Page 129 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

116 << Dot-Coms and the Making of an Overseas Territory

Situating the emergence of the dot-com sector in India in relation to the
growing importance of film marketing and shifts in the practice of film dis-
tribution and exhibition, I show how dot-com companies imagined and
represented themselves as uniquely positioned to reconfigure a geographi-
cally vast yet poorly defined overseas territory into an overseas audience
and specifically, a “Non-Resident Indian” audience demographic. Speaking
a language of web-metrics and capitalizing on the growing interest in mar-
keting and promotions, dot-com companies began generating knowledge
about overseas audiences’ engagement with Bollywood that was hitherto
unavailable to filmmakers and stars operating primarily from Bombay. More
crucially, dot-com professionals were able to forge connections and estab-
lish themselves within existing social networks in Bombay’s media world. I
argue that in doing so, dot-com companies emerged as powerful knowledge
brokers who shaped the imaginations and practices of film industry profes-
sionals for whom envisioning an overseas territory had come to constitute an
increasingly important dimension of going global.
Mapping and analyzing this relationship between the film industry and
digital media companies foregrounds a broader theoretical issue at stake here.
Drawing on David Harvey’s argument that phases of transition in business
cycles and capital flows call for and result in a “spatial fix,” Michael Curtin out-
lines how a “logic of accumulation” shapes the operations of contemporary
media industries. Even if a film or television corporation is established with
the goal of catering to national cultures, Curtin writes, “it must over time rede-
ploy its creative resources and reshape its terrain of operations if it is to sur-
vive competition and enhance profitability.” This chapter focuses on dot-com
3
companies as a way to trace the reshaping of Bollywood’s terrain of operations
and in doing so, draws attention to the dynamic relation between the expan-
sion of capital into new territories and the work of rendering those new terri-
tories more imaginable. As we will see, what Bollywood got was, in fact, a very
limited spatiotemporal fix as dot-com companies interpreted and resolved the
problem of space—of imagining the overseas territory—in the exceedingly
narrow terms of overseas audiences’ cultural temporality with the nation.

Diasporic Foundations

In order to map this relationship between dot-com companies and the film
industry, we will first need to situate the emergence of companies like indi-
afm.com and indiatimes.com in relation to the development of the Internet
economy and, more broadly, the experience of cyberculture in India. Ravi
Sundaram’s analysis of the arrival of computer networking in India and the