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Marketing and Promotions in Bollywood >> 91

At one level, this is like any other film mahurat—a brief yet elaborately
staged performance that asks potential investors to imagine a “superhit.” It is,
as Anna Tsing observes about speculation and contemporary global finance,
a performance that is simultaneously economic and dramatic: “In speculative
enterprises, profit must be imagined before it can be extracted; the possibility
of economic performance must be conjured like a spirit to draw an audience
of potential investors. The more spectacular the conjuring, the more pos-
sible an investment frenzy. Drama itself can be worth summoning forth . . .
dramatic performance is the prerequisite of economic performance.” But
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at another level, Zoya Akhtar’s staging of Rommy Rolly’s production mahu-
rat speaks to the redefinition of the mahurat from being primarily an intra-
industry ritual to becoming the first promotional text directed at audiences
in a rapidly expanding paratextual universe that includes film songs, mak-
ing-of documentaries, director commentaries and other DVD extras, televi-
sion talk shows, web-based and mobile phone contests, and so on. It also
suggests that the audience, conjured in and through television and not just
by the producer-distributor-star nexus, is now imagined through a different
set of enumerative logics (television ratings points, web metrics, and other
market research techniques), a marked departure from established practices
in the Bombay film industry.
Let us also note the importance of recasting the audience as a measurable
and knowable construct that could be used to generate additional revenues
for these new players in the film business. Television corporations like STAR,
Sony, and Zee, media subsidiaries of large corporations such as Tata (Tata
Infomedia) and Reliance Industries (Reliance Big Entertainment), and com-
panies like Kaleidoscope Entertainment set up by venture capitalists with
experience in the IT sector, operated with business logics that required them
to justify their investments. At one level, then, the push for more profession-
alized modes of film marketing and the emphasis on market research can be
understood simply as a function of these new players’ need to justify their
entry into a business fraught with risk. At the same time, we cannot discount
the symbolic value that marketing and promotions leant to the project of
fashioning Bollywood Inc. Venture capitalists, prominent NRIs, and execu-
tives from transnational advertising agencies and television corporations
certainly appreciated mahurats and other marketing/promotional tactics
that would not seem out of place in Los Angeles.
Further, even if the economic transactions that this new kind of mahurat
would animate were not readily apparent, producers, directors, distributors,
exhibitors, and others associated with the film industry were acutely aware of
the importance of Hollywood-style film marketing to the overall project of