Page 163 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

150 << Diasporic Entrepreneurs and Digital Media

media company that has emerged as the most prominent aggregator and dis-
tributor of Bollywood content in North America. The central question that
drives this chapter is: what does it take to conjure the diaspora as a viable
scale of media production and circulation in an age of global media capitals?
The goal is to examine MTV-Desi and Saavn.com as a way to understand
both the possibilities and challenges facing diasporic media entrepreneurs
as they negotiate a decidedly new phase of links between Bombay and Los
Angeles, and at the same time, a vast and networked culture of Desi media
that crisscrosses and transcends regional and national boundaries. Thus
the stories I narrate here about MTV-Desi and Saavn.com are also stories
about Non-Resident Indian and diasporic entrepreneurs working in a space
defined on the one hand by a rapidly changing American media system, and
on the other hand by increasingly influential Indian film and television com-
panies that are actively courting diasporic audiences and reshaping the ter-
rain of Desi culture.
“Desi,” which means “from the homeland,” is a term increasingly used to
refer to people of South Asian origin in various locations around the world
(but most prominently in North America and the United Kingdom). More
importantly, the term signals, as Shalini Shankar points out, “the shift from
South Asians as immigrants longing to return to a homeland to public con-
sumers and producers of distinctive, widely circulating cultural and lin-
3
guistic forms.” The term Desi thus moves discussions of cultural identities
past territorial boundaries and distinctions between those who reside in the
Indian subcontinent and those who live outside. There is, of course, a politics
to the term Desi, especially given the hegemonic position that India assumes
in terms of culture, politics, economics, and geography. Moreover, as Ama-
rdeep Singh points out, “Dravidian languages, for instance, do not have the
word desi, thus potentially limiting the recognition or usefulness of the term
4
even within South Asia.” I will return to this issue in greater detail at a later
point in this chapter to explore how such issues involving Desi identity shape
media industry practices. But for now, I want to signal the fact that where
commercial media ventures are concerned, Bollystan has a very specific
Anglo American cultural geography and as a consequence, reroots only cer-
tain kinds of Desis. As we will see, the network of cities that are part of dia-
sporic entrepreneurs’ imagination of Bollywood’s global reach include cities
such as London, New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto but not, for instance,
Durban in South Africa. And even within these cities in the Global North,
it is only a certain narrow, largely middle- and upper-middle class cultural
sphere of South Asians that informs the imaginations and practices of media
industry professionals.