Page 20 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

Introduction >> 7

the operations of the media industries in the United States as well as the ways
in which participatory cultures that cohere around media and popular cul-
ture shape this rapidly evolving media terrain in important ways.
This framework for thinking about convergence is certainly useful for
understanding processes of technological and industrial convergence in the
Indian mediaspace. Moreover, any account of the emergence of Bollywood
as a global media industry has to acknowledge the defining role played by a
vast, networked, and often “pirate” realm of fandom and participation that
ensures the circulation of Bollywood content across the world. However, the
pace of media development and change in countries like India over the past
two decades confound notions of “old” and “new” media that inform dis-
cussions of media convergence. As Ravi Sundaram’s scholarship on relations
between media and urban infrastructures has shown, cultures of copying and
recycling built on low-cost technologies of reproduction have, since the early
1990s, “blurred the distinctions between producers and consumers of media,
adding to the diffusion of both media infrastructures—video stores, photo-
copy and design shops, bazaars, cable networks, piracy—and media forms
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(images, video, phone sms/txt, sounds).” To put it simply, media conver-
gence takes different trajectories and forms in varied sociocultural contexts.
Further, I am interested here in situating the contemporary period of
media convergence within a longer history of interrelationships between
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film, broadcasting, and other emerging media platforms and institutions. I
argue that at issue is our understanding of the role that “new media” play at
different historical conjunctures in enabling media producers in established
industries to imagine and mobilize national and transnational markets, for-
tifying, in the process, certain cities’ positions as influential media capitals.
In other words, a central part of developing an account of how Bombay
has emerged as an important center of media production even as it forges
connections with an ever-expanding network of places worldwide involves
deepening and refining our understanding of the interwoven histories of dif-
ferent media technologies and institutions. While a comprehensive analysis
of intermedia relations is beyond the scope of my analysis here, let me offer
a brief account of the relationship between Radio Ceylon, a commercial
broadcasting station based in Sri Lanka, and the Bombay film industry dur-
ing the 1950s as a way to situate contemporary media dynamics in Bombay
within a broader historical and comparative framework. 20
The story of film songs and broadcasting has been narrated mainly from
the perspective of All India Radio and nationalist elites’ interventions in the
realm of cultural policy. As the story goes, Dr. B. V. Keskar, Minister of Infor-
mation & Broadcasting (1950–1962), deemed film songs “cheap and vulgar”