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>> 1 Introduction In May 1998, the Indian government transformed world media by granting Bombay cinema “industry” status. It was a remarkable decision, given the history of the state’s relationship with popular cinema. Even though Bombay had emerged as a major center of film production during the 1930s and 1940s, the Indian state did not regard filmmaking as an important industrial activity or as central to the project of defining national culture. As a consequence, filmmaking did not receive the concessions and support that media—including radio and television—did. Punitive taxation, licensing, and censorship codes defined the state’s approach to cinema for nearly five decades. Ascribing industry status to filmmaking in 1998 was, at one level, an intervention in film financing. The government framed the decision as an attempt to rid the film business of “black money” (untaxed/unaccounted) as well as the involvement of the mafia/underworld, and to encourage transparent accounting practices. More broadly, this moment of reform also generated a discourse of “corporatization,” a set of changes deemed necessary for the film industry to shed its image as a dysfunctional “national” cinema and assume its place as a global media industry. Corporatizing the film business seemed all the more urgent given the phenomenal growth of other media sectors in India (television and telecommunications in particular) and the emergence of a globally competitive IT and software services sector in cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad during the 1990s. Narratives of India Inc. confidently and triumphantly navigating the global economy were not lost on either the state or those in the film industry. This process of reform has by no means been smooth or uncontested. There has been much disagreement and confusion regarding the many institutional, creative, and social transitions under way within the film industry and the media industries at large in Bombay and other cities across India. And media industry professionals remain deeply ambivalent about changes that a decade of reform has wrought and what it means to adopt and perform globally recognizable practices of organization and management. This sense of uncertainty and ambivalence about “going global” notwithstanding, two things are clear. First, the spatial coordinates and geographic reach of Bollywood have changed dramatically over the past decade. The answer to the question, “Where in the world is Bollywood?” is, to be sure, “Bombay.” However, Bombay’s emergence as a global media capital cannot be grasped without 2 > 3 the case of Hindi-language television channels like Star and ZEE, film-based content constitutes a major part of these television channels’ programming. The use of the term “regional” to mark these industries’ position within the Indian mediascape and the Indian state’s material and symbolic investments in Bollywood certainly underscore the continued relevance of the “national” as a scale where the politics of media globalization play out.5 However, I would argue that one way to address this problem is to make Bollywood more specific. In other words, in addition to developing accounts of media industries in other cities within India, we also need to map the many forces that produced Bollywood as the Indian global media industry in order to reveal the presentist and limited nature of that globalism. Brian Larkin’s careful mapping of circuits and patterns of distribution of Bombay cinema in Nigeria, and Sudha Rajagopalan’s analysis of the circulation and consumption of Indian cinema in the erstwhile Soviet Union are important reminders of other trajectories and articulations of the “global” in the history of the Bombay film industry.6 Further, as Ravi Vasudevan observes, when we consider the fact that “regional distribution offices across the Middle East, North, East, and South Africa date back to the 1940s and were feeding into a particular market for ‘Arabian night stories’ and Laila Majnu, Shireen Farhad style love legends,” it becomes clear that we need to be far more grounded and precise in our use of terms like global and transnational.7 My analysis of the transition from Bombay cinema to Bollywood is thus set within the sociohistorical conjuncture of the past two decades—from 1991, when economic reforms initiated by the Indian government led to large-scale political and sociocultural transitions across the country, to the present. I argue that the emergence of Bollywood as a global media industry rests on profoundly uneven and contested spatial transformations across three interrelated fields: first, the reconfiguration of national space in transnational terms, marked in particular by the state’s creative responses and efforts to refigure...

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