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conducted by intercepting people at malls in cities like Bombay. MTV-India’s
PowerPoint presentations and Madison Mates’s case studies are, to be sure,
acts of conjuring audiences and part of a larger set of discursive practices
that underpin the television and advertising industries. It’s not really about
knowing the audience, then, so much as refiguring modes of constructing
and circulating knowledge about audiences in a rapidly changing media
environment. In one respect, film marketing is an extension of the mahurat
and can be seen as a dramatic performance unfolding across multiple media
platforms, designed to assuage filmmakers’ anxieties while at the same time
enabling them to leverage new sources of revenue.
It is crucial, however, to understand this shift involving the audience and
the practice of marketing and promotion as part of a broader rearticulation
of modes of speculation and forms of knowledge in the media industries in
Bombay. In a period defined by extraordinary technological, financial, and
organizational flux, marketing and promotions emerged as practices that
allowed the film industry to negotiate the transition to new circuits of capital
that had redefined Bombay’s media world throughout the 1990s and early
2000s. It was also, as we have seen, key to the overall project of imagining
Bollywood as a global media industry. It is in relation to the normalization of
marketing and promotions as distinctive features of Bollywood and broader
changes in the distribution and exhibition sectors that we need to examine
dot-com companies’ position as knowledge brokers who could construct for
the film industry what the Bombay-based television, advertising, and mar-
keting industries could not: an overseas territory. It is to this set of negotia-
tions that I turn in the next chapter.