4.4: Conclusion

In this chapter, I have argued that Nigel Thrift’s theory of “affective cities” can be a powerful tool for analyzing the rise and popularity of film cities in India. Drawing on Thrift’s theorizations of affect, I have examined how the buzz generated by the circulation of Bollywood’s glamour and star power is becoming integral to urban planning and development in India. I have tried to show how—beyond the economic value of creative clustering—the concept of a film city adds value to urban life in the affective realm due to Bollywood’s immense popularity as a cultural phenomenon.

With growing media capacity—from low-cost outsourcing to high-tech film cities—in peripheral locations of Bollywood, workers in midsize cities and small towns in India are finding more options for immaterial labor through telecommuting, freelancing, flex time, and so on. But this kind of work does not provide the guarantees of traditional forms of industrial labor with union contracts or state-sponsored employment. The rising precarity of labor relations produced through the immaterial exchanges of media, information, and communication has put pressure on state authorities to provide a semblance of stability and order in the everyday lives of their citizens.

However, due to the growing interconnectedness and rapid deterritorialization of the global economy, the traditional command-and-control structures of the Indian nation-state are no longer capable of exerting—or inclined to exert—their sovereign authority over their territories and populations. Moreover, since the global economy also enhances possibilities for producers across the world to be in direct contact with each other, labor-capital relations can be remotely managed in various locations, often without recourse to the central authority of the nation-state. As the task of regulating global-local relations shifts toward state governments and regional authorities, film cities—or plans for film cities—have emerged as the blueprints of a new architecture for the capture and control of capital and the management and dissemination of creative labor by mobilizing the immaterial productions of cinema in the social life of cities in India.