Page 67 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

54 << Industrial Identity in an Era of Reform

reformulation and performance of industrial identity that allows them to
participate in new regimes of risk and speculation, while continuing to lever-
age and strengthen their ties within established social and financial networks
in Bombay.
In focusing on this performative dimension of industry practice, this
chapter also sets the discussion of corporatization and industrial transfor-
mation in relation to a broader discourse of derivativeness that has haunted
the Bombay film industry and even more so, Bollywood. As Rajadhyaksha
reminds us, Hollywood does after all remain “the overdetermined barom-
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eter of comparison” for media industries across Asia. While this issue of
derivativeness has been addressed from textual and aesthetic perspectives,
we have yet to pay close attention to how this plays out in relation to indus-
trial imaginaries and logics. I show here that the refashioning of the Bombay
film industry as Bollywood has to do with a range of players in the indus-
try—from corporate executives like UTV’s CEO Ronnie Screwvala to Karan
Johar, who manages a family business—carefully cultivating and maintain-
ing a position of difference in the global media landscape (in relation to Hol-
lywood in particular) even as they adopt new perspectives and practices.
This focus on industrial identity is warranted not only because it allows
us to push beyond state-centric explanations of media transition or a nar-
row focus on economic impact. Exploring the strategies adopted by family
businesses like Dharma Productions (Karan Johar) and Yash Raj Films (Yash
Chopra) also opens up an opportunity to situate the operations of the media
industries in Bombay within a broader history of the enduring presence and
powerful role played by family businesses in Indian capitalism. The work of
historians and anthropologists of market cultures and kinship-based capital-
ism also, therefore, informs my analysis here. For instance, Ritu Birla has
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argued in her analysis of vernacular capitalism (Marwari merchant commu-
nities, for instance) in colonial India that there has always been “extensive
negotiability between the symbolic values of kinship, lineage and commu-
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nity, and the material values of credit, trade and investment.” Birla’s analy-
sis of the ways in which indigenous capitalists negotiated various aspects of
colonial law even as they “folded their bazaar idioms into new languages of
capitalist development” during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries is particularly relevant when considering how family-run media compa-
nies in Bombay and indeed, other prominent media capitals like Hong Kong,
have responded in creative ways to sociopolitical and economic changes at
different historical conjunctures. Framed in relation to these broader ques-
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tions, this chapter shows that the picture of Bollywood that emerges at the
end of a decade of corporatization is that of a media space being shaped by a