Page 17 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

4<< Introduction

associated with Bollywood negotiated and articulated what it meant to “go
global.” How was the notion of corporatization, for instance, normalized as
exactly what the industry needed in order to refashion itself as Bollywood?
Exploring the world of marketing and promotions, I analyze the ways in
which the film industry responded to new circuits of capital that became
available in Bombay following the establishment of transnational television
and advertising corporations. Situating the workings of the film industry
within the broader mediaspace of Bombay, my approach opens up an oppor-
tunity to understand, for example, how family-run businesses like Dharma
Productions (Karan Johar) tackled the challenges and opportunities that
this period of transition presented. Moving beyond questions of reception
in diasporic contexts, I examine how digital media companies established by
South Asian American entrepreneurs in New York have forged relations with
Bollywood to create new and unexpected trajectories of media circulation.
Overall, I conceptualize Bollywood as a zone of cultural production
shaped by multiple sites of mediation, including the operations and social
worlds of industry professionals, state policies, technological and industrial
shifts, and audience practices—all simultaneously dependent on, yet not
completely determining one another. While my primary orientation is in
the field of media and cultural studies, in the course of writing this book I
have drawn from a range of disciplines and in particular, recent historical
and ethnographic work on media cultures outside Anglo American contexts.
In doing so, I hope to contribute not only to scholarship on media and public
culture in India and the Indian diaspora but more broadly, to expand our
understanding of the histories and patterns of media convergence as well as
the spatial dynamics of media globalization.

Beyond Film, Toward a History of Media Convergence
In 2003, the New Delhi-based Seminar magazine invited a group of media
scholars to “unsettle cinema.” The objective, as Bhrigupati Singh outlined
in his opening essay, was to grapple with the question: What sort of an
object is cinema in India? Singh went on to situate this question in relation
to the transformation of India’s mediaspace since the early 1990s and to
assert that Ashis Nandy’s view of popular cinema being a “slum’s eye view
8
of Indian politics” had become nearly impossible to sustain. Writing in the
mid-1990s, Nandy had famously argued that “both the cinema and the slum
in India show the same impassioned negotiation with everyday survival.” 9
Arguing that this articulation was no longer possible, Singh wrote: “The
object that Nandy, even till as recently as 1995, could refer to as ‘cinema’