From Bombay to Bollywood analyzes the transformation of the national
film industry in Bombay into a transnational and multi-media cultural
enterprise, which has come to be known as Bollywood. Combining
ethnographic, institutional, and textual analyses, Aswin Punathambekar
explores how relations between state institutions, the Indian diaspora,
circuits of capital, and new media technologies and industries have
reconfigured the Bombay-based industry's geographic reach. Providing
in-depth accounts of the workings of media companies and media
professionals, Punathambekar has produced a timely analysis of how a
media industry in the postcolonial world has come to claim the global as
its scale of operations.
Based on extensive field research in India and the U.S., this book
offers empirically-rich and theoretically-informed analyses of how the
imaginations and practices of industry professionals give shape to the
media worlds we inhabit and engage with. Moving beyond a focus on a
single medium, Punathambekar develops a comparative and integrated
approach that examines four different but interrelated media
industries--film, television, marketing, and digital media. Offering a
path-breaking account of media convergence in a non-Western context,
Punathambekar's transnational approach to understanding the formation of
Bollywood is an innovative intervention into current debates on media
industries, production cultures, and cultural globalization.
