Page 19 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

6<< Introduction

engagement with film music, there is no sustained historical study of how
broadcasting, for instance, may have shaped the workings of the film indus-
try or vice versa. Film and media scholars have yet to pay close attention
to the ways in which relations among the media industries in Bombay have
defined circuits of capital, production cultures, and policy decisions, among
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other things. Singh’s essay in Seminar was, in many respects, among the first
to call for a move away from conceiving of cinema in purely textual terms. 13
Thus far, scholars have approached cinema in India as a profoundly
important “national-popular” domain that has negotiated various transitions
and conflicts in the sociocultural and political fabric of India for over a cen-
tury now, focusing in particular on the politics of representation in Indian
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cinema. Juxtaposing readings of films’ narrative and representational strate-
gies with the sociocultural and political context within which they were pro-
duced, circulated, and debated, these studies help us understand how cinema
mediates ideas regarding nation, gender, caste, class, community, and sexual-
ity. Over the past decade, others have built on this work and focused atten-
tion on a range of filmic and extrafilmic sites—stardom, censorship, style
and visual culture, and gender and queer politics—to explore how cinema
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relates in complex ways to the civic and the political. However, as Ranjani
Mazumdar points out, analyses have so far placed cinema “within a frame-
work of either ‘dominant ideology’ or the ‘nation’ and ‘state,’ thus situating
cinema within networks that constitute nationalist and ideological closure.” 16
Further, the study of cinema has been dominated by a focus on the formal
properties of film and the narrative form.
In contrast, this book looks beyond the film text and the cinema hall to
examine film’s relations with other media. I argue that historically informed
institutional and ethnographic analyses of intermedia relations are crucial for
developing more complex and textured cultural genealogies of Bollywood’s
global flows and influences. As the chapters that follow show, by focusing on
intermedia relations in the Indian context, I also hope to broaden scholarly
discussions of media convergence that are informed primarily by develop-
ments in Anglo American media cultures. In one respect, my understanding
of media convergence is shaped by Henry Jenkins’ approach, which moves
beyond a focus on technological dimensions to explore the industrial and
cultural dimensions of what he calls convergence culture. For Jenkins, con-
vergence refers to “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the
cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior
of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of
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entertainment experiences they want.” Paying close attention to relations
between “old” and “new” media technologies, Jenkins explores changes in