ARI Working Paper Series

In 2001 the diamond trader and movie financier Bharat Shah, one of Mumbai’s richest men, was arrested for financial links to the Dubai-based ‘gangster’ Chhota Shakeel. It was alleged that Shah’s complex financial dealings in the city included activities that the Indian state considered criminal, that these involved ‘mafia’ functioning from offshore locations, and that the city’s renowned film industry was an integral component of his financial empire: not so much for its scale but for its possibilities of absorbing invisible investments.

This paper argues that Shah’s business model for film financing adapted several practices taken from his other business interests such as the city’s real-estate economy, to make what turned out to be a significant intervention into the very process of valuating a film commodity. Such an economy moved well beyond the conventional ‘box-office’-determined limits of generating revenue. The revaluation was catalyzed primarily around the star, now used to generate a sector of ancillary ‘productions’ available for rental in financial operations that typically occurred through activities that were at best tangential to the conventional film production and exhibition. As several of these processes became visible through the 2000s, they often came together to define a film commodity’s IP (Intellectual Property), even as Shah’s intervention found itself gradually legalized into a new corporate economy around ‘Bollywood’.