ABSTRACT
Benedict Anderson has shown how print capitalism revolutionised modern cultures. To add, the indomitable cultural acculturation witnessed vis-à-vis visual spectatorship is rapidly blurring the boundaries between textual and visual history articulated as fiction, fact, myth reality, and historical consciousness in global cultures that continues to change how human experience has been recorded in antiquities of the written record.
Modern India in the nineteenth century is characterised by colonial introduction of education, social reform, and rise of nationalism wherein language and literature constituted a significant marker of contestations between ideologies of ‘region and nation’ in the making. This chapter attempts to examine and trace the historical significance of the making of the first Assamese language film Joymoti in 1935, which I propose constitutes a visual record in constituting middle-class community sensibilities vis-à-vis cinematograph spectatorship with specific reference to Assam in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century British India.
