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altered status of the universal hit indexes a shift from the masses to the classes as the imagined target audience for Hindi cinema. This chapter thus reveals how the gentrification of the Hindi film industry is most apparent and visible in the realm of its audience imaginaries and exhibition practices. The valorization of socially elite audiences has less to do with profit and more to do with Hindi filmmakers’ concerns about cultural legitimacy and symbolic capital.

NOTES ON PSEUDONYMS, NAMES, FILM TITLES, AND COMMERCIAL CLASSIFICATIONS
    Given that Hindi films have highly visible public lives and that many of my informants are well-known celebrities, who are used to having their words and images circulate globally, I have not followed standard anthropological convention of assigning pseudonyms. Instead, I have adopted a mixed approach that is attuned to the specificities of my interactions with filmmakers. I use real names when quoting from formal, tape-recorded interviews, or when relaying observations from public events or public spaces; I use pseudonyms whenever I describe observations, interactions, and conversations where my informants had some reasonable expectation of privacy or when they would not be cognizant that the anthropologist amidst them would treat their statements as a form of data. In certain instances when quoting from a formal interview, I refrain from naming the speaker entirely when he or she has requested that particular statements not be attributed. In such cases, I have identified speakers by the occupational role they perform within the industry. Additionally, certain last names in the Hindi film industry, such as Chopra, Khan, Kapoor, and Khanna, are very common. Unless a kin relationship is indicated, readers should not assume that individuals who share the same last name are related.
    Film titles that appear in this book, unless specified, are the titles of actual films. In some instances I have changed a film’s title in order to maintain the confidentiality of a speaker when the circumstances required. Hindi film titles mainly appear in the urban landscape and onscreen in their Romanized transliterated form with their own particular orthography, which I have maintained, rather than converting themto the scholarly standards of transliteration with its specific diacritical marks.
    Finally, for the sake of consistency I have followed the dominant trade practice of tabulating commercial outcome from the point of view of the distributor, even though I call into question the assumptions that govern the interpretation of commercial outcome. For a host of reasons that are discussed in chapter nine, exact, accurate, or consistent figures and statistics about commercial outcome are notoriously hard to come by in the Hindi film industry. This is a feature of the industry that has been described with some frustration by transnational accounting and consulting firms—like A.T. Kearney, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, kpmg, et al.— which have been preparing hyperbolic annual reports of the potential of the film and entertainment industry in India since 2000. For example, Pricewaterhouse Cooper’s 2006 report, The Indian Entertainment and Media Industry: Unravelling the Potential , states in its preface that “since much of the industry does not have an organised body, lack of a centralised tracking agency that could provide us with accurate figures was the biggest challenge before us to compile figures and determine the size of each segment. This challenge was exacerbated by the fact that most companies in the industry do not have their financial information in the public domain ” (Pricewaterhouse Coopers 2006a). 49 Informants told me that even the trade magazines were, at the most, 80–85 percent accurate in their accounting of box-office outcome. Additionally, the fragmented structure of the industry means that commercial success itself is a relative concept, dependent upon which point in the