A Very Old Machine: The Many Origins of the Cinema in India

Argues that Indian cinema's deep nineteenth-century past continues to play a vital role in its twenty-first-century present.

In A Very Old Machine, Sudhir Mahadevan 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 its twenty-first-century present. He proposes that there has never been a singular cinema in India; rather, Indian cinema has been a multifaceted phenomenon that was (and is) understood...