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.