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must conjure the scales themselves.” Focusing on the rhetorics and prac-
tices of scale-making allows us to understand MTV-Desi and Saavn.com
as projects that sought to reimagine the diaspora as a commercially viable
scale of media production and circulation. And surely this is what Vin Bhat,
Nusrat Durrani, and their colleagues were doing—imagining and mobiliz-
ing different visions of the South Asian diaspora, from New York City, as
Desis, in collaboration with professionals in Bombay, Los Angeles, and other
cities in the world, building on shifting notions of Desi identity and ongoing
changes in Indian and American media industries. The two ventures I have
described conjured the Desi diaspora in different ways and encountered dif-
ferent sets of challenges and opportunities. Where MTV-Desi was limited
by the niche marketing logics of the American television industry, Saavn.
com managed to not only construct an enumerable and commercially viable
“Desi audience” but also define itself as a company interested in bringing
Bollywood to the world. After all, it was Saavn.com that gave every conven-
tion attendee a “Passport to Bollywood.” It is worth asking, then, what kind
of a world is being imagined? Who gets to hold and use this passport and
who doesn’t?
The information provided in this “passport” makes it clear that it is an
artifact designed, in the first instance, for media industry professionals. Flip-
ping open the passport reveals a center page that clarifies Saavn.com’s role as
a key intermediary for anyone interested in leveraging the worldwide interest
in Bollywood: “Saavn hereby grants the holder of this passport the right to
use the best Bollywood entertainment to engage affluent consumers globally.”
But this claim on consumers anywhere in the world is quickly scaled back as
the accompanying page specifies and narrows down Saavn.com’s sphere of
operations. To begin with, the list of cities that form the global circuit that
Saavn.com is invested in includes New York, London, Bombay, Los Ange-
les, and Toronto. These are all cities in which Saavn.com has a presence—it
has employees in all these locations, its main business partner (Hungama
Mobile) is based in Bombay, and its center of operations in the United States
is New York City. But as we have seen, this particular network of cities also
speaks to an emerging hierarchy in which media industries and diasporic
communities in the Global North shape Bollywood’s cultural geography,
setting aside other key diasporic locations and in the process flattening out
varied histories and patterns of Bollywood films’ circulation and reception.
Moreover, this passport indicates that even within this specific network of
cities in the world, the cultural sphere in question is defined by a marketing
discourse about the affluent Desi consumer demographic, one that is com-
prised of the “South Asian Consumer” who is a citizen of the United States