogy from 1925–29, and changed her name to Sita Devi.Footnote ⁷⁰ Other examples included Mary Evans (whose stage name was Nadia), Beryl Claessen (Madhuri), and Iris Gasper (Yasmin).Footnote ⁷¹

After 1947, Punjabi pre-eminence as actors and directors further influenced skin color preferences. Those from Punjab were often fairer skinned than many other Indians. Raj Kapoor, and some other members of his family, had blue rather than brown eyes, which were more typical across the subcontinent. The archetype male hero in Kapoor's films, and Bollywood in general, became a lighter-skinned tall male accompanied by a heroine of similar or even lighter complexion. Moreover, female protagonists had to carry the additional burden of being the site of chastity and morally acceptable romance. To achieve this, films usually carried a contrasting character of the female “vamp,” a Westernized woman accepting the sinister glances of men in settings like nightclubs, and succumbing to male desires, aggression, and power.Footnote ⁷² The vamp in Kapoor's and other films has been described as “the sexy, glamourous, dangerous woman whose body was the focus of desire for the male spectator, made guilt-free by her ultimate defeat by the heroine's pure chasteness.”Footnote ⁷³

The star system that replaced studios created celebrities around male personalities, and to a lesser extent around female leads, who were paid less.Footnote ⁷⁴ The Censor Board also propagated unwritten rules around male-female interaction, censoring films with explicit sexual content, including kissing. This had consequences as it contributed to establishing new gender norms. For example, producers had to compensate with exaggerated body language, such as romantic leads bumping shoulders. This led to growing vulgarity, racy song and dance sequences, pelvic thrusts, bathtub fantasies, and dream sequences as a stand-in for expressing sexual desire.Footnote ⁷⁵ Gesture, silence, tongue in cheek dialogue, and other forms of suggestive behavior became the hallmark of the Bollywood cinematic genre.

India had excellent professional training for actors at institutions such as the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune and the National School of Drama (NSD) in Delhi. However, their graduates were not typically hired in Bollywood. Instead, actors were cast if they either belonged to a powerful film family like that of Kapoor, or fit standards of beauty that could be commercialized without great difficulty.Footnote ⁷⁶ Stars became key elements of Bollywood's simplistic messaging, and their physical appearance and skin color were important components of the messaging.

The informal nature of the industry and the consequent absence of conventional archives makes it hard it to explore causal mechanisms using conventional business history sources and methodology. In response, this article has drawn heavily on two publicly available oral history databases consisting of interviews with leading actors and producers in India. The first database is based on the Guftagoo talk show series produced between 2011 and 2020 for Rajya Sabha Television, the official channel of India's Upper House of Parliament. Hosted by journalist S. M. Irfan, the interview-based show takes the format of an intimate conversation that explores the life journey and industry experience of creative personalities associated with Indian cinema. Guftagoo literally means “conversation” in Urdu, and all interviews are conducted in either Hindi or Urdu. With researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, a public database was created with interview links, keywords, and other metadata to aid scholars.Footnote ⁷⁷ The second database is the Creating Emerging Markets project (hereafter CEM) established at the Harvard Business School. This project involves lengthy interviews by Harvard faculty with highly impactful leaders or former leaders of for-profit businesses based in emerging markets. The interviewees are required to have had at least three decades of experience in their respective industries. A total of 150 interviews are available as of March 1, 2021, including 38 interviews with individuals based in India.Footnote ⁷⁸ A sub-set of these interviews, with prominent Indian media figures, was used in this study. These interviews provide personal testimony on how Bollywood worked. There is plentiful evidence confirming the role of stars. “Bollywood stars know that they are commodities. They themselves are being sold,” the veteran actor Naseeruddin Shah observed. He added, “they are not a medium for reaching a message to the audience. They are themselves the product.”Footnote ⁷⁹

An important part of the process of an actor being commodified pertains to skin color. This also had implications for casting. The noted Bollywood actor Nandita Das, active in the industry from 1989, recalled her own experiences as a darker-skinned actor. “My parents never made me feel bad about my skin color, and now I see around the country young girls lose their confidence due to this. I myself faced this, with uncles and those in the extended family, and later in the film industry, saying you could certainly play a slum dweller or a village girl, but if playing an urban upper-middle class or educated girl, the director or makeup artist would come and say ‘I know you don't like wearing makeup, but could you lighten your skin a little with makeup, since this role is that of an educated person.’”Footnote ⁸⁰ There are many similar personal testimonies from other darker-skinned Bollywood actresses, similar instances in which they were denied the opportunity to play heroines and faced personal abuse because of their skin color.Footnote ⁸¹

Interviews with actors provide personal testimony about the gendered portrayal of women, and more importantly explain in a more nuanced fashion how such stereotypes became embedded in Bollywood. As was the case with Hollywood, the issue facing actresses in Bollywood was not a lack of female roles, but rather that the majority of these roles were highly stereotyped, portraying women as lacking significant agency. In the words of Shabani Azmi,

However, there were worse things than stereotyping. Physical violence against women was often portrayed casually. There is ample evidence that Bollywood glamorized violence and degraded and humiliated women through images.Footnote ⁸³ Azmi recalled:

Another noted Bollywood actor Jaya Bachchan, active in the industry from 1963, recalled in her interview how she was expected to be stripped naked and sexually assaulted in a film called Ek Nazar (1972). Despite her protests, her co-star coaxed her to shoot the scene of gross transgression that was later included in the film.Footnote ⁸⁵

Although many female actors evidently objected to what they were expected to do on screen, there were many obstacles to changing how gender was portrayed in Bollywood. Like Hollywood, the industry structure was male dominated and practically guaranteed to replicate the male gaze issue. “[India] is largely a patriarchal society, and the industry is completely male-dominated,” Nandita Das noted in her Guftagoo interview. “There are jobs like editing, music composing, music direction, and thousands of other jobs that women can do apart from acting. But, we never hear of those because there are hardly women in the industry.”Footnote ⁸⁶ As often in Hollywood, powerful male directors and actors engaged in affairs with female actors. Raj Kapoor, for example, earned a reputation as a serial adulterer.Footnote ⁸⁷

There could also be violence if actors challenged gender norms. Azmi recalled how her playing the role as a lesbian in the film Fire (1996), some years after the era of liberalization had begun, provoked violent outbursts.

By the time of Fire, the level of physical violence against women in Bollywood was on the decline, but gender stereotyping was not. The cabaret dancing sequences of former years had evolved into the phenomenon of the “item song.” The item woman was tall, beautiful, toned, and highly commodified. She moved in sexually suggestive ways on screen and had little to do with the main plot of the film.Footnote ⁸⁹ Reflecting on the phenomenon of the item song, Azmi noted, “what is actually happening is that the way the camera moves on the women's body in fragmented images of a heaving bosom, a shaking navel, a swiveling hip, the woman is robbed of all autonomy and becomes an object of the male gaze… You have these horrible lyrics where a woman is actually commodifying herself by saying that, you know, ‘I am a tandoori chicken and why don't you just swallow me along with a glass of alcohol.’”Footnote ⁹⁰

As previously discussed, it is easier to demonstrate that Bollywood portrayed women as “tandoori chicken,” and light skin people as elite, than to prove that film content substantially emboldened pre-existing gender and skin color norms. Indeed, even within the industry opinions differ widely on the matter. In his Guftagoo conversation, the noted Bollywood lyricist and scriptwriter Javed Akhtar, active in the industry after 1971, took a diametrically opposed view from Azmi.

The debate whether to “fix” society or “fix” cinema, which was also a recurrent topic in debates about content in Hollywood, has evident legitimacy. However, the following section will discuss the opinions of actors and directors outside mainstream Bollywood, who saw the cinema as part of the problem rather than part of a solution. In support of their critical views, it is significant that cinema occupied a uniquely important position in the media during the post-Independence decades. The first television broadcast in India was only in 1959. As late as 1975, only seven cities had television service, which was limited to a single state-owned channel, Doordarshan. Doordarshan introduced a second channel in 1984. In 1985, India ranked at the bottom of the world's television markets with only 10 million TV receivers compared to 190 million in the United States.Footnote ⁹² Private television channels were only permitted in the early 1990s. Cinema, then, was the major form of entertainment throughout this period. As a result, Bollywood exercised a significant influence on the nature of gender relations, including male perceptions of female bodies and idealized love, and reinforced ideas of the archetypal beautiful person as light skinned.Footnote ⁹³

It is possible to build a more specific case on the negative impact of Bollywood during the post-Independence decades. The widespread violence against women portrayed in Bollywood cinema took place in a society in which sexual violence and the legal response to it was a longstanding problem. Colonial laws placed a heavy burden on women seeking judicial remedy in courts. These laws were carried over into independent India, and continued to make rape convictions difficult. The issue was highlighted in the Mathura case in March 1972, when a sixteen-year-old tribal girl was repeatedly raped and molested by police in their station in Maharashtra. When the case came to trial two years later, the judge described Mathura as a “loose woman” who must have consented in the first place. When the case ultimately came before India's Supreme Court, it ruled that the girl's failure to sound an alarm during the alleged rape, along with the absence of injuries, constituted evidence of consent. The case caused an outpouring of protests and resulted in some changes in the law, however the problem persisted over the following decades.Footnote ⁹⁴ The repeated depiction of sexual assault in cinema was hardly conducive to combating the country's problem with sexual violence against women, the underreporting of rape, and the frequent disqualification of victim testimonies in court.Footnote ⁹⁵

In addition to espousing violence against women, Bollywood also became involved, towards the end of the period covered by this article, in the business of skin lightening creams. The two became closely related, as they reified women as the site of sexual fantasy. The iconic Fair and Lovely skin cream was launched by Unilever's Indian affiliate in 1978. It was advertised explicitly on the platform that fair skin provided women with greatly enhanced opportunities for romantic relationships and successful careers.Footnote ⁹⁶ Bollywood actors became important celebrity figures used in advertising such creams, although the close connection between actors and skin lightening creams only scaled after liberalization began.Footnote ⁹⁷ This was the start of a new era in Bollywood, beyond the scope of this article, in which cinema became deeply integrated with the sale of ancillaries, especially fashion.Footnote ⁹⁸

Post-Independence Bollywood, then, inherited a society in which gender norms and attitudes to skin color had been conditioned by history. However, as an industry that tended to avoid complexity, and even the recruitment of professional actors, it collectively chose to accept conventional norms rather than to contest them. In contrast to the impact of the Hays Code on Hollywood, this was not so much imposed on the industry, but it was rather the product of a desire to sell tickets to people with low discretionary incomes. Meanwhile, the dominance of Punjabi business families as leading producers, directors, and actors perpetuated preferences for lighter skin. Women in Bollywood movies in this period were almost a parody of the male gaze problem, and there was a more sinister aspect. The frequent use of violence against women occurred in a society in which there was widespread sexual violence against women, as evidenced by the underreporting of rape and the law's laxity towards offenders.Footnote ⁹⁹ The repeated use of the same format drove home the “sense making” about gender and skin color, as did the dominance of the industry by a small group of family dynasties, which meant that values were transmitted across generations, rather than being contested by newcomers. Bollywood certainly emboldened pre-existing prejudices and behavior, and probably contributed significantly to the problem of violence against women.

The Different Paths of Parallel and Tamil Cinemas

The Bollywood paradigm has been so prominent for understanding Indian cinema that it has often overshadowed both the heterogeneity of parallel Hindi cinema, and regional cinema produced in other parts of the country.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ There were parallel and regional cinemas that addressed different audience segments that sometimes, but not always, overlapped with mainstream Bollywood moviegoers. In other words, the categories of “parallel” and “regional” are not absolute, but they do provide an analytic differentiation of the Indian cinema industry as a patchwork quilt composed of different film spheres. This section examines in particular how Indian cinemas other than Bollywood treated gender and skin color.

The first category considered here is parallel cinema. Films in this category were usually in Hindi, although major blockbusters in other languages sometimes fell under this category. Parallel cinema was driven by a number of visionary filmmakers and actors who sought to contest restrictive societal norms, including concerning gender and ethnicity, rather than play to them.

The origins of parallel cinema have often been traced back to the iconic postwar film producer Satyajit Ray, although he can also be regarded as an example of regional cinema given that his films were distinctly Bengali in language, style, form, and location.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Ray and others made films that shifted attention from romance and middle-class anxiety towards films straddling the rural-urban divide, with coming of age films, films about religious superstition, and later detective films and historical dramas. An example was Mahanagar or “The Big City” (1963) in which the filmmaker narrated the domestic conflict a young woman faced with her in-laws, children, and husband after joining the workforce selling sewing machines door-to-door to support her unemployed husband and the family. Ray stands out as a male director for his strong female characters, the way in which he explored their complexities, and for the absence of patriarchic assumptions in his films.Footnote ¹⁰²

Ray's contemporaries in parallel cinema included Mrinal Sen, who directed films primarily in Bengali and Hindi. Sen was an ardent Marxist, who, in the final interview before he died, said, “I've tried to connect cinema to my life. I'm a social agent, I'm a social being. I've been trying to say something about the society to which I belong. This is possible only when I have done something about it.”Footnote ¹⁰³

Building on these earlier antecedents, an official “art cinema” developed in India, where films were funded partly though state subsidies and through promotion at international film festivals. The director and screenwriter Shyam Benegal became an important force for using film as a medium for shaping social views. Benegal himself made an unconventional entry into the cinema industry, working as a writer and film maker in the advertising industry in Mumbai before moving to a major advertising distribution company called Blaze, whose founders independently financed his first films, including Ankur, released in 1974.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Benegal explicitly sought to confront stereotypes, especially concerning gender. He observed:

Benegal's films addressed issues such as gang-rape, corrupt politicians, rural empowerment, women's exploitation, children's themes, interracial love, prostitution, and the unique plight of Muslim women in India.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Ankur, for example, had a heroine who was married to someone who was both deaf and mute, and had an affair and got pregnant with the landlord's son. He recruited the young Shabana Azmi to play the heroine. Azmi later recalled in her CEM interview that people thought that it was a bad career choice because the heroine would have been portrayed in traditional cinema “as a villain and somebody who broke the moral ethical code.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Azmi was not the only actor promoted by Benegal. Over the years, he introduced actors like Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Kulbhushan Kharbanda and Amrish Puri, many of whom were trained at FTII or the NSD. Not surprisingly, Benegal did not indulge fair skin preferences. He discovered the darker-skinned Smita Patil, a prominent speaker about women's issues who became acclaimed as an actor during her tragically brief career. He also introduced other darker-skinned women like Deepti Naval, Zarina Wahab, and Pallavi Joshi who were all active in parallel cinema from the 1970s. These and other actors built their careers acting in roles that challenged conventional Bollywood norms rather than conforming to them. Indeed, after her appearance in Ankur, Azmi continued to play controversial roles. “Art should be used as an instrument for social change,” she noted, “and I think film is a very important medium through which we can bring about changes, particularly in the characterization of women.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Although their budgets and outputs were more modest than mainstream Bollywood, “art films” received disproportionate interest because they appealed to film critics, educated classes, and discerning international audiences. This created a chasm between the two industries, where actors and directors who were involved in “art films” were often typecast and their opportunities in mainstream Bollywood were limited. It seems highly unlikely that parallel cinema in this period could have exercised any influence beyond urban elites in India. There was a further challenge when television service began to spread in the 1980s. “Then television came,” Benegal noted wistfully in his interview. “And the moment television came, it all collapsed, because people didn't have to go out to see films. They sat at home, they could get themselves entertained with anything that came on television.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Regional cinema was a second category of films beyond Bollywood. While these might run alongside Bollywood films in their absolute number of viewers, they were specifically geared to audiences at the state level, especially because these films were in languages that were not mutually intelligible across the vast subcontinent. In 2001, only 40 percent of the India's population identified Hindi as their mother tongue.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Even in the areas where the language was spoken widely, such as across much of northern India, dialects varied to such a degree that mutual comprehension and conversation was difficult. In southern India, encompassing the states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana, regional languages had no affinity to northern Indian vernaculars.Footnote ¹¹¹

The first Tamil and Bengali talkie films were released in 1931, and films in other languages soon followed. As these regional industries developed, small budgets and the need to cater along specific linguistic lines prompted filmmakers to develop aesthetics for highly segmented markets. In some ways, however, these film producers also had more latitude compared to the fledgling Bollywood industry, as directors could shape regional preferences by adapting existing popular genres such as mythologies, regional folk stories, and even stage theater to suit limited audiences.Footnote ¹¹²

Some contemporary observers believed that the constraints of regional cinema gave them a “greater sense of reality and cultural integrity.”Footnote ¹¹³ The themes explored in early regional cinemas often included the evils of caste, anxieties about premarital love, widow remarriage, self-desire versus collective good, religion and secularism, and after 1947, ideas of democracy oriented towards nation building.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Moreover, while mainstream Bollywood cinema cultivated characters with recognizable generic characteristics—such as being broadly urban or rural, rich or poor, upper or lower caste—regional cinema could present characters with greater nuance, with traits suggestive of a particular identity and locality, and therefore with more complexity. A closer look at how the Tamil film industry, which was based in Chennai (formerly Madras), developed shows some of this complexity, and demonstrates how regional cinema took its own path on issues of gender and skin color.

During the postwar decades, Tamil cinema was a prolific producer of films. Between 1984 and 1988 a total of 843 Hindi language films and 811 Tamil language films were produced, and in two of those years, more Tamil films were produced than Hindi films.Footnote ¹¹⁵ However, while Bollywood lacked strong political connections, and indeed earned the skepticism of the ruling Congress Party, Tamil cinema became entwined with the non-Brahmin movement and Dravidian nationalism. “Brahmin” refers to upper caste Hindu elites, while “Dravidian” refers to proponents of anti-Hindi and Tamil-language chauvinism. Both movements dated back to the early twentieth century, when resentment grew in the south of India at the dominance of Brahmins in colonial government jobs. The Tamil non-Brahmins began building a narrative that equated the powerful Brahmins with the Aryan civilization of northern India, which became associated with caste and inequality, while the non-Brahman Dravidian past was portrayed as egalitarian and democratic. These years saw a surge of interest in ancient Tamil classical books, which apparently supported this interpretation of history.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Politics became intertwined with regional cinema soon after Independence with the founding of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party in 1949. The DMK was a Dravidian party that advocated principles of social justice, anti-caste discrimination, and Tamil linguistic nationalism.Footnote ¹¹⁷ While Tamil films were initially largely mythology-based, the DMK began using cinema to launch film stars, progressive story lines, and regional nationalism.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Tamil cinema from the 1950s, one study suggested, “actively contested what they viewed as an exclusionary north Indian construction of nationhood.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

An early film, Parasakthi (1952), was scripted by M. Karunanidhi, a leader of the DMK, and a future chief minister of Tamil Nadu, a major state in southern India. The film focused on the trials and tribulations of a middle-class Tamil family's fall to poverty, especially the female lead, Kalyani, who was orphaned, widowed and impoverished. Reduced to selling rice cakes on the streets, Kalyani is a strong female protagonist who works as hard as her male colleagues. Through narrative, the film critiques the alleged sorry state of the Congress Party's policies.Footnote ¹²⁰

Despite such progressive themes in early films, Tamil cinema did not really contest gender stereotypes. In Parasakthi, the protagonist struggled to maintain her chastity throughout the film, and she was only safe once her brothers returned to town and protected her from the public. According to one scholar of Tamil culture, the film's critique operated largely within the realm of government and economy, not society.Footnote ¹²¹ Tamil movies were more political than their Bollywood counterparts were, and were more socially progressive, but they were not far ahead in breaking gender norms.

Indeed, one of the longer-term consequences of DMK-inspired films was a progressive degradation of women in Tamil cinema. At the outset, one study suggested that DMK films treated women as a “subset within the larger category of the downtrodden.”Footnote ¹²² By the 1960s, however, the DMK had identified Bollywood-style escapism as the primary way to gain viewership. The chief strategy was through portraying the typical male hero as the savior of women.Footnote ¹²³ Typically, these male heroes were cast with female actors who were much younger than them. In films like Rickshakaran (1971), Urimaikkural (1974) and Dr Siva (1975), these young female actors were primarily employed as vehicles to depict the virility of the lead actors—and by extension, those in the audience.

Sometimes, as in Bollywood, sex was more explicitly conveyed through the cabaret dancer cast opposite to the female heroine.Footnote ¹²⁴ As norms in Bollywood and Tamil cinema continued to converge, the latter started to feature scenes of sexual assault. The ideal Tamil woman transitioned, in the words of one film historian, from a “traditional, sari-clad, docile protagonist” to a “modern, scantily clad, mischievous woman, indicative of a pleasure object.”Footnote ¹²⁵

As striking was the sudden appearance of light-skinned female actors in the Tamil film industry, which had previously highlighted the variety of skin tones of the region. From the 1990s, light skinned actors from Mumbai and other parts of the country were brought into the industry, their voices dubbed into Tamil. The industry also started casting lighter-skinned female Tamil actors.Footnote ¹²⁶ International beauty pageant winners who were invariably lighter-skinned, like Aishwarya Rai, also entered the Tamil industry.Footnote ¹²⁷ It would seem that regional cinemas as a whole began to converge with Bollywood norms after liberalization began in 1991. Bengali regional cinema, for example, before the 1990s was broadly not characterized by cheap thrills, scenes degrading women, and the propagation of gender and ethnic stereotypes, but thereafter, convergence with Bollywood norms became evident.Footnote ¹²⁸

Bollywood's stereotypical treatment of women and its preference for light skin color was not, then, fully representative of Indian cinema between 1947 and 1991. The directors and actors in parallel cinema directly contested restrictive norms, and emphasized their negative social impact. They had no doubt that mainstream cinema was emboldening what they considered negative norms in Indian society. Meanwhile regional cinemas had their own narratives that did not always align with Bollywood. Yet Bollywood's setting of norms, and its success among Indian audiences left parallel cinema to court a more international audience. Indeed, parallel cinema films frequently won international prizes. The importance of language meant that regional cinemas were to some extent better placed to hold their audiences and offer alternative views, yet the success of Bollywood ultimately helped erode regional producers’ willingness to do so. The appearance and eventual dominance of fair-skinned female actors in Tamil cinema was indicative of the forces of convergence let loose in the era of economic liberalization.