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songs and pieces of background music ripped from DVDs, others police
music stores (makeshift stores set up on pavements in busy shopping areas,
in shopping complexes, and so on), threatening to call the police if pirated
CDs of Rahman’s music are not taken off the shelf.
Part of the work that lies ahead of us, then, involves examining a greater
range of sites and modes of participation surrounding the media industries
in Bombay and other emerging media capitals. Doing so will allow us to
rethink the figure of the fan: part rowdy, part rasika, part pirate, part copy-
right enforcer, the fan is as much a figure operating within pirate networks
as she or he is caught up in media industry logics. In an era in which media
industries across the world are making concerted efforts to tap into fan par-
ticipation and labor, we can enrich our accounts of transnational media and
expand the boundaries of media industry studies if we stop treating par-
ticipatory culture as mere epiphenomena. Paying sustained and systematic
attention to patterns of audience reception and modes of participation in
varied social and geographic contexts will likely generate new insights into
the three major problematics that I have focused on throughout this book—
Bollywood as a transnational cultural and industrial formation, as a site of
technological and industrial convergence, and as a site of cultural produc-
tion that is part of broader realignments of relations between space, capital,
and culture. But even more broadly, to look closely at fan participation is
to imagine transnational media worlds that are intimately tied to, but not
always constrained by, statist or industrial imperatives. The world that fans of
A. R. Rahman have created, or the one that a group of Shahrukh Khan fans
have built (srkpagali.net), disclose to us not only the multiple and fragmen-
tary ways in which Bollywood is already in the world today, but also suggest
the possibility of different transnational futures for Bollywood.