ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out to remap Hindi popular cinema by locating its regional trajectories and questions conventional accounts of Indian cinema that present a narrative of a fixed and definitive Hindi language cinema produced in Bombay. Indian films of the 1920s employed inter-titles in a variety of languages, as is evident not only from surviving films but also from the Indian Cinematograph Committee Report (ICCR), and were produced and circulated across multiple locations throughout India. The chapter argues for an alternative, and more geographically complex, historiography of Indian cinema. It highlights their multiple paths, especially their regional and cosmopolitan networks, and the fact that in the 1920s colonial India was regularly exposed to a wide range of American films. The chapter extends the proposition and examines the process of "nationalization" and the "inscribing" of regional cultural features in contemporary cinema to reveal what we could term the "forking paths" of mainstream Hindi films.
