Page 180 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

Diasporic Entrepreneurs and Digital Media >> 167

entrepreneurs spoke to the difficulties faced by diasporic youth in navigating
two starkly different cultural fields. On the one hand, diasporic youth have
to deal with parental pressure to preserve an “authentic” ethnic identity that
is, as Maira and others have argued, fraught with the politics of nostalgia
and often constructed on the basis of a highly “selective importing of ele-
31
ments and agents of Indian culture.” On the other hand, they have to con-
tend with their positions as minorities in the racial and class economies of
the United States or the U.K. as they spent the week in schools and colleges.
And it is when they enter college that they discover a community of students
with more or less similar backgrounds, with comparable stories of growing
up “Indian” in the United States or the U.K. Away from home for the first
time, many of them begin engaging with issues of cultural identity through
coursework concerning multiculturalism, postcolonial literature, South
Asian studies, and so on, but also in a more lived way through involvement
in events such as the “India Night” shows on multicultural college campuses
across the United States. As Kavoori and Joseph suggest, India Night works
as a “space-clearing gesture” and as a place for diasporic youth to come to
terms with their identities “before they enter the workplace, or parts of regu-
lar America, where the place/space for a hybrid, cosmopolitan, and ethnic
32
identity are often absent.” It is this very particular experience of coming to
terms with Desi culture and identity, especially through remixed Bollywood
songs and other hybrid forms of popular culture, that these diasporic entre-
preneurs all narrated as they tried to explain what their Bollywood meant.
The stories of growing up and coming to terms with Desi identity and cul-
ture that I heard from Acharia-Bath, Bhat, and Dhillon, and that I also came
across in newspaper and trade press coverage of their companies, do need to
be understood in relation to policies of multiculturalism in the United States
and U.K., especially as they play out on college campuses. They also need to
be situated in relation to the commodified nature of “Indo chic” or “Asian
cool” that has become such a prominent part of American and British public
33
culture over the past two decades. In addition, I also want to draw attention
to how these stories about their selves, their sense of being and becoming
Desi, became intimately tied to media industry logics. In the United States,
these entrepreneurs’ lived experiences as second-generation diasporic youth
was regarded as crucial to their ability to understand the particularities of
Desi culture, and thereby positioned them uniquely well to build a com-
mercially viable Desi media business. In other words, these entrepreneurs
came to be regarded as representatives of a larger ethnic market and in this
capacity, they had to render themselves knowable and intelligible to media
industry professionals and venture capitalists in the technology sector. Their