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Dot-Coms and the Making of an Overseas Territory >> 145

Excel spreadsheets presenting an array of web metrics, would render the vast
overseas territory more readily imaginable as an “NRI audience.” For profes-
sionals like Mobhani, Qureshi, and Trehan, this meant that the attempt to
envision an overseas audience required the continual navigation of temporal
gaps between domestic and overseas, home and abroad. In other words, the
question of space—of mediating Bollywood’s relationship with an overseas
audience—was interpreted and resolved in terms of cultural temporality. This
spatiotemporal fix was successful, I would further argue, insofar as it allowed
dot-com companies to establish a sense of control over categories like “over-
seas audience” that are, as Shanti Kumar would suggest, best understood
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as “unimaginable communities.” As distinct from the finite, limited, and
bounded nature to the imagined communities of print capitalism that Bene-
dict Anderson defined, Kumar argues that the “unimaginable communities
of electronic capitalism . . . are infinite, limitless, and unbounded,” given
the nature of contemporary media circulation across varied spatial scales. 65
Media flows, Kumar further argues, are “unimaginable both in a literal sense
of being at the technological limits of imaginative access and in a figurative
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sense of becoming limitless in imaginary excess.” But the fix that the Bom-
bay-based dot-com companies offered came at a considerable cost. Far from
offering Bollywood even a glimpse of an infinite audience—a “multiplex with
unlimited seats,” in Rajat Barjatya’s imagination—and grappling with the
uneven and heterogeneous terrain of diasporic media circulation and con-
sumption, Bombay-based dot-com companies reduced the overseas territory
to a narrowly construed, primarily U.S.-U.K.-centered “NRI audience.” To
be sure, these companies did succeed in positioning Bollywood as a cultural
industry capable of imagining and institutionalizing an overseas audience.
However, the notion of a temporal fix allows us to see how these compa-
nies’ representational practices and strategies ignored, if not suppressed, the
unevenness that marks Bollywood’s expansion into new territories.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have traced the emergence of dot-com companies as key
intermediaries who could reconfigure a vast and vaguely defined overseas
territory into an enumerable “NRI audience” and thereby shape the film
industry’s imagination of an overseas territory. I began by situating the devel-
opment of the dot-com sector in relation to what I have called the diasporic
bias of the Internet in the Indian context, and how dot-com companies relied
on and leveraged the Indian diaspora in first world countries to become both
commercially viable and culturally significant. I then detailed how dot-com