“Is Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln a Hindi film?” laughs Nitin Govil, associate professor at the University of Southern California, at one point during our conversation. Govil is, of course, revelling in a rhetorical question, but his line of inquiry is deeper. In 2009, Anil Ambani’s Reliance Entertainment loaned $325 million to Spielberg’s production house, DreamWorks (besides investing the same amount a year after and $200 million three years later); it was a significant