Page 15 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

2<< Introduction

mapping the city’s links with other centers of finance, technology, the South
Asian diaspora, and creative work such as New York, Los Angeles, and Lon-
1
don, among others. Second, it is neither possible nor productive to concep-
tualize Bollywood as a film industry. Television and digital media have been
central to the circulation of Bollywood content across the world, in expand-
ing and redefining sites and modes of consumption, and enabling filmmak-
ers and stars to envision overseas markets and audiences.
This book focuses on these and other transitions to analyze the transfor-
mation of the Bombay film industry into a transnational and multimedia cul-
tural industry that the world has come to recognize as Bollywood. Bringing
together in-depth interviews with a range of media industry professionals,
ethnographic accounts of industry conventions and sites of media produc-
tion, and trade-press materials, my central goal in this book is to capture the
dynamics of a media industry in formation and thereby analyze how a media
industry in the postcolonial world imagines and claims the global as its scale
of operations. Scale, as the anthropologist Anna Tsing observes, is the “spa-
tial dimensionality necessary for a particular kind of view, whether up close
2
or from a distance, microscopic or planetary.” Tsing further argues that a
scale needs to be understood not just as a “neutral frame for viewing the
world,” but rather as something that “must be brought into being—proposed,
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practiced, evaded, as well as taken for granted.” Drawing on Tsing’s reflec-
tions on scale and scale-making, I approach the transition from Bombay cin-
ema to Bollywood as a particularly rich conjuncture for analyzing how the
“global” is variously imagined, acted upon, contested, and rearticulated. Thus
at a broader level, this book presents an analysis of globalization, especially
as it pertains to media and communications, and the capitalist frameworks
within which a majority of the world’s media systems have come to operate.
Of course, there is no denying that Bollywood has come to occupy a privi-
leged position in the study of media in India and processes of media global-
ization more generally. Scholars including Shanti Kumar and S. V. Srinivas are
surely right to point out that this focus on Bollywood provides too partial a
view of media globalization and marginalizes other centers of media produc-
tion that are also enmeshed in transnational circuits. In the Indian context,
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the Tamil and Telugu language film and television industries based in Chen-
nai and Hyderabad, for instance, are anything but “local.” The establishment
of powerful television corporations such as Sun TV and Eenadu TV during
the mid-1990s led to the creation of a translocal network of audiences based
not only in India and the “first world” diaspora in countries like the United
States, U.K., and Canada, but also brought in Tamil- and Telugu-speaking
communities in countries like Malaysia, Singapore, and South Africa. As in