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

which he felt made for “more effective cinema” than films focused on issues of class exploitation. He referred to films revolving around personal relationships and generational conflict as “international,” and described Yaadein (Memories) the film that he was currently working on: “I am making a movie of a British Indian who has been living there for the last twenty-five, thirty years, and his three daughters have been brought up there. He. . . is very orthodox, very conservative. The daughters are not, so the conflict of values—what happens and how he handles his three daughters, and how the three daughters handle him—is the theme of Yaadein ” (Ghai, interview, October 2000). Ghai felt that the issue of generational conflict transcended the limitations of culture and nation, reasoning that the film would appeal to people living in Britain and in India, unlike films focusing on farmers or zamindars (rural landlords)— issues he felt were specific to India.
    Expressing his relief that he was not limited to making films about “U.P., Bihar, or Punjab,” Ghai asserted that films about personal relationships enabled him to grow as a filmmaker. He implicated changes in audiences as allowing him to finally break free from restrictive mindsets and realize his full potential as a filmmaker:
    I am completing my twenty-five years as a director now. In 1991 I started feeling that I am jogging in the same place, because as a director, and as a visionary, and as a person I have grown, but I had to make those films only—rural films—all the time. I was now allowed to try other parameters, which is happy news for a progressive filmmaker like me—that you can go ahead, think something new, innovate something; then people are going to accept that. That’s why I could go for Taal , otherwise I would have made a very sentimental, highly melodramatic film, which I used to make—like Ram Lakhan or Karma —in the ’80s. So, the evolvement and development you see in my cinema, it is thankfully [due] to the growth of the audience also. (Ghai, interview, October 2000)
    Ghai’s presentation of self is mediated through the choice of narrative focus and the figure of the audience. Ghai portrays certain topics as morereflective of his cosmopolitan outlook—which is what I think he means by “progressive”—and credits audiences for enabling him to realize his potential as a filmmaker. Like Ramesh Sippy, Ghai represents his evolution as a filmmaker as an intersubjective experience where (imagined) audiences play a significant role in fashioning his filmmaking practice.
    This section has delved into some detail about how the social world of filmmakers, changes in the media landscape, and trends in Hindi filmmaking from the mid-’90s resulted in a gentrified cinema, in terms of both the content and style of films. This gentrified—or in the words of the filmmakers above, more “modern,” less “feudal,” not as “silly,” more “international”—cinema is the starting point for Hindi films to be regarded as “cool.” However, what truly enables Hindi films to arrive socially, and what allows filmmakers to make the films they really want, hinted at by Ghai above, is the arrival of the multiplex. 25

THE ARRIVAL OF COOL: THE MULTIPLEX
    “What I think is the best thing that has happened to the Indian film industry in the last five years are multiplexes,” declared Meghna Ghai-Puri, Subhash Ghai’s daughter and the president of Whistling Woods International— a film school started by her father in 2006. We were sitting in her office at Whistling Woods, located in Film City, a sprawling state-owned film and television production facility in Goregaon East, a northern suburb of Bombay. It was May 2006, and we were discussing the changes that had taken place in filmmaking since the turn of the millennium. Continuing with her praise of the multiplex, which centered on the smaller seating capacities of the theaters,