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Dot-Coms and the Making of an Overseas Territory >> 117

Shree Ashtavinayak Cine Vision’s vision of Bollywood’s global reach is another example of
the growing significance of the overseas territory.

role played by diasporic Indians during the late 1980s–early 1990s is partic-
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ularly useful here. Sundaram argues that the Internet needs to be under-
stood in relation to a new nationalist imaginary that defined development
as a problem of communication. This new vision of development marked
a radical departure from what is characterized as the Nehruvian vision of
modernization and national development that defined state policy toward
science and technology for over three decades from 1947 until the early
1980s. Under Nehru’s leadership, the Indian state embarked on an ambitious
program of modernization driven by centralized planning, state ownership
of heavy industries, massive investments in industrial development, and an
accompanying emphasis on establishing institutes for higher education in
science, technology, and engineering. Sundaram observes that during the
1970s, this elite and exclusivist vision of national development was “grafted to
a highly centralized and repressive state” headed by Nehru’s daughter, Indira
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Gandhi. By the 1980s, with the “nationalist architecture” seriously in crisis, a
new approach was ushered in by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and his team
of technocrats led by the charismatic diasporic entrepreneur, Sam Pitroda.
Sundaram traces these shifts in the political landscape to make the case that
“state discourse after 1984 posed a virtual space where issues of development
would be resolved,” one in which the personal computer, the network, and