Description

Before the multiplex, before the OTT, before the air-conditioned mall, Indian cinema had a temple — and there were 13,000 of them. The single-screen cinema hall, with its hand-painted hoardings, its ticket black market, its first-day-first-show riots, its balcony romances and stall-class whistles, its Friday rituals and Sunday matinees, was, for most of the twentieth century, the most important shared public space in this country.

Over six years, film historian Anshul Pandey travelled across twenty-one Indian states to document the last of these halls before they vanish for good. He interviewed projectionists, ticket clerks, gatekeepers, poster painters, snack vendors, ushers, and the families who built these single-screens in the 1940s and ran them — often heroically, often hopelessly — into the present.

Here are the stories of the Naaz in Patna, the Royal Opera House in Bombay, the Sapna in Bangalore, the Maya Talkies in Bareilly, the Globe in Madras, the Krishna in Bhopal, the Liberty in Jullundur — and a hundred more. Some have been demolished. Some have become wedding halls. A handful have been brilliantly restored. All of them, between these pages, are remembered properly for the first time.

Beautifully illustrated with archival photographs, hoarding paintings, ticket stubs, and old film posters, *Single Screen* is a love letter, an obituary, and a cultural document — the definitive history of the public theatres that once taught India how to feel.

An essential book for every Indian cinephile.