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Marketing and Promotions in Bollywood >> 85

to distributors’ capital which is advanced to producers, the production then
belonging to the financier.” 10
These practices, not unlike those Curtin documents in the Chinese film
industry, meant that not everyone had equal access to certain circuits of
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information flow (regarding box-office returns, for instance). Social rela-
tions forged and cultivated over a long period of time, especially ones that
have successfully negotiated successes and failures at the box office, have
tended to define the operations of the Bombay film industry. In one sense,
then, the mahurat is first and foremost an industry ritual that serves as an
occasion for a range of industry professionals to reaffirm their ties to one
another. It is what John Caldwell would characterize as a “semi-embedded
deep text/ritual” that maintains, renews, and in some cases forges new rela-
tionships both among those involved in media production (producer-direc-
tor-star-distributor) and between the production community and the trade-
press (editors of trade publications and a number of print, TV, and dot-com
media journalists). 12
So why did the mahurat for the film Kaante attract attention? To begin
with, as one film journalist noted, “[T]here was no cracking of the auspicious
coconut, no lights, no camera, and no one shouting out the command . . . !” 13
At the mahurat, held at a five-star hotel in Bombay, after introductions by
actor Sanjay Dutt and writer Anurag Kashyap, the six principal stars of the
film assembled on a dais and proceeded to give the spectators an idea of the
film by reading out sections from the script. A two-minute promotional
trailer and a Q&A session for the journalists followed this script-reading ses-
sion. “It had,” another journalist exclaimed, “all the touches of a Hollywood
film in the making.” Further, trade and press reports of this mahurat noted
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that the event was attended not only by stars and other personalities from the
film industry, but also by fund managers and investment bankers. 15
This mahurat can certainly be read as an early response to calls for corpo-
ratization, as an acknowledgment of the need to adopt practices befitting an
industry seeking to go global. Journalistic accounts of the event reveal that
this was precisely how the event was understood by the film industry, with
one prominent film director commenting that “such displays would change
nothing. . . . Bollywood is not about black ties and dinner jackets.” But I
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would argue that focusing on the Hollywood-like rituals of script reading
and the screening of a trailer only serves to deflect attention from one of the
most important changes that this particular industry ritual anticipated: the
emergence of a network of social relationships defined not only in terms of
kinship and long-term personal ties, but also through new circuits of capi-
tal. The mahurat, production, and marketing of Kaante signaled that the web