Page 97 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

84 << Marketing and Promotions in Bollywood

up and take notice because of the mahurat,” explained Omar Qureshi, head
of the entertainment division of indiatimes.com. Qureshi then proceeded to
open the website that indiatimes.com had created for Kaante, and showed
me a section titled “launch” where trade and press coverage of the mahurat—
which refers to an auspicious date and time to commence any new venture
—had been compiled. It was clear that the launch of Kaante had been a sig-
nificant departure from the norm. 7
The mahurat is an important production ritual organized by a film pro-
ducer to announce a new project. In Bombay and other film-producing
centers such as Hyderabad and Chennai, mahurats are usually held several
months before actual production of the film has begun and in many cases,
are lavish affairs held at five-star hotels. At a typical mahurat, following the
announcement of the project by the producer and short speeches by the
film’s stars and other prominent film personalities present at the occasion,
the film’s main actors perform a scene that is filmed. As Ganti explains, “the
customary nature of the event is emphasized by the fact that the scene is
written especially for the occasion and the shot footage is never incorporated
into the final film. The goal is to impart the essence of the film since at this
stage the film is usually a germ of an idea—a script has not even begun to be
8
written.” The mahurat also marks the first stage of publicity for a film, and
is often used by producers to raise finances through the sale of distribution
rights. Ganti provides a thick description of one such mahurat in order to
demonstrate how kinship serves as the most important “principle of organi-
zation and hierarchy within the industry” and that it “functions as cultural
capital, symbolic capital, and a form of risk-management or insurance within
the industry.” 9
The long-term associations and friendships between directors, producers,
stars, and distributors, well-known to anyone who follows the careers of stars
in the industry, certainly present formidable barriers to entry for outsiders.
But Ganti’s analysis also makes it clear that every aspect of the film busi-
ness—including the crucial activity of tracking a film’s revenues, determin-
ing its box-office success or failure, and developing an understanding of the
“audience”—relies on a web of personal contacts and relationships developed
over a long period of time. Such informal and largely unorganized networks
of information flows are hardly surprising, as Prasad and Ganti’s accounts of
the dominance of merchant capital and the distributor-financier nexus in the
industry suggest. As we have seen in the previous chapter, this is an indus-
try in which the production sector has, since the 1960s, consisted of a hand-
ful of powerful producers and a large number of (mostly unaccounted for)
independent producers. Production has been, as Prasad notes, “subservient