The Prabhat trajectory in Pune: studio, theatre and film practice (1934–present)

Every film goes through five stages – production, distribution, publicity, censorship and exhibition where its content is shaped, and value is accrued to reach its audience. Their interconnections remain largely unexplored owing to the dominant focus in textual analysis in Cinema Studies. Attempting to fill this gap, this article focusses on the interdependent nature of three streams of business with the case study of Prabhat studio’s (1929–53) expansion into exhibition (1934–2018), via distribution networks. Tracking journeys of pioneering Marathi film personnel, their strategies to recirculate capital within cinema and its allied businesses, the analysis highlights key changes within slowly building and moving parts of film history. Avoiding pitfalls of ‘eventful’ histories and urban developmentalism, the later part presents the rich social history of the Prabhat Talkies located in the urban milieu that shaped the ‘cinema habit’ into ritualistic behavioural patterns. Even after the collapse of the studio in 1953, the metonymic of the Prabhat brand survived and was carried forward by the talkies to create an ‘after-life’ with mixed shades of ritualism, revivalism, reformism, parochialism and imagined nostalgia in the big capital multiplex era.