The Economist December 18th 2021 Holiday specials 45
indianpopularcultureT HE ARRIVAL
O F A TRUCK
F
or much ofthe year Pusegaon, six or seven hours’
drive from Mumbai, is an unremarkable village of
fewer than 10,000 people. But every winter its popula
tion swells several times over when it hosts a mela, or
fair. Religion, commerce and entertainment meet at
such fairs, which are common throughout India. In
Pusegaon cattle traders show up, and so do pilgrims to
the Sevagiri temple. There are Ferris wheels, food stalls
and merchants hawking all manner of goods. When
this correspondent visited in January 2002, there was
also, by the banks of the Yerala river, an enormous red
andwhite striped tent set up by one of India’s fabled
travelling cinemas, Amar Touring Talkies.
An ancient lorry was parked alongside the tent. On
its cab was a poster for the films being screened, and
on its hood was a loudspeaker to advertise them to the
many potential viewers who might be unable to read.
When a film projector mounted on its flatbed shone its
light through holes lined up between the truck and the
tent, the silver screen suspended in the middle of the
marquee came alive with image and sound. Tickets
cost 10 rupees ($0.20 at the time).
Inside, facing both sides of the screen, as many as
1,000 men, women and children from Pusegaon and
surrounding villages sat crosslegged on the dusty red
soil, enraptured. For some, it was their first time at the
cinema. For others it was their annual treat. And so it
went, all day and pretty much all night, five or six
screenings daily, until the villagers had had their fill
and Amar Touring Talkies rolled up its tent, rewound
the film and canned the prints, and sputtered on to the
next village fair somewhere on the Deccan Plateau.
“It was one of the most romantic, most beautiful
manifestations of cinema,” says Jonathan Torgovnik,
who was with the group that visited in 2002. On his
first trip to India several years earlier, he was fascinat
ed by “how important cinema was to Indian people
and to India’s social identity”. He kept returning to
document how film manifested itself in the everyday
lives of Indians, for “Bollywood Dreams”, a book of
photos (some of which accompany this story). Over
five years taking pictures, “the raw joy of the villagers”
at the touring cinema was the highlight, he says.
India produces some 2,000 feature films—in doz
ens of languages—every year, far more than any other
country. About a third find theatrical release. The rest
go straight to television or online, or just sit around in
cans, says Amit Khanna, an industry veteran and the
author of “Words. Sounds. Images: A History of Media
and Entertainment in India”. There are thriving indus
tries dedicated to making movies in Bengali, Bhojpuri,
Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and other lan
guages. But it is Bollywood—a onceironic, often re
viled and now mostly uncontroversial nickname for
the Hindi film industry—that dominates the imagina
tions and passions of the country as a whole.
Indians offer any number of reasons to explain the
hold Bollywood has, each at least somewhat true. One
is that a country as diverse as India needs some com
mon denominator and Hindi, for better or worse, is the
one language comprehensible to the majority. Another
is that the Hindi film industry is the biggest and rich
est, so its films are the slickest and most exciting.
Their stories, geared towards escapism and happy
endings, are a balm in a difficult, conservative country
where daytoday life, for most people, involves navi
gating between humiliation and oppressive duty.L EH AND MUMBAI
India’s touring cinemas are dying, and being reborn