Page 63 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

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

defined in particular by the phenomenal growth of the television and adver-
tising industries throughout the 1990s. To consider just one example, the
Indian government’s attempts to reform Doordarshan, the state-controlled
television network, in response to challenges posed by the rapid growth
of commercial and transnational television during the 1990s could also be
framed in terms of the state’s need to reassert itself in the domain of cul-
tural production. Indeed, Shanti Kumar’s account of debates surrounding the
Prasar Bharati bill (Prasar—to disseminate; Bharat—India) during the 1990s
shows very clearly that Doordarshan’s plans for expansion and discussions
surrounding the proposed creation of an autonomous corporation for public
broadcasting were also about the state dealing with anxieties stemming from
the impact of economic liberalization and globalization. 78
Even as we recognize that redefining policy and establishing control over
the Bombay film industry reveals the extent to which the nation-state con-
tinues to play an important role in the production of a global media industry,
we also need to move beyond state-centric analyses that tend to approach
Bollywood as an undifferentiated and monolithic industry. Thus the next
chapter focuses on the FICCI-FRAMES 2009 convention and in particular,
the reformulation of industrial identities, as a way to examine the partial and
contradictory nature of industrial transformation that a decade of cleaning
up and corporatizing Bombay film industry has wrought.