Page 25 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

12 << Introduction

To be sure, there are a number of particularities to Bollywood that
need to be elaborated: the history of state-cinema relations; shifts from a
“national development”-oriented and state-run broadcasting sector to an
advertising-based, decidedly commercial and consumerist television indus-
try; the sheer pace of media transitions (the emergence of satellite televi-
sion, Internet, and mobile phones in a span of ten to fifteen years); vibrant
“pirate networks,” and so on. Building on ethnographic and historical work
on market cultures in South Asia, I show that media industries in forma-
tion like Bollywood do not fit neatly within dominant narratives of post-
Fordist modes of capital accumulation, deterritorialization, and media
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production and circulation. Arjun Appadurai’s observation that cities like
Bombay are characterized by “disjunct, yet adjacent histories and tempo-
ralities,” where “Fordist manufacture, craft and artisanal production, service
economies involving law, leisure, finance, biotechnology, and banking and
virtual economies involving global finance capital and local stock markets
live in an uneasy mix,” is an appropriate description of the uneven, incom-
plete, and seemingly contradictory nature of Bombay cinema’s refashioning
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as Bollywood. Consider the inaugural session of FRAMES 2009, a media
convention organized by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce
and Industry (FICCI) and held in Bombay over a span of three days (Feb-
ruary 21–23).
Organized in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Commerce,
FRAMES 2009 brought together nearly three thousand individuals—media
executives, directors and producers, policymakers, bureaucrats, and oth-
ers involved with the media industries—from over twenty countries. Held
annually since the year 2000, the overarching goal for this tenth edition of
the FRAMES convention was to “celebrate a decade” of the corporatization
and globalization of Bollywood. However, with the worldwide financial crisis
looming large over the gathering, the celebration was a bit subdued. Every
speaker at the inaugural session felt compelled to remind the audience that
the media and entertainment industries were not recession-proof. At the
same time, these prominent government and industry figures also framed
the downturn as a brief interval in what was otherwise a smooth and at times
spectacular period of transformation and growth for Bollywood. This fram-
ing narrative was further reinforced with the official release of the Media and
Entertainment Industry Report prepared by the consultancy firm KPMG,
entitled “In the interval . . . But ready for the next act.” But this narrative,
which elided the complex manner in which the Bombay film industry’s
transformation into Bollywood had unfolded over the past decade, could not
be sustained even during the inaugural session.