Page 39 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

26 << Media Industries and the State in an Era of Reform

In sharp contrast to the exception that Chopra and Johar seemed to per-
sonify was Amit Khanna. A media entrepreneur with over two decades’
experience in the film and television industries in Bombay, Khanna is cur-
rently chairman of Reliance Entertainment, a media conglomerate that is
shaping Bollywood’s transnational imprint in important ways. Khanna has
also served as the chairman of the Convergence Committee within FICCI,
a group that focuses on emerging media technologies and platforms. Seated
beside Khanna was Donald Whiteside, an executive from Intel Corporation
who was leading a U.S. delegation to the convention on behalf of the US India
Business Council (USIBC). Finally, bringing these industry and government
figures together was Amit Mitra from FICCI. Established in 1927, FICCI is
a colonial-era institution that represents the interests of Indian businesses
across a range of sectors. Since the mid-1990s FICCI has played a crucial role
in mediating ties between the Indian government and the media industries
and, most importantly, in assembling a Media and Entertainment sector with
Bollywood at the center. Taken together, the people assembled on stage at
the inauguration of the tenth anniversary of the FICCI-FRAMES convention
represented the different sites and interests that had played pivotal roles in
the production of Bollywood as a global media industry.
This chapter traces how these various relations between the state, the
media industries, and institutions such as FICCI and the Confederation of
Indian Industry (CII) were forged, and situates them within a broader set of
sociocultural and political transformations that set the stage for the recon-
figuration of the Bombay film industry as Bollywood. Building on George
Yudice’s observation that “there is an expedient relation between globaliza-
tion and culture in the sense that there is a fit or a suitability between them,”
this chapter elaborates how the fit between globalization and the cultural
industries was worked out in the Indian context and specifically, posed as
1
a problem of cleaning up and corporatizing the Bombay film industry. I
begin with an analysis of links between the nation-state and the diaspora,
redefinitions of citizenship, and Bombay cinema’s mediation of these shifts
to show that the state’s efforts to manage the cultural industries is part of a
larger process of managing a wide-ranging set of spatial crises engendered by
processes of economic liberalization and globalization. As Leela Fernandes
and others have shown, economic reforms enacted by the Indian state dur-
ing the early 1990s resulted in a profoundly uneven restructuring of urban
space, a process that was oriented primarily toward the needs and desires of
2
a new and highly visible middle class. Focusing on Bombay, Fernandes also
argues that a politics of “spatial purification” and a range of movements to
“cleanse spaces of the poor and working classes” accompanied new claims on