Page 168 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

Diasporic Entrepreneurs and Digital Media >> 155

I have framed this discussion so far by positioning diasporic media and
culture between Bombay and Los Angeles, but it is crucial to also take into
account the influence that Chennai and Hyderabad, two other centers of
media production, wield. Chennai and Hyderabad are centers of Tamil-
and Telugu-language film and television production, and home to power-
ful media conglomerates, including the SUN TV network (Chennai) and
the Ramoji Group (Hyderabad). In contrast to Bollywood during the 1990s,
Tamil and Telugu cinema did not address diasporic communities or wrestle
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with the issue of reterritorializing diasporic Indians. Further, the distribu-
tion of Tamil and Telugu films across the world remains largely unorganized
and defined by informal networks involving merchants and grocery stores
that cater to South Asian communities, pirate networks that ensure the avail-
ability of DVDs within a few days of the film’s release in India, and a large
number of streaming video and BitTorrent websites. Television, however, is a
different story, as Divya McMillin’s overview of the SUN TV network makes
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clear. Managed by Kalanidhi Maran, member of the powerful Karunanidhi
family in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, SUN TV was launched as
a Tamil-language channel in 1993. Beginning with just three hours of pro-
gramming, SUN TV developed into a twenty-four-hour channel by 1995, and
went on to expand its line up by adding a news channel in 2000 (Sun News),
a music channel in 2002 (Sun Music), and a film-based channel (KTV) in
2004. During this time, the network also expanded into Telugu (Gemini TV),
Kannada (Udaya TV), and Malayalam-language (Surya TV) programming.
By 2002, audiences in the United States had access to SUN TV via the Dish
Network, and on other carriers in Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., Singa-
pore, Malaysia, China, and Russia. What McMillin’s account of the landscape
of Indian television companies’ global reach makes clear is the segmented
nature of the diasporic audience for Indian television and more importantly,
the difficulty of imagining a pan-Desi audience demographic. It is in relation
to these transformations in the media industries in India, particularly their
growing capacity to define media circulation in the diaspora, that I explore
the launch and failure of MTV-Desi.
MTV-Desi marks an important moment in the history of South Asian dia-
sporic media production and as a productive failure that signals a key shift
in the relationship between television and diasporic cultures. As Vicki Mayer
points out, examining such initiatives involves listening to stories about fail-
ure that media professionals narrate, including how they move on to the next
project, and often sheds light on what constitutes success in a given media
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landscape. But there is another perspective that I want to introduce. MTV-
Desi can also be seen as an experiment in situating Bollywood in relation