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BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies http://bio.sagepub.com/ When Film Came to Madras Stephen Putnam Hughes BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 2010 1: 147 DOI: 10.1177/097492761000100206 The online version of this article can be found at: http://bio.sagepub.com/content/1/2/147 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies can be found at: Email Alerts: http://bio.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://bio.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://bio.sagepub.com/content/1/2/147.refs.html Downloaded from bio.sagepub.com at Tehran University on December 2, 2010 Article BioScope When Film Came to Madras 1(2) 147 –168 © 2010 Screen South Asia Trust SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Stephen Putnam Hughes Washington DC DOI: 10.1177/097492761000100206 http://bioscope.sagepub.com School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Abstract This article argues for the necessity of rethinking the beginnings of cinema in South India through a broader historical consideration of the specific entertainment contexts, which both preceded and were eventually transformed by the introduction of film. The first film exhibitors introduced film to Madras as a kind of European entertainment using the same local venues as the European variety circuit. Their shows conformed to a variety format and they frequently mixed films with other kinds of live performances. In addition to situating early touring cinema shows within the local, European entertainment circuits of Madras city, the second strand of my argument is that we need to rethink the mobility of early cinema in India. Rather than fixating on any discrete point of origin, I suggest that our attention needs to turn to how early cinema worked as a portable technology that traveled along various transnational networks through India. Thus, in our effort to ground early cinema as part of local history in Madras, we must also reconcile this with a better understanding of its spatial movement throughout South Asia and beyond. Keywords Film history, touring exhibition, colonial cinema, India, Madras The first film event in India has undoubtedly acquired more historical significance than it deserves. Almost every survey of the cinema in India starts with the same story of its original moment. Marius Sestier, a touring agent of the Lumière Brothers, first brought the “cinématographe” to India. It debuted at the Watson Hotel in Bombay during July 1896 only months after its debut in Europe and in the United States.1 The event was widely reported in the press around India: Living Photography—It is impossible to deny that the recent invention of Messrs. Lumiere Brothers is almost the greatest scientific discovery of the age. By its means life-sized photographs are reproduced, every movement of the figure is accurate. The figures are projected upon a screen and can thus be witnessed by a great number of spectators.2 Thus, the arrival of moving pictures in India was portrayed as a wondrous invention of science, which realistically animated photographs in a spectacular fashion. Within the chronology of “firsts” which has conventionally defined the historiography of early cinema in India, this event has come to mark an abso- lute beginning. This story has provided a powerful myth of origin that directly links India to a global film history that begins with the Lumière Brothers. Stephen Putnam Hughes is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK. E-mail: [email protected] Downloaded from bio.sagepub.com at Tehran University on December 2, 2010 148 Stephen Putnam Hughes There are numerous historiographic problems with privileging the first exhibition event as the official starting point for cinema in India.3 Marius Sestier got the headlines for screening the first shows in Bombay, but he did not stay in the country for more than six weeks. After his run of shows in Bombay ended in August, Sestier carried on to Australia, where he was the first to exhibit and make films. In contrast, Sestier’s contribution in India was a brief cameo. Yet, far too many scholars present this event as the sufficient cause for understanding the eventual popularity of cinema in India. The symbolic power of this film first has, in many ways, closed down the subject, so that this single event has come to stand for the beginnings of cinema in India. The story of this first film event hangs like a dead weight on the early period of cinema in India, closing down the horizon of our historical imagination. I suggest that we need to let go of our comfortable attachment to this established fact as a stable foundation for early film history and start a more critical interrogation of our conventional histories. The introduction of cinema in India was so thoroughly embedded as part of a multiplicity of pre- cinema practices that it cannot be merely understood as an isolated and novel event. Accordingly, I seek to rethink the beginnings of cinema in South India through a broader historical consideration of the specific entertainment contexts, which both preceded and were eventually transformed by the introduc- tion of film. This approach is also necessary for addressing larger questions about early audiences—who were they, what were they expecting, and how were they addressed by film exhibitors and their films? I argue that the early period of cinema in India and specifically South India, was overwhelmingly European in orientation. The first film exhibitors introduced the cinema to Madras as a kind of European entertainment. In this regard, the introduction of the cinema in India was not so different from the enter- tainment’s early career in the West, where it was not only based on the representational strategies, subject matter and vast repertoire of the Victorian stage, vaudeville and magic lantern shows, as well as other popular amusements, but also integrated into mostly lowbrow entertainment venues and contexts.4 Similarly, the early film exhibitors in Madras used the same local venues as the European variety circuit, their shows conformed to a variety format and they frequently mixed films with other kinds of live performances. However, the introduction of motion pictures in Madras was also inflected by the colonial context of British India and was aimed at a relatively higher-class clientele than was the case in Europe and North America. In addition to situating early touring cinema shows within the local European entertainment circuits of Madras city, the second strand of my argument is that we need to rethink the mobility of early cinema in India. Rather than fixating on any discrete point of origin, I suggest that our attention needs to turn to how early cinema worked as a portable technology that traveled along various transnational networks through India. Thus, in our effort to ground early cinema as part of local history in Madras, we must also reconcile this with a better understanding of its spatial movement throughout South Asia and beyond. Though early film exhibitors appeared and then disappeared at short intervals, Madras served as a nodal point in the circulation of motion pictures at the end of the nineteenth century. The movement of films was primarily organized through the multiple circulatory and constitutive practices of the British Empire, which included transportation, commerce, and social networks. Amongst these vectors, the most important for early cinema were the touring entertainment companies that traveled along a well-estab- lished European variety entertainment circuit across the British Empire in the subcontinent as well as through Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Oceania. Sometimes referred to colloquially as “strolling players,” these variety entertainment companies periodically visited Madras for short engagements, predominantly catering to European and native elite audiences. Within the colonial sociology of Madras, BioScope, 1, 2 (2010): 147–168 Downloaded from bio.sagepub.com at Tehran University on December 2, 2010 When Film Came to Madras 149 early film was configured alongside these touring companies as a form of cosmopolitanism. Thus, films worked as both a representational and mobile practice to articulate Madras audiences across space and time within the British Empire and the wider world. My argument about this highly mobile and European orientation is important because it has been largely written out of the early history of cinema in India. This early period was so different from what later develops as the mainstream culture of cinema in India that it has been difficult for subsequent gen- erations to recognize and appreciate its alterity. Further, a lack of documentation and the eventual success of the Indian film industry have worked to obscure this early period. But perhaps, more than anything else, there has been an understandably nationalist slant to much of the history of cinema in India that has tended to privilege the early Indian contributions at the expense of a minority of more transient Europeans whose presence in the country has been negatively associated with British rule. This dominant European orientation of early cinema in India remains problematic within the dominant historical narratives about the triumph of the Indian nationalist movement and the success of the Indian film industry. Can we evaluate this early period without falling into a celebration of the “great white moment” in the early history of cinema in India? I believe that this is both possible and necessary if we are to begin to understand the earliest period of cinema in India. Both Europeans and Indians alike participated in the European orientation of early cinema and they did so as part of a colonial social hierarchy of the British Empire.

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