Page 191 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

178 << Conclusion

political transitions engendered by the Indian state’s adoption and gradual
legitimization of neoliberal economic policies, including the privatiza-
tion of different sectors of the economy and, broadly speaking, attempts to
leave behind a developmentalist imaginary and integrate the nation into a
global economy. As I outlined in the first chapter, this was a pivotal moment
marked not only by dramatic changes in various sectors of the Indian econ-
omy and the emergence of a globally competitive IT and software services
sector, but also by a reworking of the symbolic boundaries of the nation to
include the diaspora. In particular, this entailed a sharp turn in the Indian
state’s relationship with the diaspora and the reimagination of the figure of
the Non-Resident Indian as central to India’s fortunes in a global economy.
Among other arenas of cultural production, Hindi-language films and tele-
vision shows played a crucial role in mediating these concerns regarding
national identity. The state’s decision to grant “industry” status to cinema in
the late 1990s and the ongoing transformation of the Bombay film industry
into a multimedia cultural industry intent on reimagining its position in the
world has to be understood in relation to these broader political, economic,
and cultural shifts.
In invoking the term transnational, I also want to signal that asking how
Bollywood is in the world today entails dealing with a larger problematic: the
role played by nation-states and the prominence of the national in processes
of economic and cultural globalization. Since the late 1980s, media and cul-
tural studies scholars have played a crucial role in moving the debate on
globalization past totalizing conceptions of modernization, cultural imperi-
alism, and homogenization. The idea that the production, circulation, and
consumption of media are processes that involve interactions among a range
of actors and institutions and across multiple scales seems now to be a basic
starting point. The challenge that an emergent terrain of cultural production
like Bollywood poses, then, is how we might acknowledge the continued rel-
evance of the national without privileging it as the dominant scale at which
the processes and politics of media globalization are worked out. Adopting a
transnational perspective does not mean ignoring the fact that the national,
as Nitin Govil has argued, “has given the media industries a way to think
1
both globally and locally.” Rather, it is to carefully account for the ways
in which the national has come to be articulated with other scales and in
the process been reconfigured. As scholars like Saskia Sassen and Michael
Curtin have argued, what we are contending with are new geographies in
which relations between cities or regions, for instance, may determine the
movement as well as the reterritorialization of capital, creative labor, and of
2
course a range of cultural commodities. Throughout this book, one of my