Chalo cinema

September 23 was celebrated as National Cinema Daymdashor Cinema Halls really to thank the public for helping multiplexes reopenmdashwith a flat Rs 75 ticket across halls It resulted in housefull shows especially daytime ones evoking an earlier cinema cultureGoing to the cinema has been an iconic Indian experience with its own vernacularmdashfirst day first show matinee housefullmdashterms that viscerally call up the anticipation longing and hustle for cinema tickets The film was an object of desire a sensory orgy The cinema hall a place where these desires mingled in the dark Cinema is often seen as a metaphor for the nation But the history of the cinema hall is also a kind of history of IndiaCinemarsquos arrival in India as scholars observe coincided with mass mobilisations and politically charged events leading up to Independence It became the source of many colonial anxietiesmdashthe gathering of lsquonativersquo crowds the sexualised depiction of white women the spread of political affection for the freedom movement These anxieties birthed censorshipFree India did not liberate cinema from censorship Early leaders looked askance at popular cinemarsquos populist pleasures and retained colonial restrictions Cinema being an expensive medium it required large audiences to be viable which created the large single screen cinema with its potential and potent mixing of classes castes and genders The theatre was internally stratifiedmdashthe lsquochavanni classrsquo of the working poor closest to the screen and the upper class floating above in costlier balcony seats with the isthmus of upper stall in between the lsquopublicrsquo in the lower depths responding bodily bawdily while the lsquogentryrsquo restrained their enthusiasm or not in the back row above Nevertheless a diverse public in one space was a unique and dramatic phenomenon in a culture where access and mobility were so regulated by caste gender and class In later decades when migrant workers mostly men dominated the audience the cinema everyone watched also mirrored their concerns and tastesOften when social divisions are churned ideas of womenrsquos safety and decency start becoming louder It was always less easy for women to go to the cinema Video allowed middle class audiences to remove themselves from the cinema hall marking it as not a lsquoclassyrsquo spaceIn 1997 PVR Saket became Indiarsquos first multiplex It denoted a new segmented idea of the market with the film as a consumer good to be marketed accordingly It advocated for a new Hindi film sanitised of desi aestheticsmdashsong and dance dialoguebazi melodrama into a more lsquoglobalrsquo langue of realism consumed in a luxurious environment with lsquoa decent crowdrsquo yaniki homogenous middle class audience sanitised of poor people who were also correspondingly missing onscreen because yeh Dil Chahta Hai more like us The multiplex replaced the heterogenous imagination of an Indian public with the aspirational consumercitizen even as the cinema hall receded from the world into the interiors of the mallConversations of Hindi cinemarsquos flagging fortunes have dealt with boycotts and South stylemdashbut never its exclusionary economy The nepotism debate keeps it in the middle class and conveniently sidesteps deeper inequalities and dishonesties of who can afford a seat in the theatremdashand symbolically a place in the ongoing Indian dream The housefull shows are suggestivemdashnot just about the future of Hindi cinema but a cohesive and necessary imagination of India tooParomita Vohra is an awardwinning Mumbaibased filmmaker writer and curator working with fiction and nonfiction Reach her at paromitavohramiddaycom