Kitu Gidwani, a veteran of Indian entertainment with over four decades immersed in both Hindi cinema and television, offers a unique perspective on the industry’s evolution. Despite her extensive tenure, she remains unafraid to expose its inherent flaws, particularly concerning the contentious issues of intellectual property rights, royalty payments, and the scarcity of meaningful roles for aging actresses. Her recent statements draw a sharp contrast between the Indian system and practices prevalent in the Western entertainment landscape.
Gidwani candidly asserts that Bollywood, far from being a legitimate industry, operates more akin to a “cottage industry” with its own “vague rules.” She highlights the stark absence of a robust institutional framework comparable to Hollywood’s Screen Actors Guild in India. This lack of structure has severe ramifications, particularly regarding artist remuneration. Gidwani laments that, unlike her Western counterparts, she cannot envision working for a decade and then subsisting on royalties for the subsequent period. Instead, she finds herself compelled to “slog for 40 years.” The core of her grievance lies in the non-existent intellectual property and creative rights for artists in India. Producers, she explains, typically offer a one-time fee to actors and directors, subsequently gaining unfettered control over the creative property. This model, she emphasizes, is an anomaly globally.
Beyond the contentious debate surrounding royalties, Gidwani also expresses profound dissatisfaction with the industry’s systemic failure to craft compelling narratives for older female performers. She decries the pervasive trend of reducing experienced actresses to stereotypical, one-dimensional roles such as the generic “mother” or “maasi.” Her aspiration, and that of many actresses her age, is to portray “good, enduring roles” that encompass a wider spectrum of human experience, including elements of sensuality, romance, power dynamics, humor, and action. She points out the absurd reality within daily soaps, where women inexplicably transition into playing grandmothers in their thirties, despite exhibiting no visible signs of aging. This phenomenon, she concludes, underscores the industry’s “bizarre” nature.
Gidwani’s observations starkly underscore the fundamental differences between the Indian and Western entertainment ecosystems. In the West, well-established unions such as SAG-AFTRA for actors, and the WGA and DGA for writers and directors, respectively, provide crucial protection for their members. These unions have successfully established structured systems for residual payments, ensuring artists receive compensation whenever their work is re-broadcast after its initial airing. Whether a show is rerun on local television channels or licensed to major over-the-top (OTT) platforms, these systems dictate payouts, often based on a fixed-percentage formula or contingent on the specific terms of individual licensing agreements. This stark contrast highlights the significant ground India’s entertainment industry still needs to cover in establishing fair and equitable practices for its creative talent.
