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Dot-Coms and the Making of an Overseas Territory >> 115

indiafm.com promoting established Bollywood companies’ online presence. Such initia-
tives were crucial for dot-com companies to forge relations with established players in the
film industry (70MM, vol. 3, issue 2; 2004).

On the one hand, the slogan—multiplex with unlimited seats—which
could well have come from a dot-com executive like Saleem Mobhani,
certainly reflects the desires of producers, directors, stars, and others in
Bollywood keen on reimagining their geographic reach. On the other
hand, the term “multiplex” connotes not so much openness to the world
but rather, a well-defined and decidedly upscale audience demographic.
It indexes not only a shift in conceptions of cinematic publics as the
single-screen cinema hall continues to be marginalized across urban
India but also, as Amit Rai argues in his account of the emergence of
the “malltiplex,” new kinds of social stratification and modes of surveil-
lance. In this broader context, this chapter analyzes the role that dot-com
2
companies played in mediating the relationship between Bollywood and
overseas audiences. What did it mean for the film industry to “do much
more with the Internet” and for a director to claim, on the basis of page
hits and click-throughs, that his film had an “overseas audience”? How
did professionals in the film and digital media sectors forge relationships,
and how did these relationships reconfigure the Bombay film industry’s
geographic reach?