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Conclusion >> 185

begun meeting offline to extend discussions conducted online, help organize
concerts, and in some cases to form bands and perform film songs. Enabled
by the Internet, constituted by individuals from different parts of the world,
and driven by an interest in film music that reaches across the world, there is
no doubt that the Rahman fan community is strikingly different when com-
pared with fan associations such as those that form around Tamil film stars
like Vijaykanth.
We could begin by noting that the Rahman fan community is an elite
space and one that is defined explicitly in opposition to “rowdy” fan asso-
ciations. We could point out that compared to fan associations that meet at
street corners, tea shops, and in and around cinema halls in India, online fan
communities are not dominated by men. It is also evident that the Rahman
fan community is not invested in mobilizing around caste or linguistic iden-
tity. Given that it is first and foremost a community realized online, and that
fans bring diverse stakes and affiliations to bear on their participation, mobi-
lization along axes of caste or language is, at a basic level, rendered structur-
ally impossible. For example, fans based in Malaysia, for whom participa-
tion in the Rahman fan community is part of a larger process of claiming a
Tamil ethnic identity, share little in common with second-generation Indian
Americans for whom dancing to a remixed Rahman song at a club speaks
to a very different set of concerns. Embedded as citizens in disparate ways,
each fan brings his or her own linguistic and regional background, experi-
ences of varying racial and ethnic politics, religious affiliations, and different
registers of knowledge and affiliation with India and “Indian” culture, to bear
on his or her engagement with Rahman’s music. Therefore, while useful to
start with, such comparisons only take us so far. It is not enough to merely
point out that the fan in question here is a middle-class subject or a dia-
sporic subject. We are still left with the problem of approaching and defining
such new modes of participatory culture, a defining aspect of Bollywood, in
opposition to a specific and idealized mode of participation that is explicitly
political. The pressing challenge, then, is to reconceptualize the relationship
between cinema and public culture and broaden the very notion of partici-
patory culture.
S. V. Srinivas’ path-breaking work on fan associations is the obvious start-
ing point for any discussion of participatory culture in the Indian context.
Focusing on the Telugu film star Chiranjeevi, Srinivas situates the forma-
tion of fan associations in Andhra Pradesh in relation to a broader history
of subaltern struggles and considers fan practices as a domain of political
activity that does not fit within classical liberal accounts of citizenship and
political representation, but one that has clear links to linguistic and regional