"Ashish Rajadhyaksha argues that any exploration of the social uses to which cinema is put in a place like India can only make sense if it transforms our understanding of cinema itself. Taking as his timeframe the era of celluloid, which is also marked by public experiences of spectatorship and uses ... of cinema by the state, Rajadhyaksha examines three moments of crisis for the Indian State in which cinema played a central role." (Publisher description) more

"Most of the facts in this book are gleaned from available sources, representing the most reliable ones we could find for each of India’s cinemas (the sources are listed below). Many of these are what we earlier called, somewhat dismissively, ‘official’. Given the nature of the Indian film ind ... ustry, however, there were compelling reasons for drawing on this material alongside other, not always less ‘reliable’ sources. The editors of this book, quite deliberately and as a matter of policy, have refused to accept any single ‘authoritative’ source on any of India’s cinemas. On the contrary, we have endeavoured to produce a book providing the ‘most likely’ truth on the basis of often deeply conflicting sources. In this respect, what we offer here is not an authoritative source either (although these things are relative: we believe ours to be more authoritative than others simply because we were able to stand on the shoulders, so to speak, of the scholars who went before, even though none ever ventured to encompass as wide a field as we do in this project). Although this book will inevitably bear the scars inflicted by the unreliability of the sources used, we should like to believe that in consistently mapping India’s film histories on to a national canvas, we also present several new discoveries, such as the sheer contiguity of historical processes nationwide that most Indian regions persist in viewing as unique, the influences of film-makers from one region onto another, or even the trajectories of individual careers that transgressed boundaries sometimes decades before these boundaries came to be asserted." (Introduction, page 11) more