46 Holiday specials The Economist December 18th 2021
Moreover, Bollywood’s cultural influence extends
far beyond the movies. India’s popular music is
dominated by the soundtracks of Hindi films; in ad
vertisements on television and hoardings, Bollywood
actors hawk cola and mobile phones, underwear and
cement. Movie stars host tvshows, they appear in
publichealth messages, they own cricket teams, and
eventually they find their way into politics. Some have
even made it into the cabinet. It should hardly be sur
prising, then, that the idols, ideas and images of the in
dustry form the scaffolding upon which Indians build
a common identity. Apart from politics (an increas
ingly divisive subject), religion (ditto, but more so)
and cricket (which lacks songs, dancing and romance),
there is nothing else to tie the country together.
Cinemas, as much as the films, are part of this
mythology. Satish Kaushik is an actor, director and
producer who grew up in west Delhi in the 1960s and
1970s. Even today he can reel off the names of his fa
vourite movie halls, fondly remembered like old girlf
riends: “Naaz, Liberty and Filmistan where I lived; Ri
voli and Regal were close by when I was in school; Pal
ace, Amba, Alpana when I was in college”.
In Mumbai, the home of Bollywood, longshuttered
cinemas—Minerva, Naaz, Bandra Talkies—are stub
born landmarks of the city’s psychogeography; they
still give their names to bus stops. At GaietyGalaxy, a
pair of enormous halls in the western suburbs where
many film stars live, one of the ushers is a “duplicate”,
or stunt double, for Anil Kapoor, a famous actor. Stars
and producers buy tickets in the balcony for the Friday
matinée, entering and leaving while the lights are
down, curious to see how the audience reacts in the
stalls below. They could read the collections in the
trade papers or go to a posh multiplex. But numbers on
a page or the hushed appreciation of the bourgeoisie
are no substitute for the ecstatic cacophony of whis
tles and claps or the tinkling of coins thrown at thescreen by workingclass filmgoers. Making movies is
about more than just making money—it is about giv
ing rise to love and devotion. Cinemas are where that
passion finds its congregational expression.
Yet it is one more paradox among the millions of
contradictions that constitute India that what is per
haps the most filmmad country in the world also has
among the lowest ratios of screens to human beings.
There are just eight screens per million people in India
today, compared with 37 in China and 124 in America.
Yet Indians bought 1.98bn movie tickets in 2017, while
Chinese cinemas saw a more modest 1.62bn admis
sions and American ones a meagre 1.24bn. an epic in every pocket
The screens that do exist are unevenly distributed.
Mumbai has them in abundance; Pusegaon has none.
pvr, India’s biggest cinema operator, has more screens
in Chandigarh, a prosperous city of about a million
people, than it does in Rajasthan, a poor state of 80m.
Pankaj Tripathi, a Hindifilm actor who grew up in the
1980s and 1990s in Bihar, an even poorer state in the
east of the country, says he did not go to a cinema until
he was 11 or 12—the nearest hall was 25km away. It was
in this world that the touring talkies played a crucial
role: if Muhammad could not go to the movies, the
movies had to come to Muhammad.
When Mr Torgovnik visited Pusegaon 20 years ago,
there were 11,692 cinema screens in India, plus another
1,400odd touring talkies. Today there are around
8,000 permanent screens—as many as 1,500 shut just
during the pandemic—and only 52 travelling cinemas.
Amar Touring Talkies, whose name means “immortal”,
is long gone.
The decline of India’s film halls has many causes:
the rocketing value of the land they occupied; falling
standards for cleanliness and comportment that made
them unattractive to families and women; high enter
tainment taxes; labyrinthine licensing requirements;
television, home video and, more recently, streaming.
But the collapse of the touring talkies has been greater
and swifter, for two interlinked reasons.
One is smartphone and internet penetration. There
are at least half a billion screens in India today, not in
cinemas but in the pocket of every third person. And
what Indians use them for more than anything else is
to watch video. It accounts for the majority of mobile
internet traffic in the country. There are dozens of
streaming services, and YouTube is probably the most
visited website. Autorickshaw drivers rubberband
phones to their handlebars and watch movies as they
idle in traffic. At night the dim light of the screen illu
minates the faces of the men and women who live in
shanties by the sides of the road. In remote villages
without running water teenagers make Instagram
reels set to hit film tunes while their grandparents
watch mythological epics on their devices. Moham
mad Naurangi, who owns Sumedh Touring Talkies in
the western state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is
the capital, sums it up: “Everyone is watching movies
on mobile,” he says. “People don’t have any interest in
sitting on the ground in a mela anymore.”
Which leads to the other reason for the collapse of
the touring cinemas: they failed to move with the
times. Mr Naurangi started working in the travelling
tents as a child—his small stature unimposing as,
hawking refreshments, he skipped among the cross↑Amar Touring
Talkies