4.1: Introduction
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- Shanti Kumar
- University of California Press
In this chapter, I argue that Bollywood must be understood as a vital force of immaterial labor for the affective contagion of mass creativity in urban India. I focus on the some of the many reasons why politicians, policymakers, film stars, filmmakers, and business leaders in India are turning their attention to the infrastructure of cinema as a potential resource for attracting economic capital and creative labor in urban and semiurban areas. The fusion of cinematic infrastructure with urban architecture is most evident in Indian cities and towns that have, or are planning to have, a “film city” in their master plans for urban development. Recent examples of this popular trend include the inauguration near Kolkata with much fanfare of Prayag Film City by the Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan in April 2012; the announcement in August 2012 by actor Jackie Shroff of his investment in a partnership to build a mini–film city in Ahmedabad; the proposal by the Bihar chief minister, Nitish Kumar, in November 2012 to build a Film City near Patna in response to intense lobbying by actors from the Hindi and Bhojpuri film industries; plans by the Uttar Pradesh chief minister, Akhilesh Yadav, in October 2012 to create an IT/Film City in Lucknow; and much-advertised plans by the corporate powerhouse Sahara India to build the Sahara Pariwar Film City in its Aambi Valley development project near Pune.
Figure 1: The inauguration of Prayag Film City by the Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan in 2012 represented the fusion of cinematic infrastructure with the urban environment. Khan is shown here at the Berlin Film Festival in 2008. Photo credit: Siebbi, via Wikimedia Commons.
The mobilization of the film industry and its infrastructure, including cinema halls, shooting locations, and production facilities, for generating economic development and sustaining growth in urban, semiurban, and rural areas is hardly new in India. For instance, these proposals for film cities take their inspiration from the pioneering efforts of Ramoji Film City, built near Hyderabad in 1996, and Innovative Film City near Bengaluru, which opened in 2008. Many academic studies have detailed the central role that cinema halls, film studios, cinematic narratives, and Bollywood-inspired consumer culture have played for many decades now in producing and sustaining India’s nationalist visions and developmental goals. However, what is new about the recent spate of proposals for film cities is the way the immaterial infrastructure of Bollywood is being integrated into to the future designs and architectures of urban life as a whole in India.
Drawing on Nigel Thrift’s concept of “affective cities,” I examine how film cities—and plans for film cities—are being used in several cities and towns in India to produce and manage mass creativity by transforming urban life into social factories of immaterial labor. 1 As Maurizio Lazzarato defines it, “immaterial labor” is labor that produces the informational and cultural content of a commodity. 2 The informational aspect of immaterial labor refers to the ways digital technologies, computer networks, and cybernetic controls are becoming integral to the labor practices that workers used traditionally to perform in spaces such as the factory floor. The cultural aspect of immaterial labor involves the affect value of the practices of social life in areas such as fashion, tastes, traditions, and norms, which are usually not deemed relevant to matters of labor in the workplace. As information technologies have become central to all sorts of workplaces in recent times, immaterial labor has become more integral to practices of work and social life at large, according to Lazzarato. The result is that labor is increasingly becoming more “intellectual” in society, and the commodities created through practices of immaterial labor are not only goods made in a factory but also the products of “mass intellect” or “mass creativity” in social life.
I argue that Thrift’s concept of “affective cities” is a powerful framework for analyzing how practices of immaterial labor in urban life are shifting the focus of work from capital–labor relations (in spaces such as the factory floor) to capital–life relations (in society at large). Using Thrift’s concept of affective cities in relation to Lazzarato’s theory of immaterial labor, I examine how cities in India are trying to tap into the immaterial labor of Bollywood by mobilizing film cities for the production and management of mass creativity in urban life as a whole. In this context, immaterial labor in Bollywood is not strictly limited to what is traditionally understood as the creative process of making a film. Instead, it is the workers and consumers at large who produce a range of immaterial goods and services through the constant exchange of communication, information, and knowledge about the film commodity in the political, economic, technological, cultural, and affective realms of social relations. The film city, I argue, is a concrete embodiment of the many ways in which the immaterial infrastructure of Bollywood is being fused with the traditional architectures of cities and towns in India to meet the growing demands of—and desires for—mediated mobilities in the twenty-first century