ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at utopian logics across multiple sites not only in on-screen textual concerns and plot conflicts, but also in off-screen circuits of creative labour, industrial motivations and commercial concerns. It presents a dense, embedded and heterogeneous account of pre-independence Bombay cinema through such a method - by tracking utopias across cinema's proliferating spaces. The chapter examines the text and context, the filmic object and the catalyzing forces of its production, to argue that Bombay cinema imagined utopias in disparate modes and to varying ends. It also looks at films whose production is governed by technological utopianism; film writers compelled to paint socialist utopias on the silver screen; and audiences that had the collective power to write themselves into films as unlikely utopian protagonists. The chapter discusses several films, and the contexts of their production, one observes a range of modes through which the promise of utopia was being mobilized in late-colonial Bombay.
