ABSTRACT
In Travels of Bollywood Cinema: From Bombay to LA (edited by Anjali Gera Roy and Chua Beng Huat, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), the argument I have advanced in my article, The Lahore Film Industry, is that although Bombay, Calcutta and Madras emerged as film-making cities earlier than Lahore, the latter enjoyed an advantage and seemed poised to become the second most important film-making city. The reason being that while Bombay was the undisputed capital of Hindi-Urdu or rather Hindustani films, it was located far away from the Hindi-Urdu language heartland of northern India. Calcutta was essentially the cultural capital of the Bengali renaissance while Madras catered for the Tamilspeaking audiences of southern India.
