ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to move beyond the dominant national framework organizing both Indian and Iranian film studies by arguing for early ‘Hindustani’ and Persian-language cinemas as not only mutually constitutive but also part of a centuries-long cultural dialogue across borders. The Iranian expatriate ʿAbd al-Hosayn Sepanta produced The Lor Girl (1933), “the first talking musical film in Persian,” in the same Bombay studio in which his Parsi collaborators had produced the first Indian sound feature two years earlier. The shared origins and aesthetics of these cinemas not only speak to the Parsis’ then-mediating role between India and Iran but also to the continuing existence of a ‘Persianate’ world despite the countervailing forces of colonialism and nationalism.
