From Folk to Tech
India’s traveling cinema tradition goes modern
India’s mobile film trucks have been bringing cinema to remote communities for decades. But times are changing: Unable to compete with technological innovations and the rising cost of doing business, they were on the wane even before the pandemic. What is their future? The piece explores the evolution of tradition.
In Dev Benegal’s Road, Movie (2009), a desert wanderer tells his disbelieving fellow travelers of a carnival that takes place in the middle of the wilderness. They have just escaped the clutches of the police by hosting a night of talkies, using the projectors in their traveling cinema truck to charm an already captivated audience. Now desperate for food and water and scorched by the blazing desert sun, they wait against a barren landscape, eager for signs of life. “Set up the cinema and the fair will appear. We will get food and water. People will come.”
And sure enough, as they transform the bleak landscape into magical theatrical space, clusters of people begin to turn up, as if conjured by their traveling cinema. There are circus performers, musicians, acrobats and balloon sellers. What follows is a glowing night in the desert with romp, color and music, giant wheels and masked dances—and movies, in a surreal celebration of the carnivalesque. By the next morning, the fair has disappeared, leaving almost as abruptly as it had come.
Although fictional, Benegal’s Road, Movie points to a truth. Born from a scrappy, DIY effort to introduce film to the country's rural communities, India's mobile cinemas offered sustenance and communal entertainment to its geographically and culturally isolated regions since the 1930s. But in recent decades, technological innovations have hastened their decline: Factors like television and the internet nearly decimated the tradition even before the onset of the pandemic. Today, a new effort is underway to resurrect India’s legacy of the traveling cinema, assisted by the same technological advancements that only recently threatened its extinction.
When cinema arrived in India in the late 19th century, it was initially restricted to urban spaces, screening in hotels and theaters in cities like Mumbai. Film exhibitors soon realized that their biggest audiences were to be found in villages—regions without permanent cinemas—and specifically at jatras, the annual religious fairs that ran for several months each year. As these entrepreneurial theater owners smuggled their way into jatra festivities with tents and screens in trucks, their improvised cinemas—known as tambu talkies—soon became the main attraction, overshadowing traditional entertainment like lavani (a dance form native to Maharashtra) and tamasha (a type of Marathi theater performed by traveling groups). Within that context, the arrival of the silver screen in India’s small villages was, quite literally, a religious experience.
In villages, mobile cinema became part of the fabric of life, weaving together art, culture, entertainment and community. For some old-guard practitioners, it was also the family business. “Mine was the last tent cinema to shut operations,” says Anup Jagdale, whose father launched Anup Touring Talkies in 1963 with a secondhand projector. After inheriting the business, Jagdale spent months each year traveling through rural Maharashtra screening Hindi and Marathi films, until 2015, when he was forced to shutter. “I put my own money into the company for a long time, but there was no balance between its earnings and expenses,” he explains. Piracy and cheap internet meant that the traditional touring cinemas couldn’t keep up with the pace at which viewers were consuming new releases. The people who worked for Jagdale are all on their own now; some have found employment in fields and others in offices. And yet, a lone strain from a hit ’90s song will suddenly transport him back to his tent. Reluctant to relinquish the family trade altogether, Jagdale has stored all the paraphernalia from those days carefully in a warehouse and nurtures hopes of government support or a corporate sponsorship that could help him kickstart things again.
It was not just the rapid entry of satellite and cable television—with its ample programming and access to popular Hindi and Hollywood films within months of their release—in Indian homes in the late ’90s that spelled trouble for the touring talkies. Difficulty in finding prints as a result of the shuttering production labs and the move to a more expensive digital setup also cost the industry many players, even as the advent of digital filmmaking swiftly destroyed the romance of the analog era (that golden age of touring talkies is captured by Amit Madheshiya and Shirley Abraham in their 2016 Cannes-winning documentary The Cinema Travellers). Initially, the tent cinemas had also functioned as film distribution agents, maintaining profitable partnerships with Marathi filmmakers and cultivating an important platform for showcasing regional films that rarely stood a chance in city multiplexes. “Later, they had so many platforms to screen their films that nobody was really interested in the touring talkies,” says Sujit K. Jha, director of the documentary A Tent, A Truck & Talkies (2017).
To survive, India’s folk tradition is adapting to the times, with a new wave of entrepreneurs optimizing for the current moment. In terms of ambition and scale, they mark a radical departure from the old-school mobile cinema operations. In 2016, Sushil Chaudhary, founder and CEO of PictureTime Digiplex, launched an acoustics-enabled inflatable digital cinema. Chaudhary sought to address what he saw as the two primary reasons for India’s small number of cinema screens (which starkly contrasts with its massive film production): high real-estate prices and regulatory constraints. While starting a brick-and-mortar theater requires some 60-odd permissions, which can take up to three years to acquire, temporary cinema requires only three.
“Nobody was interested in giving rural India the cinematic experience we were getting in multiplexes,” says Chaudary, explaining that when he designed his product, the tendency was to think of the rural market as a low-end business that did not need a Day 1 film. What PictureTime offers is a product free of real estate, with the latest bells and whistles—3D-enabled 1.8 gain screens, DCA-compliant projection systems—all of which can be loaded onto a truck specially designed to erect an air-conditioned cinema with recliners in three hours.
With plans to build 100 screens and show newly released films in each, PictureTime has its work cut out. But Chaudhary believes there is still a huge potential for traveling cinema in India, pointing out that 536 districts are still deprived of big screens. “And yet, people do not bet on it because they feel traveling cinema means they will not get a first-day release,” he says. “At PictureTime, we had to convince producers and distributors to give us the Day 1 film, as this was also a move to stop piracy. We are trying to disrupt the system so that cinema release can become democratic, while also democratizing content distribution to give everybody a level playing field.”
Another contender in the new wave of mobile cinema is Caravan Talkies, started by the UFO Cine Media Network, an Indian digital cinema distribution network and in-cinema advertising platform. In Caravan’s advertising-driven model, branded mobile vans with projection systems and LED screens travel through villages showing films for free while providing marketers a platform for rural targeting. If increased reach and availability justify PictureTime’s rapid proliferation strategies even as they help it maintain a sustainable economic model, Caravan Talkies, with its in-cinema advertisements, product sampling and aggressive mobile branding drives home how far the touring talkie tradition—albeit capitalist from its inception—has come from its humble folk roots, improvised setups and rural ambitions.
Even those nostalgic for the old days must acknowledge the benefits of evolution. Caravan’s initiative aims to correct the skewed gender ratio of rural India’s traditional cinema-going audience, according to UFO executive director and group CEO Rajesh Mishra. He points out that it is men who primarily benefit from the presence of permanent cinemas, traveling by bus, truck or tractor to the nearest town to watch a film while the elderly, women and children are left behind due to logistical challenges and cost. Even touring talkies set up in carnival grounds, he insists, were patronized mainly by men who were there to buy or sell things.
“With Caravan Talkies, we typically plan shows in the evenings, when women and children, after household chores and school, can enjoy a film,” says Mishra, adding that Caravan’s screenings have drawn as many as 1,800 people. The company’s 117 vans show popular movies in open-air setups in regions without easy access to entertainment. Caravan’s various advertising methods have provided a marketing platform for private companies, and has spread awareness about government initiatives on insurance, agriculture and immunization.
PictureTime’s Chaudhary believes sustainability is key to the talkies’ survival, and that building a product that could last for 20 to 25 years is the only way India’s traveling cinemas can realistically continue. But this upgraded, calculated version of mobile viewing signals a spiritual disassociation from older community festivals for which the touring cinema was once the centerpiece. It is also a decidedly urban import, whereas the earlier talkies had been conceived by village men who had migrated to cities and, enamored by the motion pictures, had brought them back to the countryside.
“Even today, there are so many villages in India that don’t have theaters, so many people who want to see films on the big screen,” says Anup Jagdale. “But the pandemic has killed people’s spirits. If one company is somehow able to restart, who knows, others might get the confidence to get back in the game too.”