Page 133 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

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

not shed light on the creation of the dot-com economy as a distinct arena of
cyberculture in India. The fact is that even six years after the entry of private
ISPs and substantial reductions in the cost of Internet access, the number of
Internet users in India remained low. As of March 2004, even after the intro-
duction of broadband services, only 3.6 percent of the population was classi-
fied as being active Internet users and usage remained limited to an “urban
15
core” of the educated middle and upper-middle class. However, low rates of
penetration and usage did not seem to matter at all when it came to the cre-
ation of thousands of India-specific websites and the establishment of major
dot-com companies in India during this same time period. In fact, by the
end of 2001 the size of the Internet economy in India was estimated to be $22
billion. To grasp the paradoxical nature of this development, consider this
excerpt from a magazine feature written in May 2000, aptly titled “Is Anyone
Not Setting Up a Dotcom?”

This country has about 1 million Internet subscribers, perhaps 3 million
net-enabled users in all. If they were all in Bombay, that isn’t even every
fifth person. And yet, every billboard in Bombay is taken by a dotcom.
India this, Info that, My Search Engine, Your Personal Email, Woman
Power, Man Power, Kiddie Power . . . it boggles the mind . . . the maga-
zines the boys at the signal push at me, the newspaper my vada pav comes
wrapped in; they are all full of this alone. All the signs point to the Internet
and the World Wide Web, the brand new virtual world where lives and
fortunes will be remade. 16

This news feature, among hundreds of others published during 2000–2001,
pointed to the yawning gap between the promise of cyberspace and the
everyday realities of “third-world” India where a majority of the population
had no access to the Internet. But to emphasize digital divides in India is to
miss the significance of the development of the commercial web as a link
between “home” and “diaspora.” The development of the commercial web in
India, in other words, had a distinctly diasporic bias.

The NRI Web

The role played by American NRIs in shaping the discourse of globalization
in India, and more specifically, articulating the successes of the IT sector
to the adoption of neoliberal economic policies by successive Indian gov-
ernments during the 1990s, has been well documented. Paula Chakravarty,
for instance, has examined how “Indian cyber-elites . . . overturn[ed] the