Cricket, entertainment, glamour industry and promotional culture in India, 1913–2013

Cricket and entertainment in India have been inextricably connected deeper and wider than is acknowledged by commentators. They have successfully exploited one another's positive image to intensify their appeal, brand value and consumption potential. This article examines the significance of this convergence of cricket and entertainment within a historical framework, focusing principally on Bollywood's use of cricket as a strategy to maximise publicity. The history of cricket's appropriation for promotional campaigns provides an entry into the cultural modes of cricket's interaction with other forms of leisure, exploring the limits and excesses of promotion and dispelling myths of cricket's pre-eminence as a recent phenomenon. In the first two sections, the article analyses the appearance of cricketers in advertisement, promotional events, films and television serials. In the next two, it explores how entertainment personalities have used the medium of cricket for promoting themselves as leisure products. By examining the agency of cricket and entertainment as constitutively contributing to the ever morphing practices of this consumer culture, the article registers the entanglement between aesthetic and commercial imperatives in the capitalist/personal enterprise of publicity in modern India