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business potential that these two films signified was connected to their quality. “In a gap of one year, you have two major blockbusters like never ever have happened in the film industry. You have that kind of business waiting for you; the point is now you have to have a picture to collect that kind of audience, that kind of money. If you make a bad movie, you don’t expect people to go and pay you” (Shyam Shroff, interview, April 1996). Shroff and Adarsh both expressed a tautology that I heard frequently during my fieldwork: audiences will only come to see a good film, and the way to know if a film is “good” is when audiences come to see it. Of course, their statements linking commercial success with cinematic quality is in direct contrast to the arguments presented in the previous section, especially in relation to the discussion about Lamhe —an acknowledged “good” film that performed poorly at the box-office. In the discussion about the 1980s, the dominant view presented by the press and filmmakers was that “bad,” “trashy,” or “vulgar” films were the ones that did well at the box-office and that good films like Lamhe did not have much commercial scope. The unanticipated success of HAHK and DDLJ therefore necessitated a major re-envisioning of the industry’s axioms about filmmaking and audiences. Similar to filmmakers’ discourses about the ’80s, however, cinematic quality in the ’90s was linked to the advent of new technologies and the social class of audiences.

The Era of Satellite and Returning Middle-Class Audiences
    The attitudes toward new media technologies underwent a remarkable transformation between the two periods. Whereas video was posited as the reason for the degeneration of Hindi cinema in the 1980s, the presence of satellite television was cited as a factor for the improved production values of Hindi films in the 1990s. If video made filmmakers take shortcuts, satellite made them try harder. There were two strands to thisargument—enticement and education—each addressing the distinctly imagined class-based identities of the audience. One explanation, based on middle-class ideals of domestic comfort and privatized leisure, centered on trying to entice assumedly elite viewers away from their television sets. Filmmakers argued that since they faced increased competition from satellite television, they had to spend lavishly to project a cinematic experience unavailable at home. Rajjat Barjatya, the director of marketing for Rajshri Films, explained their decision to make Hum Aapke Hain Koun! with optical stereo sound as a way to deal with the challenges posed by satellite television: “That is the only way we can combat video and satellite TV, which is penetrating almost every home today. . . When you sit at home you have 50 channels, and at least 45 to 50 films are being screened every day if you include the TV and cable channels. Why [would] a person come to a cinema? The film has to be extraordinary; the cinema has to be extraordinary; the entire experience has to be extraordinary, only then will he come” (Barjatya, interview, April 1996).
    The other explanation had to do with the reforming tastes of the implied mass audience . Filmmakers argued that with audiences being exposed to the “best” in the world, or to “international” standards, they demanded no less from Hindi films. DDLJ’s director, Aditya Chopra, explained that audiences were becoming better judges of quality and more discerning in their tastes, which he attributed to satellite television and its plethora of channels: “Mainly due to satellite, they see so much international stuff that when they come and see a Hindi film. . . I’ve seen [the] audience talk today about camerawork, about sound, about effect, which was unheard of! A common man saying, ‘ arre kya light kiya shot ko !’ [Look how well he lit that shot!]. You know, they [didn’t used to] talk like that! But nowadays they do, so