Page 31 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

18 << Introduction

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professional gatherings; and economic/industrial analysis.” But this book
is also a multisited and transnational ethnography, given the multiple sites
that I map and analyze. This does not simply mean, as George Marcus and
Michael Fischer argue, an increase in the number of sites that one observes. 46
Rather, it is to recognize the difficulties of defining a particular field site for
understanding the operations of media industries like Bollywood. It also
involves being attuned to how each site—an industry convention such as
FICCI-FRAMES, for example—is embedded within and shaped by larger
economic, political, and cultural systems. In this book, this has meant mov-
ing across national spaces (India and the United States) and media spaces
(film, television, advertising and marketing, and digital media companies).
The chapters that follow thus draw on in-depth interviews with a range
of media industry professionals, participant observation in various produc-
tion settings as well as industry conventions, and textual materials (largely
unexamined trade-press sources such as TV and Video World, and industry
artifacts such as press kits and materials circulated at industry conventions).
I read all these materials critically and in relation to one another, attentive
to the relationship between the production of press kits and media journal-
ists’ coverage of industry-related topics (particularly writers at trade mag-
azines), and aware of the risks and limitations of interviews with industry
47
professionals, particularly high-level executives. This involves, as Caldwell
writes, keeping these different research materials “in check” by “placing the
discourses and results of any one register in critical tension or dialogue with
the others.” 48
Further, studying the media industries in a context where access to indus-
try archives and trade artifacts remains limited meant developing a few
industry contacts and relying on them to establish more connections and to
gain access to various sites in Bombay and New Delhi. Not surprisingly, I
had a range of experiences in various media companies and with different
industry professionals. In some instances, it became clear that the people I
was speaking with were not willing to offer anything more than what one
could glean from the PR materials that their companies had developed. In
other cases, my initial conversation led to subsequent meetings and invita-
tions to spend as many days as I would like observing production practices,
attending staff meetings, and so on. Differences in levels of openness not-
withstanding, it is worth mentioning that gaining access to a range of sites in
Bombay—sets of films and television shows in production, staff meetings at
a dot-com company, publicity events for films, and so on—as well as across
different levels of the media industries (executives, middle-management, and
entrepreneurs) was not as fraught as it may have been in, say, Hollywood.