From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry by Aswin Punathambekar (review)

Aswin punathambekar’s from bombay to Bollywood is a welcome addition to the recent shift in Indian film and media studies from an overwhelming focus on texts to ethnographies of Bollywood’s industrial, production, and material practices.¹ Historically situating the spatial and geographical coordinates of both “Bollywood” and “Bombay” within global landscapes of intermedia relationships and expanding the domains within which we can constitute and imagine these as focal points, this book crucially illustrates that Bollywood can no longer be imagined only as a film industry. The corporatization of the industry after the privatization of the Indian economy has been considered to be the key event that led to the transition of Bombay cinema from its “national-popular” dimensions to its current incarnation: a mammoth entertainment industry known globally as Bollywood, encompassing all manner of things. Arguing that this transition has been uneasy and uneven, Punathambekar asks: How do multiple interconnected and interdependent media industries, all of which function under the umbrella of “Bollywood,” imagine and claim the global in its scale of operations (2)? Influenced from similar frameworks used by Serra Tinic in her book On Location: Canada’s Television Industry in a Global Market (2006) and Michael Curtin in his article “Media Capital: Towards the Study of Spatial Flows” (2003) to study the “spatial dynamics of media production” in other nodal centers of capital and labor flow like Vancouver and Hong Kong, the book charts three interrelated fields through which these uneven transitions have occurred in the Indian scenario.² First, the reconfiguration of the space of the nation into the transnational, which was especially marked by the state’s responses to both media industries and its imagination of diasporic audiences; second, the rise of Bombay as the main cultural and financial node through which several transnational networks began to circulate and operate; and third, the unprecedented expansion of India’s mediascape as seen in the dizzying proliferation and convergence between television, mobile phones, the Internet, advertising, and so on. The various case studies in the book, based on interviews with media professionals, participant observation at industry conventions, and textual and discursive readings of films, trade journals, and publicity material, all illustrate how all of these terrains are “all simultaneously dependent on, yet not completely determining each other” (4).

Punathambekar draws from multiple theoretical approaches, primary among which are Henry Jenkins’s ideas of convergence culture, which highlight the flow of content across multiple media platforms and the migratory behavior of audiences to go just about anywhere to find the content they want. Jenkins particularly emphasizes the interplay of “old” and “new” media in this process. Drawing from these and employing similar frameworks, Punathambekar notes that one key aspect of understanding Bombay’s current sociocultural conjecture is to unpack the long-standing histories of interconnected networks of media practices where radio, television, and film shared symbiotic relationships both locally, translocally, and even globally. Also, like Tejaswini Ganti’s “Producing Bollywood” (2012), this book significantly helps us in understanding the role of industry professionals in the everyday workings of “Bombay” and “Bollywood,” thus foregrounding the centrality of an industry/ production studies framework as an extremely pertinent way of seeing.

Chapter 1 provides a refreshing insight into the Bollywood blockbuster Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (Happiness and Sorrow, Karan Johar, 2001) by reading it through the lens of the relationship between the state and its diaspora. Situating the arrival of diaspora-centric Bollywood film within a range of reform undertaken by the Indian state to reconfigure itself in the era of globalization, the author argues for the foregrounding of a particular kind of cultural imagination that was made possible by a political discourse of cleansing at multiple levels, from the regional to the global, as India embraced economic liberalization. In chapter 2, we see a particularly fascinating study of the meeting and sometimes uneasy coexistence of Hollywood style corporatization, with its globally recognizable policies of...