Traveling Showmen, Makeshift Cinemas

Abstract

This article offers an archeology of vintage, obsolete, pirate and "junk" media forms related to the cinema in India, with the Bioscopewallah or traveling picture showman at the center of such an archeology. The article traces the origins of the Bioscope to nineteenth century European entertainment in Calcutta, and follows its numerous subsequent reinventions, as it weaves in and out of the European and Indian worlds, private, commercial and state initiatives, and plays a central role in movie exhibition in early twentieth century Bengal. It concludes by mapping itinerant cinema's place within India's contemporary media ecologies. Linking technology and commerce to each other on the ground of seemingly vestigial artifacts from an earlier era, it argues that the obviation of obsolescence, as an historically contingent and geographically variable survival tactic, is critical to the logic of media history in India.A considerable proportion of film exhibition in India occurs in itinerant form and in makeshift-and often temporary-establishments rather than in permanent theaters. 1 Many of these are traveling showmenfamiliarly known as bioscopewallahs-who transform the spaces of everyday life into theatrical space, exhibiting moving-images through a combination of often vintage, "obsolete" projection equipment and film scraps disposed of by established studios. These instances compel rather basic historical questionswhere did these projectors come from, and how have these methods persisted and remained viable into the present? What genealogies of movie exhibition can we construct, relying it would seem at first glance, only on the "memory of living men", the projectionists, and the workings of their hands on their apparatuses? 2In answering these questions, I offer a rudimentary media archeology of vintage, obsolete, pirate, and "junk" media forms related to the cinema. Some versions of the bioscope in existence today in India are remnants not of the early twentieth century cinematographic apparatuses, but also of the mid-nineteenth century optical instruments that undergirded practices of European visual entertainment in cities such as Calcutta (Kolkata). 3 From an initial consideration of the screen practices that comprised the circuits of nineteenth century European entertainment, I follow the bioscope in its numerous mutations, as it weaves in Article BioScope 1(1) 27 -47