In the depths of the January gloom, Britain is set to celebrate a red-and-gold Indian monsoon wedding from Friday as Mira Nair’s film goes to general release across the country in a unique bi-lingual format and marketing experiment. "We’ve tied up with the Asian film distributor Eros to do separate targeted marketing of two separate versions of Monsoon Wedding, one in Hindi, the other in English. It’s never been done before, to actually have the same film in two different languages in the same cinema hall," Pete Buckingham, deputy chief executive of Film Four, Monsoon Wedding’s UK distributors, told The Times of India.

The experiment, says Buckingham, is a hugely expensive, logistically difficult exercise aimed at bringing white and Asian audiences into cinema halls simultaneously and taking Monsoon Wedding into the big league of this year’s top 25 grossers. Industry pundits say the "experiment" is signficant for Bollywood’s "crossover" aspirations with Aamir Khan publicly stating last year that he wanted Lagaan to cross the white-Asian divide and become the Hindi Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Lagaan was shown nation-wide, sometimes in cinema halls with a dominant white clientele. But now, the Monsoon Wedding experiment will unite and carve up the British market at the same time, because critics say, white mainstream audiences cannot be lumped with Asians and vice versa.
"They might watch the same thing but each doesn’t want sub-titles and both need different advertising strategies," agrees an advertising executive associated with the English-language Monsoon Wedding campaign.