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Diasporic Entrepreneurs and Digital Media >> 149

Produced by Saavn.com, a New
York-based digital media company,
and distributed to everyone who
attended the SAMMA-Summit, such
industry artifacts signal how crucial
Bollywood has become for diasporic
media professionals.

the Fall 2004 issue of Another Magazine, a now defunct publication targeted
at “young, upwardly mobile South Asians.” Featuring Bollywood star Aish-
warya Rai on the cover, the magazine declared: “Bollystan is a state without
borders, defined by a shared culture and common values.” Using the term
Bollystan to refer to a vast space of transnational cultural production that
included everything from henna tattoos and remix music to literature and
films, Khanna and other writers sought to map how rapid flows of people,
culture, and capital across national borders have rendered difficult any easy
separation between nation and diaspora. In fact, Khanna proceeded to argue
that Bollystan is “cosmopolitanism’s inversion: instead of one person being
at home anywhere, it is re-rooting Desis everywhere in a real and imagined
shared cultural space.” 2
In this chapter, I examine the production of this “real and imagined
shared cultural space” by focusing on the role played by diasporic media
entrepreneurs in shaping Bollywood’s transnational circulation. Diasporic
media companies have historically operated as small-scale and often, though
not always, family-run enterprises. Tracing how this has changed over the
past decade, I examine two recent diasporic media initiatives—MTV-Desi,
a television channel that sought to target South Asian American youth but
only lasted eighteen months, and Saavn.com, a New York-based digital