Page 159 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

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

companies like indiafm.com positioned themselves as vehicles for market-
ing and promoting Bollywood films overseas, and capitalized on structural
and symbolic dimensions of corporatization to participate in and shape the
larger process of Bollywood going global.
However, the story of Bollywood’s relationship with overseas audiences—
Indian Americans in particular—is not just about Bombay-based industry
professionals’ imaginations of a multiplex with unlimited seats. Over the
past two decades, Bollywood’s cultural geography has also been transformed
by the efforts of diasporic media entrepreneurs. The next chapter thus
shifts focus to map and analyze the role played by diasporic media produc-
ers in rearticulating Bollywood’s relationship with the world. Outlining the
changing dynamics of migration and relations between “home” and “dias-
pora” since the mid-1990s, the next chapter traces changes in the diasporic
mediascape from grassroots and community-managed media production,
particularly the use of public access television, to the entry and dominance
of India-based television channels like ZEE, Star, and Sony Entertainment,
and finally the launch and failure of MTV-Desi, a niche television channel
for South Asian American youth. This analysis of diasporic television in turn
sets the stage for tracing the emergence of Saavn.com, one of the most influ-
ential Bollywood-focused diasporic media companies.
Further, all the chapters so far have been concerned with industry prac-
tices and the institutional dimensions of convergence between the film,
television, and dot-com sectors. In the following chapters, I foreground par-
ticipatory culture as a key dimension of Bollywood films and film music’s
transnational circulations and one that complicates any easy assumptions
regarding cultural temporality between “home” and “diaspora.” Media circu-
lation both within and outside the territorial boundaries of India is defined
by a vast and networked pirate culture that crisscrosses not only regional,
national, and diasporic boundaries but more importantly, moves beyond the
Anglo American diaspora to include countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Fiji,
and Nigeria as key nodes in Bollywood’s emergent cultural geography. The
next two chapters thus reflect on what it takes to conjure the diaspora as a
viable scale of media production and circulation in a terrain defined not only
by changing relations between Bombay and Los Angeles but perhaps more
crucially, by informal networks of media circulation that commercial media
ventures find nearly impossible to match in scale and scope.