The Neoliberal Self in Bollywood: Cinema, Popular Culture, and Identity

By Namrata Rele Sathe

This book explores the consequences of unbridled expansion of neoliberal values within India through the lens of popular film and culture. The focus of the book is the neoliberal self, which, far from being a stable marker of urban, liberal, millennial Indian identity, has a schizophrenic quality, one that is replete with contradictions and oppositions, unable to sustain the weight of its own need for self-promotion, optimism, and belief in a narrative of progress and prosperity that has marked mainstream cultural discourse in India. The unstable and schizophrenic neoliberal identity that is the concern of this book, however, belies this narrative and lays bare the sense of precarity and inherent inequality that neoliberal regimes confer upon their subjects.

The analysis is explicitly political and draws upon theories of feminist media studies, popular culture analyses, and film studies to critique mainstream Hindi cinema texts produced in the last two decades. Rele Sathe also examine a variety of other peripheral ‘texts’ in her analysis such as the film star, the urban space, web series, YouTube videos, and social media content.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Feb 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9781789388817

Namrata Rele Sathe

Namrata Rele Sathe holds a Ph.D in media studies and is currently a postdoctoral fellow affiliated to the School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences at Krea University, Sri City. She is the assistant editor of Studies in South Asian Film and Media. Her research interests include feminist media studies, literary studies, gender and sexuality studies, and popular culture.

Book preview

Introduction:

The Future that Never Was

Choices, choices: The myth of neoliberal progress in India

The launch of the #VogueEmpower India campaign in 2015 – advertised via a short film featuring Hindi film actor Deepika Padukone – raised eyebrows and (as expected) caused a stir in the Indian public sphere. While many hailed the two-minute-long film, which celebrated women and their freedom to have and make ‘choices’, as the ultimate feminist statement, others denounced it as a repudiation of culturally mandated traditions of womanhood, sexuality, and feminine decorum. The film epitomizes early-millennial faith and enthusiasm in the semblance of freedom of choice offered by consumerist culture and technological advancement, especially in the area of gender and sexual identity. The video – which went viral within days of its release and at the time of writing has over twelve million views on YouTube – also testifies to the centrality of social media platforms in generating popular culture discourse, that now is a matter of routine, but was, even in as recent a year as 2015, in its nascent stage.

The Vogue video featured, most prominently, Padukone and a host of other famous women from the fields of acting, filmmaking, fashion modelling, and other media/glamour industry careers. As the women twirl, smile teasingly at the camera, dance, and scream in aesthetic, slow motion shots filmed almost entirely in black-and-white, Padukone's voice-over repeats, almost fetishistically, the phrase ‘my choice’, and asserts that women's choices in matters of love, romance, sexual orientation, and dress should not be policed, but respected. The advertisement might have been well-intentioned, but a deeper analysis of the ideology of choice behind the video immediately brings up certain key problems (see Khanna 2019), the foremost being its embeddedness in the exaltation of neoliberal feminist subjectivity.

This campaign, initiated by high-end fashion and celebrity culture magazine Vogue India, posits that a woman must have the freedom to choose her career, her sexuality, and her attire among other things. In this, the advertisement is speaking directly to the conservative notion of the idealized Indian woman who is defined by her participation in heteronormative marriage and the domestic space. However, a closer examination of the many women appearing in the video shows that these are mainly affluent and well-known celebrity women. The only images of rural women are stock pictures as opposed to the celebrity women who are captured in live motion. Vogue India envisages emancipation as reflected in its own audience: upper-class women who can afford to buy an English-language magazine that costs INR 150 rupees (approximately USD 2.50) per month. I will not be too hasty in dismissing the Vogue Empower advertisement as it raises pertinent questions with regard to a woman's freedom and engages in the politics of sexuality, but the ideas expressed in the video are embedded within the economic context of neoliberalism. I begin this book with the example of the Vogue Empower campaign as it enables me to introduce the main concern of this book: the link between neoliberal subjectivity, choice, gender, and sexuality, (re)presented as a given, an always already present privilege that the pursuit of individuality built around neoliberal values bestows upon its subjects.

This book is a social history of the times we live in and how we got here; my analyses of cultural texts through the course of the book rest on the intersection of feminist studies of culture and media and neoliberal subjectivity. My primary argument is that neoliberal subjectivity, far from being a stable marker of urban, liberal, millennial Indian identity, has a schizophrenic quality, one that is replete with contradictions and oppositions, unable to sustain the weight of its own need for self-promotion, optimism, and belief in a narrative of progress and prosperity that has marked mainstream cultural discourse in India. The unstable and schizophrenic neoliberal identity that is the concern of this book, however, belies this narrative and lays bare the sense of precarity and inherent inequality that neoliberal regimes confer upon their subjects.

To illustrate my argument, I focus on cultural texts that have occupied the popular imagination in India, particularly in the last twenty years, starting with the turn of the century. I deploy mainstream Hindi cinema texts as repositories of current ideological currents to demonstrate how contemporary Hindi cinema, as a cultural expression of neoliberalism, has tended to celebrate the assimilation of neoliberal values in everyday life. Rather than adopting a critical stance towards the crisis of inequality and the devaluation of quality of life that has occurred as a result of neoliberalism, popular Hindi cinema has taken to celebrating values of entrepreneurialism and affluence to represent them as desirable. This has resulted in a thoroughly apolitical and complacent cultural sphere, disengaged from everyday realities in India. Along with Hindi films, I have referenced a wide variety of other peripheral ‘texts’ in my analysis such as the film star, the urban space, web series, YouTube videos, and social media content. There are two reasons for this analytical strategy: one, it is impossible to speak about cinema as an isolated form in our times of globalized, interconnected media systems. No media text exists in an airless vacuum these days but breathes through several intertextual references simultaneously. The second is that popular films tend to be conformist and formulaic as a commercial product and avoid risk-taking in terms of subject matter. Peripheral texts, produced outside of the behemoth of the Bollywood culture industry, thus enable a more layered understanding of the cultural politics of contemporary India. As Ashvin Devasundaram has argued, films and other texts which float outside of conventional Bollywood narratives offer ‘micronarratives’ that provide a ‘nuanced, multifaceted, self-appraising and alternative insight into India’ (2018: 2). In this, they function as the Other of Bollywood and mainstream Indian cinema, interrogating the very locations of the schizophrenic split and representing the lives and stories of those who suffer directly from the structural and economic changes brought about by India's neoliberal turn.

The early period of economic liberalization in India, the 1990s, engendered a sense of optimism and forward-looking aspiration in the national imagination and culture. This faith in novelty and change, for the urban middle-classes, was a result of the increase in incomes in white-collar jobs and the availability of greater choices in the commodity market for consumers. Thirty years later, the fantasy of wealth and abundance that was supposed to transform the country into a thriving superpower is visibly cracking as social reality has not kept up with the promises afforded by economic liberalization. The most recent World Inequality Report of 2022 states that India is a ‘poor and very unequal country with an affluent elite’, wherein the top 10 per cent of the Indian population holds a staggering 64 per cent of the nation's wealth and earns a 57 per cent share in the country's income.¹ These astronomical differences in increasing wealth gap have created an atmosphere of everyday violence, divisiveness, and despair.

I also have a personal stake in telling this story. I grew up from being a teenager to a working professional in this millennial phase of the past twenty years and writing this book was also an attempt to fully comprehend the changes that were taking place around me (in rapid and often deeply obfuscated ways). Therefore, this is an attempt to process the current situation from the inside out, from the personal to the theoretical, the minute to the detailed, and the mundane to the significant, where, as a feminist media theorist, I deliberately position myself within the themes I have focused on in the four chapters that make up the body of this book. The realities of work precarity, of romantic relationships, of being a woman who has had to navigate urban spaces alone, and my fascination for Priyanka Chopra (that I am ambivalent about owning up to) – are all events that were personally relevant first and I hope, via this work, will become matters of general interest.

I came of age in the early years of the new millennium and to me, as a young person, the changes that took place in my environment seemed like a sign that my country was progressing towards a sparkling future. In this future, we could be anyone we desired, we could have anything we wanted. The sudden cornucopia of things and experiences brought on by the freshly liberalized economy was overwhelming for someone who had grown up middle-class and had always been taught to save, repair, reuse, and pass on. Now there were multiplex theatres playing several films, like on television, from which you could choose what you wanted to watch. You could shop in brightly lit malls, a far cry from the curmudgeonly old shopkeepers in the city that I grew up in, who first asked you about your ‘budget’ and then showed you products accordingly. Instead, in the mall, you would be greeted by a smiling assistant, who would cheerfully assist you in finding what you desired. There was no need to stand on the roadside in the afternoon heat sipping tea in a tiny glass from a chai tapri (a tea shack); instead, you could spend hours chatting with friends over a cup of cappuccino at an airconditioned chain coffee shop. But these products, these experiences were only a mirage offered by the new economy, a future that promised all this to everyone, but delivered only to a few. I was naïve then; I know better now.

Writing this book was a way of coming to terms with that future: the one that was lost and, possibly, the one that never was.

Neoliberalism and its discontents

Neoliberalism is an economic system that foregrounds privatization of services, deregulation and relaxation of state intervention in economic matters, rollback of social welfare programs, and promotion of entrepreneurship as an ethic in every sphere of life. It represents a return to the founding principles of classical liberalism, that is, upholding the free market as a fundamental value. Neoliberalism privileges individual freedom and enterprise. The role of the state is not to serve as a regulatory body that mitigates inequality or redistributes wealth but to consolidate the interests of the socio-economic elite and corporate profits by withdrawing social welfare and rolling back laws that offer protections to labour. After independence from British imperial rule in 1947, India's economy was inspired by socialist principles. The government of newly independent India adopted a ‘mixed-economy approach’ in which ‘major investments [were part of] the public sector’ with ‘some sectors remaining open to private capital’ (Ahmed 2011: 33). The Indian state prioritized national development, restricting imports in favour of self-sufficiency and self-correcting mechanism in major sectors such as food, infrastructure, and industry. However, in 1991, India officially became a liberalized economy, opening avenues for large-scale foreign private investment and entry of multinational corporations.

The policy changes implemented by the Indian government – euphemistically called ‘structural adjustments’ in official parlance – were undertaken to improve what was considered a slow rate of economic growth. In reality, the government was coerced by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in exchange for loans. These policy changes had the ‘endogenous support’ of India's elite, ‘represented in class [and] caste power’ (Ahmed 2011: 33) – an already wealthy and powerful group of people that largely resided and owned businesses in urban areas. The shift to neoliberalism in India, thus, was never ideologically neutral and occurred in keeping with the self-interest of the business and affluent classes (Heller and Fernandes 2006; Kapur 2014). Any ‘development’ that is attributed to neoliberalism in India has been heavily skewed towards the increase in the wealth of a minority urban elite population, while the peripheral majority of poor urban locales, small towns, and rural areas remain comparatively underdeveloped.

Increasing social inequality and disparity in the distribution of resources, as David Harvey explains in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, is not just a fallout of neoliberal policy, but ‘structural to the project’ (2005: 16). Harvey further explains that ample evidence exists to suggest that an associated feature of neoliberalism is the ‘restoration […] of the power of economic elites’ (2005: 19). In the case of India – which up until its liberalization was an underdeveloped economy on a slow path to recovery from the ravages of British imperial rule – this fact is starkly visible in its cities. The neoliberal Indian city is a spectacle of contrasts, as Waquar Ahmed, Amitabh Kundu, and Richard Peet argue, where India's neoliberal policy has translated into

lots more money and power for a relative few, located in the elite spaces of India's glittering cities, and utter deprivation and exploitation for the masses, sleeping on the streets, encamped in urban slums, and struggling to survive in over half a million villages.

(2011: 10)

India was never a classless society; the social and economic division between people was exacerbated by the caste system, but the influx of global capital and culture has deepened the split between the haves and have-nots.

The enthusiastic embrace of neoliberalism by the urban elite has turned Indian cities into what Swapna Banerjee-Guha calls ‘incubators of neoliberal strategies’ (2011: 77). The haphazard execution of development schemes such as the building of roads and flyovers, subway systems, malls and office buildings, and elite housing, as per Banerjee-Guha, has resulted in an ‘intense conflict due to the imposition of the neoliberal framework, reflecting contestation between global society and segmented localized communities’ (2011: 77). Consequently, the urban space in present-day India is a setting of stark contrasts: slums and lower-class housing stand right opposite middle and upper-class apartment buildings; little tea stalls and fast-food handcarts park themselves in front of shiny malls; and smartly dressed corporate employees spend long working days in state-of-the-art office complexes built by extremely poor migrant and informal labourers.

In his account of post-liberalization India, Siddhartha Deb writes about the countryside as gradually being swallowed up by growing cities. Deb mentions the role of Special Economic Zones (SEZs): ‘wetlands or agricultural plots’ (2011: 121) acquired by the government to build infrastructure such as commercial offices, roads, housing, and malls, all geared towards the upper and middle classes. The website of the Indian Ministry of Commerce and Industry lists that its goals for promoting such zones are increasing ‘foreign and domestic investment’, generating employment and improving overall economic activity. However, as Deb argues in his analysis, this ‘urban expansion’ has excised a whole class of Indians, especially farmers, from the ‘mainstream accounts of progress’ (2011: 121). Economic progress in India, generally measured in popular accounts based on how ‘World Class’ its cities look, is a one-sided story that has further marginalized those who were already on the periphery of society.²

Rana Dasgupta interprets this privatization of public land in cities in terms of a lack of continuity between outside spaces and the inner sanctums of coffee shops and malls. He states that globalization in India brought with it a culture of ‘Americanization’ – as seen in the pervasive presence of shops selling US-based brands – but not equality, as it failed to positively affect any aspect of the lives of millions who lived in poverty. Dasgupta indicts the mall as being a ‘rapacious economic torrent’ (2014: 95) that became a greenhouse for the growth of global brands, but only after it had destroyed the lives of people who may have lived or farmed on the land