The traffic in technologies: Early cinema and visual culture in Bengal, 1840--1920

This project offers a fresh glimpse into the pre-history and earliest years of the motion-pictures in South Asia, with a focus on Bengal. It highlights the multiple intersections between the cinema, photography, the printed image, and a wide range of practices of mechanical reproduction and visual entertainment.;Visual culture in Bengal was ensconced within far-reaching networks of objects, technology, and personnel. These networks of trans-regional trade and traffic shaped technologically- and commercially-unique practices of image production and sale. Photography developed in ways that ensured the dominance of the photo-studio at the center of a retail culture of photography, rather than a mass-amateur market dependent on the individualized consumption of the Kodak hand-camera. Similarly, early film exhibition was mostly itinerant, geared towards geographically dispersed and niche rather than homogenized markets of movie-going audiences.;Itinerant film exhibition facilitated multidirectional and trans-regional networks of piracy. India was one of the largest markets for "junk" or pirated films in the early film period. Piracy also closely wove the histories of print technologies of mechanical reproduction, and visual culture together, as visual images found multiple formats: photo-illustrated books to accompany film actualities, postcards, and lithographs. These media crossovers spotlighted the political ramifications of the process whereby images acquired value through their circulation. The producers of these images negotiated the layers of a fractious imperial bureaucracy, dispersed across India and Britain, by resorting to claims of cultural authenticity, and engaging in acts of imitation as gateways to modernity. I re-interpret iconic instances of early indigenous filmmaking by situating these endeavors within such strategies. I also show that these media overlaps enabled a greater diversity of visual engagements with modernity than has hitherto been recognized.;Thriving on obsolete practices, makeshift technology and pirate networks, photography and early cinema took the form of localized performances rather than mass-mediated spectacles in Bengal. I contend that the departures these aspects constitute, and their specificity, can only be articulated through comparative frames of reference to other locations: Bombay, Europe and the U.S.