Page 192 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

Conclusion >> 179

main aims has been to reveal the contingent nature of claims about urban,
national, diasporic, and global scales that inform the imaginations and prac-
tices of everyone from bureaucrats and state officials to media professionals
and, as we will see later in this chapter, pirates and fans.
Second, Bollywood is part of ongoing transformations in relations between
capital, space, and cultural production. As early as 1995, when the multi-
nodal media world that we are familiar with today was beginning to take
shape, David Morley and Kevin Robins argued that a “social theory that is
informed by the geographical imagination” was crucial to understanding
changes in media and communication. Surveying the political and eco-
3
nomic transformations that had transformed national economies across the
world since the late 1970s, they focused in particular on the increasingly
complex spatial relations that the mobility of capital had engendered as the
“essential context for understanding the nature and significance of develop-
4
ments in the media industries.” Informed by this spatial approach, I have
attempted to show here that Bollywood is shaped by the uneven and highly
differentiated nature of capitalist transformation in India and specifically the
city of Bombay since the early 1990s. For instance, examining the impact
that the discourse of corporatization has had on the film industry by analyz-
ing the construction of industrial identities suggests that the narrative of
transition from one established mode of production to a new one, say Ford-
ism to post-Fordism, does not adequately explain the industrial logics and
practices that characterize Bollywood.
In fact, Madhava Prasad’s observation that the Hindi film industry
adopted a “heterogeneous form of manufacture in which the whole is assem-
bled from parts produced separately by specialists, rather than being cen-
tralized around the processing of a given material,” troubles stagist narra-
tives of media industries in the non-Western world catching up with those
in the West. After all, the dominant mode of production in the Bombay
film industry could be described using terms like flexible accumulation and
decentralization that theorists like David Harvey use to describe the logics of
late capitalism in the West. In other words, the particular histories of capi-
5
tal in Bombay cannot be easily set aside. Understanding how contemporary
speculative capital is reconfiguring Bombay’s media world requires us to pay
careful attention to entrenched practices associated with mercantile capital
that are in turn underpinned by long-standing kinship ties and interpersonal
relationships.
The dialectic of homogenization and localization does shape develop-
ments in various domains of the media industries in a city like Bombay. At
the same time, it would be too reductive to say that the model of capitalist