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>> 147 5 “It’s Not Your Dad’s Bollywood” Diasporic Entrepreneurs and the Allure of Digital Media Diasporic Entrepreneurs and Digital Media In June 2003 the publicity event for Rajshri Productions’ film Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon in New York City was attended primarily by journalists and public relations professionals working for various South Asian newspapers, magazines, and popular diaspora-centric web portals like Sulekha.com. The entire event lasted a hour, and went largely unnoticed by anyone besides this small group of diasporic media professionals. By the fall of 2008, when the South Asians in Media and Marketing Association (SAMMA) organized its second annual convention, the influence that Indian media had come to wield in the South Asian American mediascape and indeed, American public culture at large, had changed dramatically. Declaring that 2007–08 had been the year of South Asian entertainment, Neal Shenoy, founding member of SAMMA, kicked off the 2008 SAMMASummit (October 31–November 1) held at the Time Warner conference center in New York City. In a glitzy room packed with over three hundred professionals from film, television, advertising, and digital media companies, Shenoy set the stage for a day-long series of panel discussions focused on the growing influence of South Asian media and the increasingly prominent role that South Asian media professionals of South Asian origin were playing in shaping media and entertainment on a global scale. As images of Padma Lakshmi (Top Chef), Sendhil Ramamurthy (Heroes), Mindy Kaling (The Office), Kal Penn (The Namesake), and other instances of South Asian representation in American film and television flashed behind him on a large screen, Shenoy delivered his opening lines: We learned that South Asians could play heroes outside of Bollywood films; that we could evolve to far more substantive and accurate depictions of our culture beyond the irate taxi driver and the equally irate terrorist; that good books with universal storylines that feature India as a character could make exceptional cinema. This year, we learned that 148 > 149 the Fall 2004 issue of Another Magazine, a now defunct publication targeted at “young, upwardly mobile South Asians.” Featuring Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai on the cover, the magazine declared: “Bollystan is a state without borders, defined by a shared culture and common values.” Using the term Bollystan to refer to a vast space of transnational cultural production that included everything from henna tattoos and remix music to literature and films, Khanna and other writers sought to map how rapid flows of people, culture, and capital across national borders have rendered difficult any easy separation between nation and diaspora. In fact, Khanna proceeded to argue that Bollystan is “cosmopolitanism’s inversion: instead of one person being at home anywhere, it is re-rooting Desis everywhere in a real and imagined shared cultural space.”2 In this chapter, I examine the production of this “real and imagined shared cultural space” by focusing on the role played by diasporic media entrepreneurs in shaping Bollywood’s transnational circulation. Diasporic media companies have historically operated as small-scale and often, though not always, family-run enterprises. Tracing how this has changed over the past decade, I examine two recent diasporic media initiatives—MTV-Desi, a television channel that sought to target South Asian American youth but only lasted eighteen months, and Saavn.com, a New York-based digital Produced by Saavn.com, a New York-based digital media company, and distributed to everyone who attended the SAMMA-Summit, such industry artifacts signal how crucial Bollywood has become for diasporic media professionals. 150 > 151 Between India and the United States: Repositioning Diasporic Media and Desi Culture Over the past two decades, media scholars have built on the work of social theorists including Arjun Appadurai and Stuart Hall to provide us with a rich vocabulary and set of tools to analyze the relationship between media and migration.5 In this scholarship, diaspora and diasporic media production have been privileged sites for understanding the shifting, often disjunctive , relations between cultural production, geography, and identity. Further, in the South Asian context, it is possible to now trace an arc beginning with Marie Gillespie’s analysis of media use in a predominantly Punjabi community in a London neighborhood, through Sunaina Maira’s exploration of Indian American youth culture in New York City, to Shalini Shankar’s ethnography of Desi youth culture during the tech boom in Silicon Valley as a way to foreground transformations in understandings of South Asian diasporic identity and the South Asian mediascape...

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