Page 32 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

Introduction >> 19

These issues of access and openness played out very differently, however, as
my “field” expanded beyond Bombay and New Delhi to include the worlds
of diasporic media professionals in the United States. My analysis of the role
that diasporic media entrepreneurs in cities like New York and Los Angeles
play in reconfiguring Bollywood’s sphere of operations is based, therefore, on
in-depth interviews and participant observation at publicity events as well as
key industry conventions such as the one organized by the South Asians in
Media and Marketing Association (SAMMA-Summit).
In general, “studying up” did not pose the kinds of issues that Sherry Ort-
ner, for instance, describes in her account of the challenges of conducting
ethnographic research in Hollywood. At the same time, I should acknowl-
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edge that for the most part, my research in different sites in the film, televi-
sion, and dot-com sectors in India involved spending time with people who
are, as Ortner points out based on her experiences in Hollywood, “really not
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much different from anthropologists and academics more generally.” After
all, given that my research focus was on industry logics and practices as they
related to Bollywood’s emergence as a global media industry, a majority of
my interactions were with “above the line” professionals.
I offer this brief account of my research experience partly to draw atten-
tion to the challenges involved in speaking with and representing sub-
jects who are, as Vicki Mayer and others point out, “usually charged with
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representing us.” But my other objective is to make clear that what this
book offers is a set of grounded but partial and situated perspectives on
the transformation of the Bombay film industry into Bollywood. What Bol-
lywood is, its political, economic, and cultural significance, its organization
and structure, evolving production culture(s), the redefinition of film form
and genres that accompanies and shapes industrial shifts and so on, is far
from settled. Bollywood is an emergent cultural-industrial formation, and
the challenge that I take up in this book is to craft a narrative of industrial
transformation that is nevertheless attuned to and informed by other sites
and dimensions of change.

Structure and Chapter Overviews
Chapter 1, “Bollywood Is Useful: Media Industries and the State in an Era of
Reform,” traces the sociocultural and political transformations in India that
set the stage for the reimagination of the Bombay film industry as Bollywood.
Building on George Yudice’s argument that “there is an expedient relation
between globalization and culture in the sense that there is a fit or a suitabil-
ity between them,” this chapter elaborates how the fit between globalization