She talked about the changes in Hindi film production from the 1990s until 2010, locating them in Hindi filmmakers’ efforts to accrue symbolic capital, social respectability, and professional distinction, and to manage the commercial uncertainties of filmmaking. She accompanied her talk by reading excerpts from the book. 

About the author

Dr. Tejaswini Ganti is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and its Program in Culture & Media at New York University. She has been conducting ethnographic research about the social world and filmmaking practices of the Hindi film industry since 1996. She has also written about the politics of commemorative rituals around cinema in Bombay, Hindi filmmakers’ practices of remaking Hollywood films, their tremendous ambivalence about song and dance sequences, how value and distinction is indexed and enacted within the Hindi film industry, and the industry’s complex relationship to state censorship. She is also the author of Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (2004; 2nd edition 2013).