Paradox of Colonisation in India

 Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra

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British Colonisation of India—Its Necessity and its Price narendra October 7, 2025
The Paradox of Colonisation in India The question of the colonisation of India presents a profound paradox, encompassing immense external devastation alongside... Read Full

The Nationhood of India prior to British Rule narendra October 7, 2025
India was not a nation in the modern, political sense prior to British colonisation. However, India possessed a profound and enduring form of cultural and... Read Full

The Cycle of India's Rise, Fall and the Beginnings of Renaissance narendra October 7, 2025
Following is an analysis of India's spiritual trajectory, outlining distinct periods of evolution, a critical point of failure leading to intellectual and moral... Read Full

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Fundamentally, we pose the crucial question – why does the cinema hall keep slipping away between various categories of historical analyses of film history although notionally it is at a centre of them? One can detect three macro categories that hover around work on cinema halls only to relegate it into the shadows: people, identity, and networks of flow of film culture, capital, and technology, which eclipse studies in film exhibition. In a very (not so) subtle anthropocentrism of sorts film studies subsumes the cinema hall to ‘people’ oriented goals – the formation of mass urban societies/media consumers and identitarian telos: gender, race, class, rural versus urban, First World versus Other Worlds, and so on. Here, flesh seems to triumph over matter and material. Otherwise, the site of exhibition gets obscured by wider foci on networks of mass urban culture, cinema as capital culled off trade preoccupations – distribution above all, and production or technology. Such networks take the node for granted. 

But above all, one sees the main problem of the lack of extensive focus on cinema hall histories in academe is more an effect of the intersect between the object and the economics of publishing, alongside their obvious fluidity and ephemerality of the objects of study. Presenting a single cinema halls as book-length studies would mean selling the local to a global audience, which is an almost impossible task outside the discipline of anthropology. The local remains stubbornly singular to its local context, opaque to the generality of the global gaze (except of course as a general example) and more significantly it remains too petty a scale of focus for the global. Leslie Stainton’s monograph on the Fulton, for instance, is published by Penn State University Press – a state university press (not UPenn Press), for the history of a site of public entertainment. More often than not, the singular cinema hall is banished to the essay form – a small genre for a small thing. We are, however, not measuring the size of academic outputs, rather, we are enquiring what questions can we ask which amplify matters of cinematic habitus.

How could a ‘thick’ history of a cinema hall which is a rooted firmly in the local be presented to a general global public? Especially, if the site itself is not marked by some special iconic feature. And therefore, the prominence of local histories of cinema halls rather than by global academe. It is remarkable how even essays devoted to exhibition histories of cinema need to dissolve the particular sites of exhibitions into networks and flows, which can add up to a globally prominent city or a nation or trans-nation. And then there is the ‘ontological’ problem – a focus on the cinema hall as part of a larger picture displaces to a certain extent the very object of study, it takes away the immediacy of cinema as an active and alive agent of history. Thus, a recent edited volume that purports to discuss space/place with respect to film, nevertheless, anchors all its essays in the twin ideas of conquest of space by cinema/personalities that lead the conquest of exhibition by cine cultures of the public to render into place. Again, specific flows – technology, capital, audiences, and identity politics – tagged on to something as deterritorialising as cinema, and thus, the cinema hall as too specific to film and identities...

What emanates from the testimonies are vivid descriptions of being in the cinema-halls, the frenzy around films, the fascinations for film-songs, posters, and the headiness of film-viewing cultures in a mofussil town. Furthermore, Swarnavel Eswaran’s article draws special attention to the

uniqueness of touring talkies, mostly in Tirunelveli; the tent-like structures that offered movie screenings in rural areas and recounts the atmosphere and experience of viewing films there. Eswaran sutures personal memories and experiences of watching films in touring tents with of

their seating arrangements, breaks during the movie, technologies, and social dynamics within the theatre, as well as the challenges faced by the touring talkies. The engagement with the stardom of the Southern superstars Sivaji Ganesan and MGR during the 1960s and the 1970s, and their reception in semi-urban and rural areas, also sheds light on the cinephilia of the owners of touring talkies. Furthermore, the contemporary situation of touring theatres in Tamil Nadu is also considered by the accounts of Sri Lakshmi and Ganesh Talkies, which are the last remaining ones. To use Eswaran’s words: ‘this article is an elegiac remembrance of the Touring Talkies experience’... 

Finally, we must emphasise that the articles in this volume – Wondrous Screens in India – are neither bound by any one theoretical premise nor limited to a single philosophical concern. Therefore, the authors have referred to varied (primary) material and invoked a wide variety of approaches including those pertinent for writing urban histories, public cultures, cultural histories, oral histories, and about political cinema and collective memory. Moreover, they address the transforming avatar of cinema – from the early period to the present – and amplify the subject of

entangled histories, which dramatically unfold at a site, and transforms into a sight. It is our hope that this cluster of articles concerning single screens with very different biographies substantially conjure different worlds. We hope a reading of the articles together will stimulate our readers to consider the single-screen cinema beyond the ‘salvage ethnography’ sentiment, as mere case studies or reflections of systemic preoccupations that screen away the cinema hall from its own large

histories, in favour of the radical break that ‘thick’ studies of cinema hall sites might mean for film histories and history as such.