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Why Padmaavat controversy ended up as a win-win for both Sanjay Leela Bhansali and Karni Sena

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Gautam Benegal
Gautam BenegalJan 27, 2018 | 15:24

Why Padmaavat controversy ended up as a win-win for both Sanjay Leela Bhansali and Karni Sena

Paresh Mokashi, director of Harishchandrachi Factory, said in an interview after his film was selected in the Best Foreign Language Film category in the 82nd Academy Awards, “If Dadasaheb Phalke were alive today, he would have loved the way we have moved forward on celluloid and evolved in tandem with the socio-economic changes in how we are making films with both budgets and earnings that cross Rs 100 crore unlike during his time when he literally had to mortgage his house and sell everything he owned to collect funds to make films.”

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But Dadasaheb Phalke, whose iconic 1913 film Raja Harishchandra had a budget of Rs 20,000 (in today’s terms Rs 2.4 crore) presumably did not have to set aside a hefty percentage of his budget for aggressive in-your-face-marketing in order to ensure that his film did not sink like a stone at the box office. At least not the way it is done in Bollywood these days.

The average publicity budget of a mainstream Bollywood film can fund about five or six regional films or indie films.

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A mainstream film spends nearly 45 per cent-50 per cent of its total marketing budget on television and 10 per cent-15 per cent each on print and digital, according to "Showbiz, The Indian Superpower" report by ESP Properties.

According to Vinit Karnik, Business head, ESP Properties, “The film entertainment industry is an integral part of India’s marketing landscape and drives revenue for film production and exhibition. Traditional film studios and production houses now increasingly rely on advertising and digital media interaction, coupled with innovation to market movies. At ESP Properties, we bring our client brands and movie marketing together to engage an audience that is spoilt for choice with 1,000 movies released every year. Targeted marketing to the consumer has, therefore, become critical, and this report will give brands and film producers some insights into movie marketing in a media landscape that is so disruptive.”

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In this scenario, just as celebrities play the role of active influencers to the brand, so does the profile of the target audience. A growing new middle class, vocal and opinionated and social media savvy, upward mobility from rural areas to urban, disposable incomes, and not the least, the socio political trends in the last decade pointing increasingly towards extreme nationalism, orthodoxy, traditionalism, and the religious polarisation that we are witnessing, also impact the brand.

Bollywood is a mirror that will not only reflect society, but also obligingly magnify its lowest common denominations to entice, captivate and to sell.

It is no coincidence that in the past few years, films have been made centered around the upswing of hyper nationalism, the downplaying of intellect, and in the recent case of Padmaavat (with a budget of Rs 190 crore), valorisation of sati, self-serving patriarchy, and deliberate demonisation of Muslims through the black and white portrayal of Alauddin Khilji.

Bollywood which has exploited the grey area between mythology and fact, successfully for years, dishes out pleasing narratives like the corner "chatwala", a potpourri of tear-jerking sentiment, item songs, patriarchy, nationalist zealotry, all served on a platter of opulent sets, costumes and jewellery.

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It does so to willing receptive audiences who, by and large, have an ahistorical mindset and have been weaned over the years through romantic films like Pakeezah, Mughal-e-Azam, Raziya Sultan, Jodhaa Akabar that bridged fantasy and reality, replaced academic history with the popular imagination of bazaar history. But none of those films had a common undercurrent that reflected the socio-political zeitgeist of the country as Baahubali (1 and 2), Bajirao Mastani, and now, Padmaavat does. The undercurrent of muscular Hindutva aggression that passes through films places them firmly in the same genre.  

Bollywood cinema in the past decade has been systematically promoting the Hindutva ideology in the name of protecting ancient (Hindu) societal tradition and national pride and integration, acting as a medium to project and reinforce the dominant Hindu, upper caste, upper class ideology. The rise of Hindu nationalism has reinforced the tropes of Muslim characters as the villain or the “invader” and to associate them with anti-patriotic values and terrorist activities and these films are now effectively richly packaged and presented with promotionals of this world view.

So when we talk about targeted marketing and marketing budgets, it is as difficult to make the distinction between the budget of the film and the budget for the marketing of the film, as the medium itself has become the message.

The lines between the traditional promo (or what used to be called the “trailer” in an earlier age) and the current 360 degree media deployment we are witness to, have blurred too. The former was a simple creative exercise carried out by a director who specialised in packaging and an editor, also skilled in the same. They would select shots from the length of the film and rearrange them as teasers to be projected in cinema halls before other films or telecast them in between programmes. What we have now are elaborate, finely calibrated corporate campaigns drawing from focus groups, research analysis and data analytics, leaving little ground for error. They go far beyond merely selecting scenes and shots from celluloid into the public sphere in the most invasive ways one can think of.

In corporate campaigns such as these, the lines between fame and infamy are also blurred, in fact, non-existent. In the post-digital world of social media, there is no such thing as “good” or “bad" publicity. It holds good for all the players in the case of a controversial film like Padmaavat, whether it is Viacom, which funds the film, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, who produces it, or the Karni Sena, which opposes it.

It is a win-win situation for all of them as they all stand to achieve their individual bottom lines, whether it is money or political center stage.

In other words, they’ll all be laughing all the way to the bank.

It is this a mutually beneficent synergy that prompts many to speculate whether at some point there is active collusion between the principles of these various interests.

Conspiracy theories apart, it is also worth thinking about how external to that marketing budget in real costs, how much a Bollywood film like Padmaavat extracts from the civil society in terms of publicity-by-controversy, and add that to this publicity budget.

We are talking about violence over three states, burning buildings, school buses, damages to property, and worse human costs.

Is it worth the ecosystem of self-interests and profits ranging from media ratings to a grassroots politician's ambitions that such promotionals thinly disguised as films generate, even before the release date?

Dadasaheb Phalke would probably not agree.

Last updated: January 28, 2018 | 22:13
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