Page 16 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

Introduction >> 3

the case of Hindi-language television channels like Star and ZEE, film-based
content constitutes a major part of these television channels’ programming.
The use of the term “regional” to mark these industries’ position within the
Indian mediascape and the Indian state’s material and symbolic investments
in Bollywood certainly underscore the continued relevance of the “national”
as a scale where the politics of media globalization play out. 5
However, I would argue that one way to address this problem is to make
Bollywood more specific. In other words, in addition to developing accounts
of media industries in other cities within India, we also need to map the
many forces that produced Bollywood as the Indian global media industry
in order to reveal the presentist and limited nature of that globalism. Brian
Larkin’s careful mapping of circuits and patterns of distribution of Bombay
cinema in Nigeria, and Sudha Rajagopalan’s analysis of the circulation and
consumption of Indian cinema in the erstwhile Soviet Union are important
reminders of other trajectories and articulations of the “global” in the history
6
of the Bombay film industry. Further, as Ravi Vasudevan observes, when we
consider the fact that “regional distribution offices across the Middle East,
North, East, and South Africa date back to the 1940s and were feeding into a
particular market for ‘Arabian night stories’ and Laila Majnu, Shireen Farhad
style love legends,” it becomes clear that we need to be far more grounded
and precise in our use of terms like global and transnational. 7
My analysis of the transition from Bombay cinema to Bollywood is thus
set within the sociohistorical conjuncture of the past two decades—from
1991, when economic reforms initiated by the Indian government led to
large-scale political and sociocultural transitions across the country, to the
present. I argue that the emergence of Bollywood as a global media indus-
try rests on profoundly uneven and contested spatial transformations across
three interrelated fields: first, the reconfiguration of national space in trans-
national terms, marked in particular by the state’s creative responses and
efforts to refigure its relationship with the diaspora as well as the media and
entertainment industries; second, the reinvention of Bombay as a global city
in this period of economic and cultural globalization, and its position as a
key node in multiple transnational networks of capital and cultural produc-
tion; and third, the phenomenal expansion of India’s mediaspace, character-
ized by the rapid development of the television, advertising, Internet, and
mobile phone industries as well as increasing levels of technological and
industrial convergence among them.
In relation to these broader shifts, chapters in this book tackle sev-
eral other questions, themes, and issues. Tracing changes in state policy
toward media and entertainment, I explore how various people and groups