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Marketing and Promotions in Bollywood >> 83

establishment of transnational television companies such as Star, ZEE, and
Sony during the 1990s—reveals how the film industry responded to new cir-
cuits of capital and discursive practices (television ratings points, for exam-
ple) that transformed Bombay’s media world.
It would be a mistake, however, to conceptualize these changes as leading
to a thoroughgoing break, of established practices giving way to new ones. In
fact, Tripathi’s account, in which he invokes both an established director like
Karan Johar and MBA-style film marketing, signals not so much new mar-
keting practices replacing older modes as the imperative to negotiate a media
ecology defined by multiple, at times competing, notions of value. As we will
see, marketing and public relations professionals became central to the pro-
cess of authoring hype in large part because they were able to facilitate inter-
actions and exchanges among professionals in film, television, and advertis-
ing despite the fact that these industries were defined by what appeared to be
incommensurable regimes of value and modes of knowing the audience.

Reimagining the Audience: A Tale of Two Mahurats

Let me begin with Kaante (Thorns, dir. Sanjay Gupta, 2002), a project that
trade narratives positioned as a test site for a range of stakeholders to envi-
sion Bollywood as a space of cultural production that would resemble Hol-
lywood not only in terms of production values and processes, but most
crucially, in terms of marketing strategy. Kaante was coproduced by Sanjay
Gupta (also the director of the film), Pritish Nandy Communications (a tele-
vision production company that entered the business of film production in
1999), Raju Patel, an NRI with over two decades’ experience as a producer
in Hollywood, and Lawrence Mortoff, a Hollywood producer. Gupta’s story
outline, an Indianized version of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, was
converted into a script and the film itself was shot in Los Angeles with an all-
American crew and actors from India reportedly working twelve-hour shifts
and adhering to completion bonds. Billed as the Hindi film industry’s first
“truly international” film and a “pioneering effort to integrate the Indian film
industry with the rest of the world,” Kaante went on to do well at the box
office in India and abroad, and was even listed in the Top Ten charts in the
U.K. and the United States. 5
While clean financing, discipline, and efficiency were all cited as reasons
for Kaante’s success, the film’s marketing and promotional strategy also
received a lot of attention. “Forget the online trailer, the TV promos, the
6
deal with Thums Up, the L.A. connection and everything else. All this was
played up, yes. And it helped. But I would say that Kaante made everyone sit