Skip to main content

A VERY OLD MACHINE

This book shows how Indian cinema’s many origins in the technologies and practices of the nineteenth century continue to play a vital and broad function in the twenty-first.
Mahadevan proposes that there has never been a singular cinema in India; rather, Indian cinema has been a multifaceted phenomenon that was understood, experienced, and present in everyday life in myriad ways.

Employing methods of media archaeology, close textual analysis, archival research, and cultural theory, he digs into the history of photography, print media, practices of piracy and showmanship, and contemporary everyday imaginations of the cinema to provide an understanding of how the cinema came to be such a dominant cultural force in India. The result is an innovative account of Indian cinema’s “many origins.”


“a rich study of a wide array of primary materials and an important intervention about how we might try to imagine writing the many histories of cinema . . . provides us with new lenses through which we can reconstruct the past and begin to understand the present . . . at a historical moment when the state is aggressively promoting narrow ideas of cultural nationalism, Mahadevan’s book is a powerful reminder that what we tend to take for granted as ‘national’ cultural practices actually emerged through the traffic and circulation of images and material infrastructures across India, Britain and Europe. For all this and more, Mahadevan’s engaging and elegantly written book should be on every cinema student’s reading list”
SHOHINI GHOSH

“Through its brilliant excavation of the media ecology in which cinema made itself at home in early twentieth century India, this book makes a major contribution to both film studies and to the cultural history of Indian modernity, and widens our understanding of how to do film history and media archaeology” MANISHITA DASS

“This book asks us to look at the emergence of cinema at key historical junctures and through certain persistent lines of connection with the contemporary. Exploring the relationship amongst photography, print culture, the circulation of media commodities and the formation of early cinema, Sudhir Mahadevan undertakes a work of archaeology which argues that older media configurations never quite go away. The result is a stimulating series of provocations challenging linear histories and and opening up multiple archives to engage film and media experience”
RAVI VASUDEVAN

“a work of great theoretical sophistication and rigorous historical scholarship. A revisionist and definitive treatment of early Indian film, the book shows how prevailing attitudes toward technology, photography, empire, commodity, and mass culture made the cinema a socially and culturally distinct form in India. Drawing on a wealth of primary research, A Very Old Machine fills many gaps. Anyone who wants to know how Indian cinema became Indian will need to consult this book” JAMES MORRISON


SUDHIR MAHADEVAN is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media, at the University of Washington.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

THE BOOK OF INDIAN ESSAYS

Indians have been writing prose for 200 years, and yet when we think of literary prose we think of the novel. The “essay”   brings only the school essay to mind. Those of us who read and write English in India might find it hard to name an essay even by someone like R.K. Narayan as easily as we would one of his novels, say Swami and Friends or The Guide . Our inability to recall essays is largely due to the strange paradox that while the form itself remains invisible, it is everywhere present. The paradox becomes even more strange when we realise that some of our finest writers of English prose  did not write novels at all, they wrote essays. The anthology is an attempt at making what has always been present also permanently visible. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra   • A collection of the finest essays written in English by Indians over the past two hundred years. • The Book of Indian Essays is a wide-ranging historical anthology of the Indian essay in English – the f

THE GREAT AGRARIAN CONQUEST by NEELADRI BHATTACHARYA

BUY THE PAPERBACK       FROM THE REVIEWS   Review in SOCIAL HISTORY, USA by Benjamin Siegel The Great Agrarian Conquest represents a massive intervention into the contemporary historiography of South Asia, elaborating upon some conventional wisdom but upending a great deal more of it. Readers might well place this book in conversation with works like Ranajit Guha ’ s A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963) and Bernard Cohn ’ s Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (1997), to which The Great Agrarian Conquest owes some preliminary inspiration. Yet what Bhattacharya o ff ers is a wholly original account of the transformation to agrarian colonialism . . .   Few volumes in South Asian history have been more awaited than this monograph, Neeladri Bhattacharya ’ s fi rst. One of the most celebrated mentors and researchers at New Delhi ’ s Jawaharlal Nehru University, Bhattacharya retired in 2017 after a decades-long career. His formal scholarly output, limited to sev

PARTHA CHATTERJEE: THE TRUTHS AND LIES OF NATIONALISM as narrated by Charvak

"While the Covid-19 pandemic was still raging in the autumn of 2020, I found, one evening, placed outside the door of my home in Kolkata, a sealed packet. Apparently, it had been left there sometime during the day. It did not come by post or any of the courier services that usually deliver mail because, if it had, someone would have rung the bell and I was home all day. In fact, the parcel did not bear any seal or inscription except my name and address written in English script in a confident cursive style rarely seen these days. My curiosity was aroused because the package did not look like a piece of junk mail. The thought that it might contain something more sinister did strike my mind – after all, the times were not exactly normal. But something in the look of the packet persuaded me that it should be examined. After dutifully spraying the packet with a disinfectant, I unwrapped it and found, within cardboard covers and neatly tied in red string, what looked like a manuscript