Wondrous Screens in India

This book brings together fifteen chapters involving extraordinary primary material, evidences, and experiences of the rapidly shrinking single-screen spaces and transforming viewing cultures in the big cities and towns across India. It emphasizes on the material history of cinema - a history of one hundred years and more, intrinsically linked with accounts of the late colonial period, nation, democracy, as well as film industry, flow of capital, movement of people, traffic of the cinematic, urban and public cultures. The volume unpacks the history of cinema in India by exploring collective experiences at the site of cinema-halls. Scholars of cinema have considered subjects of infrastructure, micro- industries, industrial networks, media-ecologies, intermediality, as well as matters of performance, media-forms, and the labouring body. This volume complicates existing researches via the study of exhibition sites at Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Allahabad, Pune, Jamshedpur, Tirunelveli, Anantnag, and Srinagar. By problematizing the nostalgic gaze hovering over defunct single-theatres, the volume produces a pioneering reading of manifold film cultures in India. It focuses on history of places, peoples, practices, film publicity, architecture, urban and peri-urban spaces to generate a social history of cinema; rethinks issues of tangible and intangible archives; and provides methods to address the lacunae within cinema studies. This interdisciplinary volume will be invaluable to scholars and students across multiple fields including cinema and media studies, cultural studies, urban studies, visual studies, South Asian studies, and social history. It will be particularly useful for researchers working on film industry and exhibition cultures, viewership, urban history, media archaeology, and socio-political aspects of cinema. The chapters in this book were originally published as special issues of South Asian History and Culture.

Madhuja Mukherjee is Professor of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, India. Her research involves: South Asian film and media industrial histories, sound in cinema, gender, labour, digital practice, and urban cultures. She focuses on archives and material history of film and media. Her academic research evolved into media-installations, comics, and films. Kaushik Bhaumik is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. His areas of research mainly pertain to Indian, Asian and global cinemas with special emphasis on the political and cultural economies of film and media histories. He also teaches courses on 20th-century visual aesthetics.

Introduction: Wondrous screens in India: cinema halls, place, public, and cinephilia 1. The early world of cinema, expansion of theatres in Bombay and a map of the city via cinema-halls 2. Maratha Mandir, Bombay: cartographies of difficult histories of a metropolis 3. Something slippery: A speculative history of Calcutta cinemas through court-room documents 4. The Prabhat trajectory in Pune: studio, theatre and film practice (1934-present) 5. Cinema-going in a mofussil town: recalling the life and times of Lakshmi Talkies, Allahabad 6. Tirunelveli, touring talkies and tent cinemas: multiple stories of single-screens 7. The political economy of the single-screen cinema with respect to Bombay cinema 8. Escaping the DVD dispositif: John Abraham and the historical exhibition 9. The 'Celluloid Chapter' in Jamshedpur: break journeys and film society cinephilia 10. Cinema memories and single screen theatres: Yakut Mahal theatre, Hyderabad 11. After the single screen: performing publics at large 12. The 'Great Unknown': the movie theatre in our time 13. Cinema and its spectral returns: the single-screen viewer at the site of artistic re-imagination 14. Watching films in Kashmir Valley, 1960-1990: an interview with Inder Salim, artist