Page 33 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

20 << Introduction

and the cultural industries was worked out in the Indian context and specifi-
cally, posed as a problem of cleaning up and “corporatizing” the Bombay film
52
industry. In particular, I focus on links between the state and the Indian
diaspora, redefinitions of citizenship and the boundaries of the “national
family,” and Bollywood’s mediation of these shifts. Through a close, thematic
reading of Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (Happiness and Sorrow, 2001, Karan
Johar) and other diaspora-centric Bollywood films, I argue that this moment
of reform needs to be understood in relation to a range of other reforms
undertaken and negotiated by the state, and as part of the redefinition of the
nation-space in an era of globalization. The ongoing struggle over corpo-
ratization in Bollywood needs to be understood, this chapter suggests, as a
response to a wide-ranging spatial crisis involving the nation-state, the film
industry, and the city of Bombay in a period of rapid and profoundly uneven
political, economic, and cultural shifts. I show how the state’s decision to rei-
magine its relations with the media industries and indeed, the very idea of
creating and defining Bollywood as a global media industry, was shaped by
a political discourse of cleaning/cleansing that played out at urban, regional,
national, and diasporic scales throughout the 1990s as India embarked on a
program of economic liberalization.
Chapter 2, “Staging Bollywood: Industrial Identity in an Era of Reform,”
begins by considering the ellipsis in the title of the KPMG report—In the
interval . . . But ready for the next act—as indexing a complicated and evolv-
ing terrain of media production, one marked as much by unpredictability
as by a sense of certainty regarding the “next act.” I draw on my experi-
ences and observations at FRAMES 2009 to complicate the official narra-
tive in which the notion of an interval is understood as nothing more than
an interruption and, more crucially, that the “next act” was readily imagin-
able. Focusing attention on this moment of celebration opens up an oppor-
tunity to consider the entire decade—from 1998, when the government
granted “industry” status to Bombay cinema, until 2009—as a formative
interval. One of the major consequences of corporatization, I argue, is a
terrain marked on the one hand by small-scale (often family-owned) com-
panies rearticulating their industrial identities and, on the other hand, large
corporations that have entered the film business only to find themselves
contending with the limits of corporate logics in the Bombay film world.
Drawing on panel discussions, various artifacts circulating at the conven-
tion, and trade-press coverage of the convention and this period of transi-
tion, this chapter outlines how Bollywood is being shaped by a productive,
if at times uneasy, coexistence of heterogeneous capitalist practices defined
as much by kinship networks and interpersonal relations as by modes of