Introduction
This chapter prepares the comparative media crucible – an intensive synthesis of approaches to understand the media, in relation to capital, infrastructure, film form, narration, sovereign voice and geography. The book takes shape inside this analytical dwelling at the intersection of various grids – the recruitment of the province, capital and narrative voice, and the ideological containment of the masses – preparing the grounds for reading the coalitional tendencies before reassembling the role of media within the social order. It also assesses the provincial imperative acting upon ‘Bollywood’, and the attendant translations and purifications of the processes investigated in the book. The book thus grapples with a constellation which, this chapter argues, addresses an overflow of tendencies tethered to an unknowable ‘mass audience’. This search for an abstract mass, which breaches the embankments of region, class, language and culture, forces us to prepare the crucible with robust comparative analytics.