Page 181 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

168 << Diasporic Entrepreneurs and Digital Media

personal life histories had become a crucial source of cultural capital at a
historical conjuncture in which marketing discourse surrounding the South
Asian American consumer and the growing presence of Bollywood in the
global media landscape had generated new opportunities.
If their own lives and identities as diasporic subjects constituted one tra-
jectory of change, the other sense of a generational break for these entrepre-
neurs involved Bollywood itself. Echoing the Indian state and FICCI’s narra-
tives of corporatization, these entrepreneurs emphasized that their ventures
would not have been possible had it not been for changes in the film indus-
try in Bombay and in particular, the emergence of corporate studios such as
UTV Motion Pictures and Reliance Entertainment. In fact, a key panel dis-
cussion that took place earlier in the day at the SAMMA-Summit had set the
stage for an interpretation of corporatization as a much-needed and smooth
transition to more globally recognizable industry practices. Titled “Bolly-
wood Meets Hollywood: How Indian and U.S. Entertainment Partnerships
Are Shaking Up the Industry,” the panel included Michael Andreen, a senior
vice president in Disney’s International Production division, Sanjay Chitale,
a senior executive in the Indian conglomerate Sahara One, and Rohan Sippy,
a Bollywood producer and director who belonged to one of the most storied
family businesses in the Bombay film industry. In much the same way that
Vishesh Bhatt did a few months later at the FICCI FRAMES convention in
2009, Rohan Sippy struck the lone note of dissent by arguing that corporati-
zation did not necessarily mean the adoption of Hollywood-like practices of
speculation, production, and marketing. But the other panelists were quick
to point to Hollywood studios’ investments in Bollywood, UTV’s coproduc-
tion deals with Hollywood studios, and the deal between Reliance Entertain-
ment and Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks as signs that established practices
would change or simply fade away. In this sense too, it was not their “Dad’s
Bollywood,” one represented by family businesses and kinship-based prac-
tices. Rather, their Bollywood was a corporatized media industry with global
ambitions that they, as professionals embedded in the American media sys-
tem, could work with.
Thus, these diasporic entrepreneurs argued that they were uniquely posi-
tioned to respond to the transcultural dimensions of diasporic culture and
establish new trajectories of circulation for Bollywood films and film music
in ways that were not possible either for professionals working primarily
in Bombay or American media professionals who at this point simply did
not possess the necessary cultural expertise. In the following section, I draw
on an in-depth interview with Vin Bhat in addition to his presentation at
the SAMMA-Summit to narrate the emergence of Saavn.com as one of the