Page 23 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

10 << Introduction

nation-as-audience, and enabling the Bombay film industry to imagine a
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“national audience.” It also encourages us to ponder how marketing and
promotions, stardom, conceptions of the audience, fan cultures, and other
aspects of cinema in India have been profoundly shaped by technological,
business, and creative developments in broadcasting and other media tech-
nologies and institutions (VCRs and the video business, cable and satellite
television, and so on). It is this broader historical and spatial understanding
of media convergence that guides my analysis of how relations among the
film, television, and digital media industries have shaped the refashioning
of the Bombay film industry as Bollywood and, in the process, positioned
Bombay as a key node in an emergent cultural geography.

Spaces of Media Production

If thinking beyond film to account for intermedia relations and processes of
media convergence constitutes one of the significant interventions this book
makes, the other involves bringing an emerging industry studies/production
cultures framework to bear on the operations of the media industries. My
analysis of the ongoing restructuring of the media industries in India thus
proceeds from the understanding that industry professionals play a central
role in shaping both everyday practices and the larger project of imagin-
ing Bollywood as a global media industry. Of course, a few scholars writ-
ing about film and television in India have addressed these issues. Madhava
Prasad, for instance, has analyzed how relations of production shape the film
form by examining the fragmented nature of the production apparatus, the
centrality of kinship loyalties within the industry, the reliance on merchant
capital, the influence that distributors wield in every aspect of the filmmak-
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ing process, and so on. Among other essays, Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s account
of links between the film industry, particularly in the distribution and exhi-
bition sector, and various forms of speculative capital in Bombay has also
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been immensely valuable. However, as Tejaswini Ganti has pointed out,
such analyses “that try to ‘read’ or infer production practices from the fin-
ished film cannot access or do justice to the complexity, the negotiations, the
idiosyncrasies and frequent chaos that characterizes filmmaking.” 29
This gap that Ganti identifies in the scholarship on cinema does, in fact,
characterize the majority of studies on media and public culture in India and
diasporic contexts as well. While scholars have analyzed the globalization
of Bollywood through critical readings of films and ethnographic studies of
audiences in different locations, they have yet to pay close attention to indus-
try dynamics. Moreover, as Michael Curtin points out, media industries