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Media Industries and the State in an Era of Reform >> 43

Poster at the FICCI-FRAMES convention signaling Bollywood’s position within a trans-
national and multimedia terrain.

this committee also began organizing an annual convention (FRAMES) that
brought the film industry into contact with prominent NRI venture capital-
ists, influential diasporic filmmakers such as Shekhar Kapur, NRI media pro-
ducers and executives based in the United States (such as Ashok Amritraj of
Hyde Park Entertainment), the IT and software sector in India and abroad,
representatives from countries interested in coproduction treaties, execu-
tives from transnational media corporations such as Sony and Warner Bros.,
global consultancy firms, and financial institutions. 55
By 2000 the annual FRAMES convention had emerged as one of the
most important sites where the transition from Bombay cinema to Bol-
lywood was staged. Further, since 1998 FICCI had also assumed respon-
sibility for producing the official reports on the media and entertainment
industries. In sharp contrast to the reports on film and television generated
by the Ministry for Information and Broadcasting until the 1980s, FICCI
commissioned multinational accounting and consultancy firms such as
KPMG, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, and Arthur Anderson to produce glossy
reports using statistics and terminology in ways that fit within global busi-
ness paradigms. I shall focus on this aspect of language and performance
in the next chapter. But for the moment, I want to draw attention to the
fact that these reports redefined film as “filmed entertainment” and situ-
ated Bollywood as part of a larger “Media & Entertainment” industry that