Maratha Mandir, Bombay: cartographies of difficult histories of a metropolis

This article seeks to present an imaginative cartography of ‘everyday practices’ of film culture centered around Maratha Mandir, which was for a long time a leading single-screen cinema hall in Mumbai. Located at the heart of the megalopolis, at the intersection of contesting communities, Maratha Mandir becomes, in its affective histories of illegalities and violence, becomes a palimpsest of histories and contemporary politics, cultures and cinema experience in Mumbai. Such subaltern histories reveal deviations from mainstream cultural trends in that villains frequently become heroes, local Robin Hoods, and heroes turn villains. Controlling cinephilia - or an emotional attachment to films-in and around the cinema hall becomes a locus of alternate power for local dons and their retinues as well as patronage to a carnivalesque culture of cinephilia which, however, could frequently turn violent. Local mythologies abound around such figures. Things reached a particularly high pitch during the communal tensions and violence in the city through the 1990s, an account of which reveals not simple but extremely complex and contradictory trajectories of history inflected by the particular effects of cinephilia amongst a culturally heterogeneous and even heterodox populace at work on the cinema hall.