From Indiafm.com to Radio Ceylon: new media and the making of the Bombay film industry

Abstract

How did Bombay emerge and maintain its position as the pre-eminent media capital in India? Focusing on the film industry in particular, scholars have identified a number of key factors: the city’s position as a center of trade and commerce, and the influx, through the decades, of mercantile capital into filmmaking; its status as a vibrant cultural center, with established theater movements initially providing the film industry with a range of creative personnel; the use of Hindi which accorded the Bombay-based film industry (located in a multi-lingual city and in a state where the official language is Marathi) ‘national’ status whereas film industries in cities like Madras and Hyderabad were ascribed ‘regional’ status; and the impact of India’s partition on other centers of film production, most notably Calcutta and Lahore, and the migration of a number of producers, directors, actors and technicians to Bombay during this period (Ganti, 2004; Rajadhyaksha, 1999; Thorner and Patel, 1995). In this article, I seek to add another important factor that might account for why Bombay has managed to maintain its position as a national media capital and claim ‘global’ status in ways that no other center of media production has been able to: the role played by new media – radio, television, the internet and the mobile phone – in enabling the Bombay film industry to consistently imagine andmobilize a ‘national’ and now, ‘transnational audience’. Specifically, this article provides a case study of Indiafm.com, one of the most popular and successful film websites, to illustrate the role played by dot.com companies in the film industry’s construction of an overseas market over the past decade. From being ignored as a medium that a majority of Indians could not access, how did dot.com companies become an integral part of the film industry within a brief span of two or three years? How did these websites become key