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>> 113 4 “Multiplex with Unlimited Seats” Dot-Coms and the Making of an Overseas Territory “So tell me, you left India for work or for higher studies?” asked Saleem Mobhani, cofounder of the highly popular and successful Bollywood website indiafm.com, a division of Hungama.com and recently rebranded as Bollywoodhungama.com. We were in a conference room in the office of Hungama.com, one of the few media and entertainment portals in India to have survived the dot-com crash. “Higher studies. I left in ’99,” I replied and before I could say more, he interrupted: “If you’ve been in the U.S., you know that it was students and expats sitting on the cutting edge of the boom, people like you, who created several Bollywood websites during the mid90s . They were the leaders at the time.” I nodded and said I knew about groups like rec.arts.movies.local.indian and the prebrowser days of Bollywood fan culture on the Internet. “But we’ve come a long way since then,” Mobhani continued, pulling his chair closer to the table and leaning in. “We have become the most credible Bollywood property online, and even trade people now get their information from indiafm.com. So let me tell you how it all started.” “The first promotion which happened on the Internet was for the film Kaante,” he began. “It was a very interesting case where Sanjay Gupta, master publicist that he is, shot a one-and-half minute promotional trailer, which he put up to distributors for funding. And by that time—this was in mid2000 —indiafm had made its presence felt in reaching out to the overseas audience. Satellite TV was not easy to consume, it was still expensive, and the spread was not all pervasive. So he made us a proposition—he would release the trailer globally on indiafm.com.” As Mobhani recalled, Sanjay Gupta set a date—June 6, 2000—for the trailer to be made public on indiafm.com and would only be available through this one website for a week. Giving me no opportunity to ask questions, Mobhani continued: “No TV, no print, nothing . And what resulted was just amazing.” According to Mobhani, publicity surrounding the release of the Kaante promotional trailer worked so well that on the very first day, 600,000 people tried to access the video, resulting 114 > 115 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 surveillance .2 In this broader context, this chapter analyzes the role that dot-com 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? indiafm.com promoting established Bollywood companies’ online presence. Such initiatives were crucial for dot-com companies to forge relations with established players in the film industry (70MM, vol. 3, issue 2; 2004). 116 > 117 role played by diasporic Indians during the late 1980s–early 1990s is particularly useful here.4 Sundaram argues that the Internet needs to be understood in relation to a new nationalist imaginary that defined development as a problem of communication. This new vision of development marked a radical departure from what is characterized as the Nehruvian vision of modernization and national development that defined state policy toward science and technology for over three decades from 1947 until the early 1980s. Under Nehru’s leadership, the Indian state embarked on an ambitious program of modernization driven by centralized planning, state ownership of heavy industries, massive investments in industrial development, and an accompanying emphasis on establishing institutes for higher education...

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