Writing History with Cinema

<strong>Centre for Historical Studies School of Social Sciences</strong> a Lecture <strong>Writing History with Cinema</strong> <strong>Ashish Rajadhyaksha</strong> independent film scholar and curator <strong>2nd September 2015</strong> The cinema in India is often described as socially far too important a phenomenon to leave to the film theorists. And yet it has been the case that, barring the inevitable exceptions, historians of modern India have rarely taken its cinema as a constituent force in defining India's twentieth century; more importantly, they have rarely mined the resources that the cinema provides in writing larger histories of (say) Indian modernity. The problem is not only that of historians alone: the cinema is often a tough, and deeply elusive, challenge. Some of its challenges it shares with other popular forms, which can be equally elusive; yet other problems it poses appear unique to the cinema. This presentation, directed at the students and faculty of the CHS, asks what kind of a history might emerge of modern India if the cinema were made central to it. It will be accompanied by several clips showing rare footage from the silent cinema, and explores what might happen if such footage was viewed as providing significant information for writing history. <strong>Ashish Rajadhyaksha </strong>is an independent film scholar and curator. He co-authored the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema with Paul Willemen (2001) and has written Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (2009)