Standard histories of “Indian cinema” suggest that the coming of sound in 1931 fragmented a previously homogenized national audience for the cinema in India – a moment that thereby arrested the rise of the large pan-Indian industry and divided the so-called national audience for “Indian cinema” into separate linguistic groups. However, as the quotation above suggests, from the manager of the Globe Theater, one of Calcutta's elite cinemas, this conceptualization of a large, undivided “Indian” audience in 1927 was essentially a myth. This essay explores the emergence of cinema in the city of Calcutta, one of the two key film production centers in colonial India, along with Bombay, and conditions of exhibition in the 1920s to complicate the notion of silent film audiences of “Indian cinema.” It reveals a varied exhibition structure, addressing a range of audiences in the city of Calcutta, and explodes the myth of a homogeneous national audience for film in India, tracing this idea back to the history of theater and to global trajectories of entertainment in the second largest city in the British Empire. This reading thus points to the inadequacies of categorizing film audiences along national divisions in an age of persistent global encounters.

Calcutta: Colonial City

The area on the banks of the river Hooghly that grew into Calcutta was already a commercial hub, with a cluster of trading villages and markets, when British, French and Dutch immigrants decided to settle in the area to trade in cotton, saltpeter, opium and indigo in the 17th century. Throughout the next two centuries Calcutta grew rapidly into a global metropolis, the commercial and administrative center of the British East India Company, and later the capital of British India, attracting diverse communities of traders, soldiers, missionaries and servicemen. The concentration of trade and industry in Calcutta saw large numbers of people migrating to the capital city, especially from the late 18th century, and the city extended steadily into surrounding areas, absorbing villages and wetlands as it expanded.