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“It’s Not Your Dad’s Bollywood”

Diasporic Entrepreneurs and the Allure of Digital Media

Diasporic Entrepreneurs and Digital Media

In June 2003 the publicity event for Rajshri Productions’ film Main Prem Ki
Diwani Hoon in New York City was attended primarily by journalists and
public relations professionals working for various South Asian newspapers,
magazines, and popular diaspora-centric web portals like Sulekha.com. The
entire event lasted a hour, and went largely unnoticed by anyone besides this
small group of diasporic media professionals. By the fall of 2008, when the
South Asians in Media and Marketing Association (SAMMA) organized
its second annual convention, the influence that Indian media had come to
wield in the South Asian American mediascape and indeed, American pub-
lic culture at large, had changed dramatically.
Declaring that 2007–08 had been the year of South Asian entertainment,
Neal Shenoy, founding member of SAMMA, kicked off the 2008 SAMMA-
Summit (October 31–November 1) held at the Time Warner conference
center in New York City. In a glitzy room packed with over three hundred
professionals from film, television, advertising, and digital media companies,
Shenoy set the stage for a day-long series of panel discussions focused on
the growing influence of South Asian media and the increasingly promi-
nent role that South Asian media professionals of South Asian origin were
playing in shaping media and entertainment on a global scale. As images of
Padma Lakshmi (Top Chef), Sendhil Ramamurthy (Heroes), Mindy Kaling
(The Office), Kal Penn (The Namesake), and other instances of South Asian
representation in American film and television flashed behind him on a large
screen, Shenoy delivered his opening lines:

We learned that South Asians could play heroes outside of Bollywood
films; that we could evolve to far more substantive and accurate depic-
tions of our culture beyond the irate taxi driver and the equally irate
terrorist; that good books with universal storylines that feature India as
a character could make exceptional cinema. This year, we learned that
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