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of Desi youth culture while also becoming commercially viable, perhaps it is
also worth asking if we can expect television, in its current form and struc-
ture, to play a crucial role in expanding Bollywood’s reach. Do digital media
platforms allow for more flexible and productive links across spatial scales?
What might the fortunes of a company like Saavn.com tell us about the work
of creating a circuit of media circulation that is able to leverage changing
relations between national, global, and diasporic audiences in ways that a
television channel like MTV-Desi could not?

“It’s Not Your Dad’s Bollywood”

The last panel of the SAMMA-Summit of 2008, titled “It’s Not Your Dad’s
Bollywood: The Upstarts behind a New Generation of South Asian-Inspired
Content and Distribution Companies,” brought together three diasporic
entrepreneurs who had launched digital media companies with ties to Bol-
lywood. Given that the title signals a generational break, we might begin by
asking: What was Dad’s Bollywood for Vin Bhat (Saavn.com), Anjula Acha-
ria-Bath (Desihits.com), and Geetanjali Dhillon (Jaman.com)?
As Bhat and Dhillon recalled, Dad’s Bollywood was what they grew up
with in their homes and communities in the United States: weekend screen-
ings at a community hall or in a university auditorium, often arranged by
an enterprising South Asian family; film music played at home or in cars
on road trips with other South Asian families; dances performed at com-
munity events; and most crucially, one-hour programs featuring Bollywood
songs on the local Public Access Station every Saturday or Sunday morning.
Supported by advertising from South Asian grocery stores, restaurants, and
companies like Western Union, these television shows were also locally pro-
duced or, at best, purchased from the New Jersey-based Asian Variety Show.
For Acharia-Bath, who grew up in the U.K. and moved to the United States
as a working professional, the experience was not that different either. Nod-
ding along as her copanelists recalled their experiences growing up as Indian
Americans, Acharia-Bath added that her own experience as a British Asian
was much the same, the only difference being that Indian content was far
more widely available in the U.K. All the panelists, as well as the moderator
for the session, Vipin Goyal, agreed that this was not their Bollywood.
What, then, was their Bollywood? The answer, it turned out, rested on a
set of shifts in cultural production and perceptions of value—of what was
“cool”—that unfolded in seemingly parallel tracks. The first site of change
involved these entrepreneurs’ rejection of “Dad’s Bollywood” early in their
lives as they struggled with and against films and film music that resonated