Page 185 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

172 << Diasporic Entrepreneurs and Digital Media

On the ground realities notwithstanding, Saavn.com defines itself as a company that
targets audiences worldwide and not just a diasporic audience.

Conclusion

Narrating the fortunes of two recent diasporic media initiatives, this chap-
ter has examined how the restructuring of the media industries in Bombay,
and changing relations between Bombay and Los Angeles, have reconfigured
the space of South Asian diasporic media production and circulation. MTV-
Desi and Saavn.com are without a doubt mainstream media ventures and are
strikingly different in comparison with diasporic film and television produc-
tion up to the mid-1990s. Far from being exilic or interstitial, the scale at
which these media initiatives operate cannot be grasped without account-
ing for the ways in which relations between global media capitals—in this
case, Bombay, New York City, and Los Angeles—have begun to define media
circulation in the diaspora and structure the conditions for diasporic media
production.
Projects such as establishing and operating a digital media company do
not just reveal the interpenetration of scales (national, global, regional, dia-
sporic, urban)—that is surely recognizable from the operations of a com-
pany like Saavn.com. To return to Anna Tsing’s terms, one could say that
such projects “cannot limit themselves to conjuring at different scales—they