Page 190 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

Conclusion

Fandom and Other Transnational Futures

I began this book with an account of a spectacular media convention
designed to celebrate Bollywood’s growing prominence in the world. Held in
Bombay and attended by industry professionals, policymakers, and bureau-
crats from across the world, the 2009 FICCI-FRAMES convention seemed to
mark Bollywood’s arrival on the world stage. Yet as we saw, discussions at this
gathering revealed the messy, uneven, and contradictory nature of industrial
change. As with other domains of cultural, political, and economic life in
India, the consequences of globalization where the Bombay film industry is
concerned have been far from predictable or, for that matter, easily managed.
Gatherings like FRAMES in Bombay and the SAMMA-Summit in New York
thus served as rich ethnographic sites from which to begin mapping and
analyzing the reconfiguration of the Hindi-language film industry in Bom-
bay as Bollywood. Beginning with these sites and moments of celebration,
introspection, and predictions regarding Bollywood’s global futures, I have
moved across a range of other media spaces in an attempt to craft a narrative
of industrial and cultural transformation. In examining the reconstruction
and performance of industrial identity, the impact of the rapid growth of the
television and advertising sectors on the film industry, dot-com companies
and their conjuring of an overseas territory on a daily basis, and the social
and professional worlds of diasporic entrepreneurs, the overarching question
that has guided this book has been: How is Bollywood in the world today? In
this concluding chapter, I want to address this question by first highlighting
a few broad themes and issues that this question brings into play and that
various chapters in this book have tackled. Following this, I want to direct
our attention to fan participation as a domain of media culture that is inti-
mately connected with industry practices and offers an alternative perspec-
tive and vantage point from which to explore Bollywood’s emergent cultural
geography.

***

First, Bollywood is a transnational cultural and industrial formation. I begin
with this broad statement to reiterate that the emergence of Bollywood has
to be situated within the sociohistorical conjuncture of the period since the
early 1990s. This was a period that witnessed a number of sociocultural and
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