South Asian Popular Culture

Vol. 9, No. 2, July 2011, 147160

From cinema hall to multiplex: A public history

Adrian Athique*
Department of Screen and Media Studies, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
The reconfiguration of the social spaces in which the theatrical exhibition of feature
films takes place, from dedicated single-screen large capacity cinema halls to multiplex
venues, has progressively transformed cinema exhibition across the world since the
1980s. The rise of the multiplex in India since 1997 has been an integral, and highly
visible, component of the general spread of mall culture; with multiplex venues often
being housed within shopping mall developments and other new forms of privatized
public leisure. As such, the multiplex has powerfully altered the nature of cinema as
public space and thus, crucially, what it means to be in the cinema hall. While the
reconstitution of the cinema crowd within the multiplex might be seen as constitutive of
the globalizing trends now at work in Indian cities, this article seeks to demonstrate
that the particular dynamics of the Indian multiplex at the present time must also be
understood within the historical trajectory of the Indian cinema hall and the political
struggles that have been played out within its confines.

The multiplex in India

Whilst the multiplex cinema has made an important intervention in urban leisure at a
number of levels elsewhere in the world, the appearance of the multiplex format in India
since 1997 has, if anything, had an even more dramatic impact. In part, this stems from the
primary role played by the cinema in Indian popular culture. Much more than this, however,
the multiplex format has been adopted against the backdrop of massive social change taking
place in an era of economic liberalization. During the decade of its existence, the multiplex
has thus been very much a sign of the times both a symptom and a symbol of new social
values. In particular, the multiplex has been indicative of a consistent, if not always coherent,
push to create a globalized consuming middle class and a new urban environment.
Multiplex theatres, like their single-screen predecessors, have thus become key sites in the
long-running struggle over cultural legitimacy and the right to public space in Indian cities.
Lawrence Liang has argued that there cannot be a distinct account of cinema or
cinematic spaces, which is not at the same time an account of the history of the city, of the
experiences of modernity and of the conflicts that define the very occupation of these spaces
(366). As such, any critical account of the multiplex phenomenon must be informed by
Indias great cultural diversity, its colonial and socialist pasts, its dense and contested
spatialities, its vibrant audio-visual culture, the strengths and contradictions of its mixed
economy and its complex arrangements of civil and political society. For this reason, as I will
argue here across a wide historical trajectory, the public sphere of Indian cinema continues to
represent a site of ongoing contest between the different publics emerging from the shadow
of colonialism, the legacies of caste society and the principle of universal franchise.

*Email: aathique@waikato.ac.nz
ISSN 1474-6689 print/ISSN 1474-6697 online
q 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14746681003798037
http://www.informaworld.com

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Colonial rule, civic order and the birth of the cinema crowd
The British Raj was at the height of its power when the first moving picture shows came to
Indian cities in 1896, although anti-colonial nationalism was also emerging as a powerful
political force. The early years of the cinema in India were thus accompanied by the
catalytic events (such as the abortive partition of Bengal in 1905, the First World War
during 1914 18, the passing of the Rowlatt Act and the subsequent massacre at Amritsar
in 1919, followed closely by the khilafat agitation), which were to lead eventually to the
independence and partition of the patchwork of territories assembled under British
Paramountcy. As such, the advent of moving pictures, and their subsequent growth in
popularity as a mass medium in India took place against the backdrop of increasing mass
mobilization against colonial occupation, and a very public contest for the metropolitan
spaces of an India already in the throes of urbanization and political change.
Indian cities during this period were characterized by the complex spatial politics of
the colonial order. In the major presidency cities, Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, where
British economic power was concentrated, the urban landscape was organized around a
central district reserved for Europeans and their servants, with a number of native
suburbs radiating away from this core, many of which were organized around a particular
ethnic or social group, although there were also some highly-mixed neighbourhoods along
with some tied to related occupations or trades. The spatial relationship of these social
groups to each other was defined by a number of factors:
(1) The rank of that community in the social order established by Company, and later
Crown, colonialism.
(2) The role played by that community in the economic life of the city.
(3) The date from which that community came to occupy space in the city.
(4) The social standing of the group in relation to the overall indigenous caste system
in that historical epoch.
Initially the exhibition of film reels in India consisted of imported material from
Europe and America screened for what was a predominantly European audience in a small
number of exclusive metropolitan picture palaces in the central spaces of the presidency
cities. As such, the first cinema halls were constructed in the privileged districts where the
European population either resided or conducted their business affairs. The impact of the
new medium upon the public, and the promise of the profits to be made from theatrical
exhibition, encouraged many businessmen to build cinema halls, and even at this early
stage a national chain of theatres that would dominate the film business in India was
conceived and pursued (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 6). In the early 1910s, Indian film
artists such as D. G. Phalke launched an indigenous film industry that steadily extended the
popularity of the cinema beyond the colonial and native elites. Local films surpassed
foreign imports during the 1920s, and the Indian cinema rapidly went on to become Indias
first truly mass media and the dominant mode of public entertainment. With the coming of
sound in 1931, film production in India evolved into half a dozen industries serving the
major linguistic markets.
In thinking about the implications of the cinema as a public space in India, it is crucial
to recognize that the cinema hall was a thoroughly modern addition to public life, not
simply in terms of its technological apparatus but in its re-ordering of social space. In a
context where respectable women may not have appeared in public at all, and where
temples, residential areas and water sources were often subject to exclusive access by
certain caste, faith and class groups, the gathering together of a diverse public within a

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single social space appears to have represented a radical departure from existing social
norms. At the same time, however, the space inside cinema halls was always regulated by
different classes of seating, typically ranging from floor class to bench class to chair
class. Similarly, the adoption of a sex-segregated seating option was also introduced
within weeks of the first showings at Watsons Hotel (Barnouw and Krishnaswamy 5).
Given the rise of anti-colonial feeling, the Government of India in the twilight years of
the British Raj had little interest in the development of a leisure industry predicated upon
public assembly and accessible to the lower social orders. The primary interest of the
government, therefore, was in controlling the construction and programmes of cinema
halls in order to prevent the inculcation of seditious ideas, whether they resulted from
American or Indian movies. Accordingly the censorship of films in India was instituted as
early as 1918 with the Indian Cinematograph Act. Censorship of the cinema sought to
prevent the degradation of the image of Caucasians arising from the exposure of the
natives to Hollywood films (that were seen to present white woman as promiscuous and
thus threaten the moral superiority of the white race) and to restrict the ability of Indian
film makers to make films which sympathized with the growing nationalist movement
(Prasad 78).
As Stephen Hughes has observed, the colonial authorities in urban India were
particularly adverse to the idea of crowds of Indian working-class men gathering for film
shows in close proximity to important government institutions (49). Given the location of
those institutions, we could take this to indicate European-dominated districts generally,
and as Hughes also notes, it remains significant that the earlier construction of theatres for
colonial and upmarket audiences in those selfsame districts had not raised similar concerns
(Hughes 50). It is worth recognizing that this kind of paranoia surrounding new forms of
mass culture, and their social impact, was also being felt at home by European elites in the
wake of socialist agitation. However, in the case of British India, a colonial government
which was rapidly losing legitimacy had even more cause to experience trepidation about
the growth of a modern public culture. When it came to the emergence of a popular Indian
cinema, it was not simply the presumed psychological effects, or the ideological efficacy
of the medium, that concerned colonial officials. Rather, it was the combination of this
effect with the degree of mass participation required to make the exhibition of films
profitable in a market where tickets had to be priced from just a few annas (a fraction of a
rupee). For the authorities, the rapid turnover of large crowds that was intrinsic to mass
exhibition implied:
The daily collecting of crowds in the street . . . at regular intervals before a film show and
then, after being emotionally galvanized through the collective experience of film-watching,
exiting together on to the streets again, [this] made the police authorities particularly
concerned. The colonial government of India had long recognized crowds, especially those of
religious processions and at dramatic performances, as a potentially uncontrollable threat to
the political and social order. The very notion of collective gatherings, even at places of public
entertainment, carried assumed connotations of riotous mobs and revolutionary masses.
(Hughes 49 50)

For this reason, the construction of cinema halls was heavily restricted under the guise
of public safety regulations. Furthermore, a mandatory police presence was installed in the
halls that did get built to ensure that public order was maintained and that censorship was
implemented.
By the end of the 1940s, British rule had ended in India and their direct regulation of
both cinema and urban life was over, even though their imprimatur remains upon the urban
landscape of India to this day. The British colonial authorities, however, were not the only

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critics of the cinema and its public. In a written contribution to the Government of India in
1927, Mahatma Gandhi denounced cinema as a sinful technology, although writing for
his journal Harijan in 1942, he also conceded that: If I began to organize picketing in
respect of them (the evil of cinema), I should lose my caste, my Mahatmaship (see also
Jeffrey 13 31). Jawaharlal Nehru was also critical of popular cinema, albeit for different
reasons, believing it to be a waste of resources for a country where poverty was so
widespread. Indias first Prime Minister believed that the technology should be used for
bringing the message of national development to rural India, rather than squandered on
escapism for the urban masses. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that all of the measures
introduced by the British in regard to cinema halls were continued, and indeed often
extended, by the postcolonial government. Anxiety about the behaviour of cinema
audiences, and the very public nature of the cinema was to continue long after the defeat
and departure of the British Raj.
Entertaining a postcolonial public
The ongoing debates after 1947 on cinema halls, as S. V. Srinivas has detailed through his
examination of letters sent to film journals of the day, were centred upon the discomfort of
middle-class Indian viewers with the public behaviour of the lower social orders within
theatres, as well as concerns regarding the potential for contacts between respectable
Indian women and thoroughly unrespectable men that were now being made possible by
the institution of cinema. Beyond the dimension of the cinema hall as a complex model of
class relations, and as a site of political struggle, the gendered dimensions of cinema as
public space also receive a high degree of attention in accounts of the cinema from the
1950s. Although, as Srinivas notes, none of these writings were produced by women, a
large proportion of them deal with problems faced by female audiences and [emphasize]
the need to strictly segregate male and female audiences (Srinivas Is There a Public).
According to Srinivas, these accounts provide a further indication of what the middle
class audience found anxiety inducing about cinema halls [and] draw attention to the
larger problem of managing an assembly of diverse groups of people, some of whom were
perceived to have tremendous disruptive potential and some others deserving special
protection (Srinivas Is There a Public).
Nonetheless, both the economic logic of film exhibition as a mass medium and the
scarcity of public leisure space in the new India meant that people of all classes were
regularly brought together by the instrument of cinema during this period. Both the lower
and upper middle classes, if they wanted to enjoy the rich products of the Indian cinema,
had to rub shoulders with the working poor. As such, films remained in high demand
amongst the middle classes in the decades before television, and the omnibus nature of the
Indian masala film was designed to appeal across a wide and differentiated audience.
Since these operating conditions were also contemporaneous with the formal realization of
the nation-building project, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Indian cinema of the period
has been frequently cited as an important site in the formation of national consciousness
and of the democratic project in India. In terms of the products of the golden age of
Indian cinema, scholars such as Ashish Rajadhyaksha have pointed to the inclusive
narrative address of the Indian film and the gradual and fitful construction of an Indian
film spectator as a ready parallel with the search for an Indian citizen (Rajadhyaksha
267 96). In specific relation to the social practice of attending a film screening, Srinivas
offers the following as representative of similar democratic claims that have been made for
the cinema hall itself:

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The Cinema Hall was the first performance centre in which all Tamils sat under the same roof.
The basis of the seating is not on the hierarchic position of the patron but essentially on his
purchasing power. If he cannot afford paying the higher rate, he has either to keep away from
the performance or be with all and sundry. (Sivathamby qtd. in Srinivas Is There a Public)

In this light, it is possible to see that the requirement of cinema as an industrial medium
for a mass, rather than select, audience might have given rise to a sense of commonality
amongst patrons, thus opening up the possibility of an entitlement to public participation
and the occupation of public space that transcended prior social structures. Here the
cinema might be usefully paralleled with some of the other public spaces offered by
modernity, such as railway stations, whose logic was directed at a mass public arranged by
capitalist mobility, rather than the maintenance of feudal spatial practices. Srinivas,
however, claims that while the cinema hall may have permitted new forms of social
proximity in a certain sense, its democratising effect must be reconciled with the fact that:
There is now a growing body of evidence indicating that although members of lower castes
were allowed to enter cinema halls, theatre managements ensured that caste and class
hierarchies were reinforced within them . . . [therefore] It is important to note that the cinema
hall was one of the sites for the struggle of political rights as far as the lower caste-class
viewers were concerned. (Srinivas Is There a Public)

Srinivas describes the cinema hall as a key battleground in the contest over public space
in Indian cities (Srinivas Is There a Public; Devotion and Defiance). While the terms of
the public debate on the cinema were determined by a male, middle class and upper caste
viewpoint, the development of this contest, in its ensuing stages, was to follow a pattern over
the following decades where the cinema hall became increasingly dominated by the young
men of Indias urban underclass at the expense of the middle class spectator. At first glance,
the outcome of this contest can be seen to have been predetermined simply on the basis of
numbers alone. There were, however, some other factors which also had an important
bearing upon the proletarianization of the movie audience. Most obvious, perhaps, was the
ongoing tide of migration from rural areas into both the major cities and the regional
(mofussil) towns. Unable to absorb new migrants within their existing residential capacity,
but increasingly dependent upon them as an integral component of economic growth, the
metropolitan authorities entered into a protracted struggle over the growth of shanty towns
and their encroachment upon unattended public spaces.
If housing and public amenities were unable to keep pace with the urbanization of the
Indian population, then places of assembly and entertainment were also in scant supply.
It is worth noting that, despite having the worlds most prolific industry in terms of
production and what is most likely the largest daily ticket sale in per capita terms, there has
always been a chronic undersupply of theatres in India in comparison to the vast size of the
audience. As such there was, and is, a shortage of entertainment capacity in Indian cities.
For the large populations of new citizens living in the cheek-by-jowl conditions of the
semi-permanent shanty towns after the 1950s there was, in addition, a chronic shortage of
personal and public space in general, and hence an increased significance for the limited
resources for public entertainment that were available to this class of the population. The
more itinerant pavement dwellers occupied the public space of the city even more visibly,
and they too constituted a growing audience for the cinema hall an audience with a
relatively low spending capacity but also one with few other entertainment choices. As the
crisis of the 1970s unfolded in India, and the Nehruvian ideology began to unravel under
Indira Gandhis heavy-handed governance, the public spaces of the major cities were
increasingly venues for unrest and dissent. The already extent anxieties of middle class

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cinema-goers, along with the zeitgeist of the Emergency, encouraged them to stay away
from the cinema.
Ravi Vasudevans recent ethnographic research illustrates how cinemas in New Delhi
experienced a downturn in status (rather than ticket sales) from the 1970s onwards, when
cinemas were no longer attracting families and women audiences, always considered
crucial to the cinemas social legitimacy (Cinema in Urban Space). Instead cinemas
catered to a mobile bachelor population . . . a restless, transient population hustling for
goods and attracted to a cinema of sensation and distraction (Vasudevan). Since the
demographics of the cinema hall became dominated by young men of the lower social
orders, the industry adjusted its themes accordingly. The major theatrical successes of the
period, from Zanjeer (1973) to Coolie (1981) demonstrate how the romantic hero of
the 1960s was rapidly supplanted from the early 1970s until the end of the 1980s by the
Angry Young Man personified by Amitabh Bachchan (Kazmi 143 155; Mazumdar
238 261). Themes of socially marginalized vigilantes targeting a corrupt society were
hugely popular amongst the urban underclass. Just as the cinema came to represent, as
Ashis Nandy puts it, a slums eye view of politics, the cinema hall itself, particularly
after dark, began to be associated with gangs of young rowdy-sheeters and was therefore
increasingly seen as an unsuitable place for middle class families (1 18).
The importance of the cinema as political terrain in urban India, therefore, remained as
evident during the 1970s and 1980s as it was in the early independence years. Despite
authoritarian measures taken to clear slums during the Emergency, there was a gradual
recognition of the importance of these populations to the economic life of the cities and
subsequent attempts to hammer out a compromise between the legal and illegal domains
of urban life. Recognizing the social (and electoral) benefit of guaranteeing access to the
cinema for the restless urban population, various state governments instigated legislation
fixing ticket rates at an affordable level as well as requiring cinema halls to offer a set
capacity (typically three rows) of seating at extremely low rates for the poorest. However,
these lower ticket prices also diminished the profits of exhibitors which led to decreasing
interest in the maintenance of the cinemas, with the physical deterioration of many urban
cinemas highly apparent by the end of the 1980s.
For the more privileged sections of society, these measures represented further gains
for others, which symbolically refuted their sense of entitlement over setting the norms for
public culture and which practically diminished their access to urban leisure facilities.
It would be an exaggeration to say that there were no theatres that continued to enjoy
middle class patronage during the 1980s, but it does appear to be the case that middle class
audiences had mostly vacated the central public spaces for theatres located within
specifically middle class colonies or suburbs (see Vasudevan). Even here, the
encroachment of itinerant settlements on open grounds further encouraged a sense of
siege. Something that served to mitigate their declining participation in the cinema was the
slow growth of television ownership amongst the upper-middle classes and the advent of
the VCR, which was taken up enthusiastically by these groups throughout the 1980s
(Friedberg). As such, reflecting on the 1980s for India Today, Madhu Jain observed that
this was a decade in which the gentile class had retreated to the comfort of television and
video, leaving cinema halls to the children of the mean streets (Jain 46).
The liberalization era and the multiplex
The final, and therefore, contemporary, period in the public history of the Indian cinema is
the era of economic liberalization in India, understood in the popular imagination as a

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switch from a socialist to a free-market society. This era, commonly seen as being
inaugurated by a series of economic policy reforms in 1991, has been characterized by the
push for a consumerist society and the return of the middle class romance as the dominant
theme of the Indian cinema. The identification of this new era in the public imagination of
India should not imply that the pugilist terrain of the Indian cinema in the previous phase
has been entirely overwritten by the new types of films and the new social values that have
emerged since 1991. It is fair to say, however, that the 1990s and 2000s have constituted a
moment in public culture within which the old logics of the all-India movie and the
numerical superiority of the masses have been severely truncated by new technologies, a
changing regulatory environment and new ways of imagining India.
It is in this context and in a marked contrast to the downshifting trends in the
exhibition sector over the previous two decades that the luxury multiplex cinema has
appeared in Indias urban landscape. The multiplex in India was instigated in the upmarket Saket district of New Delhi in 1997 through a tie-up between a local family-run
exhibition concern, Priya Exhibitors Ltd, and Village Roadshow Ltd, a multinational
concern based in Australia. Indias first multiplex, PVR Anupam, was the result of a
refurbishment of a large old theatre into a multi-screen site modelled on an international
standard and charging five times the balcony price at a regular theatre. Located in a
suburban commercial district with manned security gates at its access points and
surrounded by national and international retail franchise outlets (including McDonalds,
Pizza Hut, Barista, Nirulas, Subway, Moti Mahal, Planet M, Lee and Reebok), PVR
Anupam proved highly popular with an upper-middle class crowd and has become one of
Delhis most profitable cinemas over the last 10 years. The success of PVR Anupam
prompted a number of other players to reconsider the opportunities in Indias exhibition
sector, where thousands of small independent single-screen theatres were still catering
largely to lower class audiences. During the last five years in particular, leading Indian
business houses have rushed to jump on the multiplex bandwagon (see Athique 123 40).
Indias new chrome and glass multiplexes have been much appreciated by middle
class cinema-goers seeking a better standard, and wider choice, of entertainment than the
older large-capacity halls provide. Due to smaller auditoriums, higher admission prices and
its inherent rationale of providing an entertainment menu, the multiplex has served to elevate
the box office value of the middle class public. With scores of multiplexes now in operation
across India, the multiplex sector now far outweighs the returns made from the traditional
cinema circuit. This naturally has major implications for how Indian film producers perceive
their audience, and thus underscores the pre-eminence of the contemporary aspirational
mode of middle-class melodrama and the values that it espouses. At the same time, the
multiplex has also provided Hollywood films with more access to the Indian market as
well as offering a venue for niche middle class oriented films in a range of styles not
previously viable with the old mass public (and thus screened more or less exclusively within
the multiplex). It is upon this basis that Aparna Sharma claims that:
Once in place, the multiplex developed a counter to the unitary propensity of the single screen
hall, founded on exclusion, perpetuating homogeneity and cultivating committed audience
segments. While single screen cinemas identify themselves with films of particular kinds, say
the Hindi masala and blockbuster, the English, or the porn movie, the multiplex has
capitalized on an inclusive tendency to motivate and assemble diverse audiences. (Sharma
Indias Experience With the Multiplex)

In fact, this inclusive tendency is predicated on a diversity of content arising at the

expense of a more socially diverse audience. This is an outcome not only welcomed, but
publicized, by the multiplex operators who know that the absence of the cheap crowd is

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a prerequisite for attracting the kind of patrons they desire. As with Srinivas account
of the earlier historical period, Ronald Inden has been able to illustrate the sensibilities
being associated with the multiplex through the analysis of public letters written to
contemporary film journals. Here is one example:
The addition of Movie Time Cinema (at Malad West) to the many, new, compact and highlysophisticated cinemas in Mumbais suburbs is welcome indeed. The tickets may be priced
higher, at RS 75 or thereabouts, but the ticket rates are deliberately priced to keep unwanted
elements away. These theatres cater to family audiences and the bubble-gum crowd and offer
a variety of snacks and viewing comforts, even hygienic toilets. The fact that they are situated
in the suburbs and screen the latest big films, is a major plus point. (qtd. in Inden 62)

During the course of ethnographic research conducted in Baroda during 2007, a clear
majority of multiplex patrons indicated that it was the presence of an appropriate (or
decent) crowd which was the definitive factor in the appeal of the multiplex. The decent
crowd of the multiplex was articulated by patrons as an imagined community strongly
differentiated from the general cinema audience. As such, the habituation of the multiplex
was constructed in an inverse manner to the perceived norms of cinema spectatorship in
India, and this difference was overwhelmingly attributed to the audience demographic. For
example, one female respondent identified that she greatly preferred the multiplex due to:
Cordial surroundings, and to a certain extent, the viewers. As far as India is concerned
there are categories of viewers. At multiplex, yes, the difference can be noted. The
multiplex crowd was defined positively by its exclusive nature, which was widely
considered as the price that had to be paid for enjoying cinema in a manner that was not
simply luxurious but, most importantly, disciplined and non-threatening.
F18u: I chose multiplex because multiplexes are comfortable. The crowd there is good.
Security system is well-organized, no nuisance is involved over there.
F20u: I choose INOX multiplex because INOX being a multiplex that offers a lot of facilities.
I.e., one can visit Pantaloons, have food at McDonalds and of course watch a movie. So its
like having everything under one roof. Moreover, the gentry at multiplexes is better.
21Mu: I couldnt watch films in other theatres cos the environment of the other theatres
wouldnt be as good as that of the multiplex and also the comfort of watching movies in the
multiplex is very good. Environment consists of people, the cleanliness of the place, etc.

Lakshmi Srinivas (The Active Audience) has described Indian audiences viewing
masala movies as actively participatory in nature, a tendency she attributes to
overwhelmingly group-oriented social relations that she juxtaposes with the atomized,
disciplined spectators of American cinemas. Similarly, for my respondents, the older-style
cinema halls were associated with raucous acts of mass participation, such as screaming,
applauding, whistling and singing. However, for much of the multiplex clientele, this active
mode of spectatorship (where audiences boo the arrival on screen of the villain, sing and dance
during the film songs, and throw coins at the screen) was seen to devalue their own experience
of going to the cinema. A large component of the eagerness of multiplex viewers not to mix
with the cheap crowd in traditional cinema halls appeared to stem from a rejection of the
latters emotionally demonstrative and undisciplined watching of films.
F18: Normal cinemas are not having wide space. Crowd is not good, has cosy premises, very
crowded. Indecency is seen, the whole premises are not bright. Nuisances and havocs are created.
M22: What I like is the prices for the tickets is damn low there. What I dont like is the crowd
it attracts. Not that I am against the lower classes but they dont appreciate good work.
F20: The hooting and screaming is one of the main reasons why I dont like normal cinema
halls.

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By contrast with regular Indian cinema halls, the film-viewing experience in the
multiplex is odour-free and marked by a relative silence. The sporadic call tones of mobile
telephones and the subsequent mumbled one-sided conversations provide the only major
distraction from the screen, with laughter at appropriate points in the film narrative (and
only those points) being the only audible sign of shared participation. As well as appealing
to its core audience in terms of the safety derived from an exclusive and disciplined
audience, the multiplex interior is also significant because of its capacity to deliver a
sensorial experience of personal space to a clientele resident in some of the worlds most
crowded urban centres. The multiplex architects and operators work hard to disperse the
customer flow and negate the impression of being in a threatening, overcrowded space that
is commonly associated with cinemas in India. In a spatial sense, therefore, what is crucial
for the multiplexes is that the crowd formed by the audience is absorbed into the building
itself and is no longer publicly visible as a crowd, either to onlookers or amongst its
members. Since the multiplex is divided amongst a number of auditoriums with staggered
show-times, the multiplex audience is temporally dispersed, creating a cinema crowd that
is no longer a potential mob occupying public space, but instead comprises a steady flow
of consumers moving effortlessly and individually in private, commercial space.
To be part of this decent crowd was seen by multiplex patrons as a marker of both
affluence and good manners, and it allowed them to put themselves at a distance from the
general movie-going public. At the same time, despite seeing themselves as moving
amongst an affluent crowd, most multiplex patrons also demonstrated personal
consternation with the high costs of visiting the multiplex. It quickly became evident
that the remarkably consistent description of the multiplex audience (amongst both
operators and patrons) as the most wealthy, high status and free-spending members of
Indian society was not reflected by the demographics of the actual audience. Rather, it
appears that the multiplex functions as a major site for middle class aspiration, and that
multiplex operators are capable of marketing its socially-exclusive nature to a markedly
wide cross-section of the middle classes. It seems irrefutable, nonetheless, that the
multiplex cinema in India must be understood as part of a sustained attempt to create
dedicated public spaces for theatrical exhibition for the middle class family.
It is this deliberate selectivity in their customer base that explains why the multiplexes
currently operating in India remain notably smaller in capacity than their international
counterparts. The multiplex in India can thus be seen as responding to a latent demand
amongst the middle classes for sufficiently sanitized and controlled public space where the
behaviour of patrons corresponds with middle class norms and where the overwhelming
numerical superiority of the mob is mitigated. To a significant extent, therefore, the
multiplex has been deliberately marketed in India with specific regard to the longstanding
middle class anxieties that have arisen around the cinema hall. In this sense, multiplexes
commodify new social aspirations, prioritizing cleanliness, safety and congeniality, and
providing a sensory environment that distances the well-off consumer from the immediate
past of fear, discomfort and scarcity in public space. When the longevity of these concerns
is taken into account, we have to take them seriously as indicative of an inherent difficulty
faced by the cinema in a diverse society.
The cinema as public space
The cinema crowd has been one of the most ubiquitous publics formed within the urban
environment over the past century, and therefore represents a critical site for charting the
dynamics of the public sphere in modern India. We are directed to think about two distinct

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ways in which the particular history of Indian cinema is implicated in the articulations of a
public sphere in modern India. These two dimensions of the public-ness brought together
by the format of cinema can be characterized as the symbolic and the spatial manifestation
of social practice. In the former case, the symbolic functions of the cinema are generally
understood in terms of its thematic concerns, its signifying structures and its ideological
construction. The constructed (or encoded) film text thus provides a dual contribution
to public culture which can be usefully related to Stuart Halls model of a circuit of
communication (128 30). At one pole of the circuit, the Indian cinema reacts to, and is
therefore reflective of, the public mores of Indian society. At the other pole, the cinema
intervenes in public mores, providing both the symbolic referents and the issues of the
day for everyday conversations on romance, social justice, nationalism, community
relations and modernity. Both elements of this symbolic mediation of social life correspond
closely with the manner in which the link between the mass media and the public sphere
postulated by Jurgen Habermas (Structural Transformation) is most commonly understood;
that is, at the level of providing a forum for public discourse that is irrevocably implicated in
the democratic function (or dysfunction) of mass society.
While some scholars have generally accepted the orthodox Habermasian definition of
the public sphere as a communicative forum born out of rational debate, other thinkers
by contrast have drawn attention to the very different social and historical conditions
under which the public realm has developed in India. The major factors that are seen
to contribute to the particularity of the Indian experience are the legacy of long-term
colonialism, uneven economic development and the complex ethno-cultural make-up of
Indian society. The work of Partha Chatterjee, in particular, has been significant for
interrogating the universal notions underlying the theory of the public sphere and in
detailing how the Indian case varies significantly from the presuppositions underlying
Habermas work (Chatterjee The Nation; Beyond the Nation?; Politics of the
Governed). In the first place, Chatterjee emphasizes the heightened division between
private and public life in Indian society, which despite being a normative proposition of
modernity, was greatly exacerbated in India by the colonial presence. At the level of
public life, Indian society generally accepted the dominance of modernity in a rational,
Westernized form. By contrast, the private realm was even more assiduously maintained
as a realm of traditional, indigenous and feudal social practices. The persistence in
postcolonial India of the tradition/modernity binary, understood in parallel with an
alien/indigenous distinction and with a significantly gendered dimension, has remained a
marked feature of social life.
At the same time, Chatterjee posits that the public realm of Indian society has
been subject to a further split through the emergence of two distinctly different and
incompatible publics, classified as civil society and political society. These two
definitions mark Chatterjees attempt to situate two broad, but competing, domains that
provide an illustration of the inherently contested terrain of Indian society in an era of
mass mobilization and social change. The Hegelian concept of civil society, according to
Chatterjee, is best used in India to describe those institutions of modern associational life
set up by nationalist elites in the era of colonial modernity (Beyond the Nation? 61).
These institutions, which it can be argued emanate from the first urban associations formed
under colonialism, embody the desire of this elite to replicate in its own society the forms
as well as substance of Western modernity. It is a desire for a new ethical life in society,
one that confirms to the virtues of the enlightenment and of bourgeois freedom (Beyond
the Nation? 61). Civil society, then, is an elite public domain constituted by bourgeois
individuals to serve their collective interest in managing the colonial legacy.

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By contrast, the much larger, less coherent and unashamedly populist political society
which encompasses the bulk of Indian society is built around the framework of modern
political associations such as political parties (Chatterjee Beyond the Nation? 64). This
untidy brawl, where both the modern and the traditional are invoked in an emotive politics
of self-interested and tribalistic association that offends the bourgeois sensibilities of civil
society, and which threatens its ideological hegemony, can be seen to represent a site
of strategic manoeuvres, resistance, and appropriation by different groups and classes,
many of those contests remaining unresolved even in the present phase of the postcolonial
state (Beyond the Nation? 64). This, then, is the arena of subaltern politics, and of
the shadowy legions and vote-banks through which Indian politicians operate. This is a
popular arena in the Gramscian sense, where power is continuously contested by different
groups, and the ability of any one group to achieve their aims is always contingent upon
short-term strategic operations (such as forging alliances with other groups and/or sources
of influence). Political society, then, is not conceptualized in terms of a normative, legal
relationship between individuals and the state, but rather in terms of shifting allegiances of
self-interest and the physical management and manipulation of unruly populations.
According to Chatterjees account, the public sphere, as it operates in India, is constituted
by an ongoing contest between the officially sanctioned project of civil society and the
fragmented reality of political society.
The accounts of public participation given by Habermas and Chatterjee are similar in
that they both emphasize the diminishing hegemony of the civil elite over public life.
Where they differ is that Habermas laments the subsequent fragmentation of rational
public participation, whilst Chatterjee celebrates the heterogeneous contest of political
society as a symptom of democratic maturity. There is an obvious correlation to be
found in the discourses surrounding the multiplex, where the social expectations of the
decent crowd are articulated in opposition to the bawdy behaviour of the cheap crowd
that defines the general cinema audience. From a historical perspective, what is perhaps
most notable is that the middle class critics of the cinema in the early postcolonial period
maintained the ambition of reforming the larger Indian public in their own image. In
light of the increasingly assertive behaviour of the lumpen cinema audience in the
ensuing decades, however, the decent crowd of today seems content to relinquish this
project in favour of more orderly leisure facilities constructed for their exclusive use.
In this respect, it is also worth noting that the middle classes of the liberalization era
represent a very different constituency from the civil society of the 1950s. The
expanding middle classes who are now seeking to inherit the mantle of the decent
crowd are a more culturally diverse segment of the population, with a lesser stake in
assuming the mantle of civic leadership. Looking forward, therefore, it seems entirely
possible that the middle and lower classes will become increasingly separated in terms of
what they watch at the cinema and who they watch it with. Needless to say, this has
major implications for the conceptualization of the Indian cinema as a public forum. For
Habermas this process would be indicative of increasing fragmentation of the public
sphere, and if the contestation of political society infers a social divorce of this kind,
then Chatterjee may well find less to celebrate in the postcolonial collision of civic elites
and urban politics.
It is equally imperative, therefore, that we augment our understanding of the Indian
public sphere as a site of political discourse with an interrogation of the spatial politics
of public leisure. In this respect, the trajectory that is marked out in conventional
Habermasian accounts of the public sphere (moving from historical small-scale physical
assembly to the virtual mass publics for contemporary media such as television and the

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Internet) tends to sideline the particular operating conditions of cinema. Cinema, despite
being a mass media format, continues to require physical assembly within specificallyconstructed physical environments. Therefore, cinema is implicated not only in the
discursive function of a symbolic public but also in the material production of public space
and public gatherings. Both of these elements thus contribute to the dynamic of the public
sphere in the cinema, which continues to represent a unique interface between the mythicsymbolic and the architectural and corporeal dimensions of public culture. Ravi
Vasudevan has suggested that we therefore pay regard to the institution of the Indian
cinema as a form of regular, normalized public congregation, sometimes assuming great
symbolic functions, but at the same time remain aware that the cinema hall is also an
everyday space: composed of the hall, its internal organization of foyer, auditorium,
seating and the projected film, [with a] public presence, as in its facade, advertisements,
marquees, hoardings (Cinema).
Critically, Vasudevan prompts us to see this space in relation to a broader space, in the
market, near factories, schools, offices blocks, in a mall, in residential areas and to
interrogate how it is located in the depth of this space or on its margins, near main arterial
thoroughfares, linking one space to another (Cinema). Similarly, in his recent writings,
Chatterjee has also paid particular attention to how the contest between civil and political
society is currently being played out in urban space (Politics of the Governed). Chatterjee
describes the programmes of urban renewal and gentrification now being undertaken in
Indian cities as part of a concerted counterattack by civil society through which it seeks to
reclaim its dominance over the public sphere and roll back the advances made by plebeian
groups under the auspices of political society since the beginning of the 1970s. This has
taken the form of renewed efforts to clear slum settlements and pavement vendors from the
centre of Indian cities and to construct new enclaves of affluence built around rising
consumption, prompting Chatterjee to pose the question: Are Indian Cities becoming
bourgeois at last? (Politics of the Governed 131). The multiplex cinema in contemporary
India has to be located, therefore, within an expanding network of interconnected and
socially exclusive spaces that also includes shopping malls, gated residential communities
and country clubs (see Paul, Shetty and Krishnan 386 409).
While Indias older cinema halls are typically located in places where large crowds are
formed (such as city markets) and areas around public transport hubs (such as railway
stations and bus depots), access to multiplexes generally requires private transport. The
strategy of the multiplex developers has been to develop sites either close to existing
wealthy suburbs (such as Elgin Road in Kolkata), in up-and-coming areas associated with
the new economy (such as Koremangala in Bangalore), in areas where re-zoning has
made land very cheap and is attracting residential developers (such as Ghaziabad near
Delhi), or along the arterial routes and flyovers that now connect central commercial
districts with these middle class suburban enclaves (such as Andheri in Mumbai). Clearly,
the spatial distribution of these new leisure facilities within the urban environment has a
major impact upon how people move around their city, while the particularity of each
location has an equally critical effect upon how (and by whom) this leisure infrastructure is
accessed.
Therefore, it is crucial to remain aware that Indian cities are amongst the most denselypopulated habitats on earth and that they have also long been at the forefront of social
change in the subcontinent. Operating in material and spatial conditions where scarcity
and inequality are pervasive, the Indian cinema hall has always been an inherently political
terrain for metropolitan regulators and for its patrons. The contemporary period is
no exception. Whilst the recent growth of malls and multiplexes provides access to

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valuable public space for middle class citizens, such developments inevitably entail
the redistribution of public space at the expense of other groups. The differences in
ownership, location, operating procedures and (increasingly) programming between the
multiplexes and the bulk of single-screen cinemas are readily apparent. The disjuncture
that is now emerging between these two tiers of exhibition infrastructure raises serious
questions, both about the demise of a common cinematic culture operating across the
different strata of Indian society, and about the validity of the much-vaunted claims about
Indian cinema as a force for social integration in the first place.
In this context, the multiplex is not simply an imported format suturing global and
local space, although it bears those apparent markings. Rather, this paper has sought to
demonstrate that the antecedents of the multiplex, and its exclusivist nature in the Indian
context, lie in the unfolding history of the Indian cinema and the conflicts that have been
constituted within and around the cinema hall. As such, the (re)appearance of cinema
as an extension of retail leisure has clearly been predisposed by a series of ideological
motives deeply ingrained amongst the middle classes pertaining to the suitable
composition of the audience and the appropriate ritual purpose of the cinema experience.
From this perspective, the multiplex is just the latest part of the history of the cinema
hall which, in totality, provides a useful weather-vane pointing to the prevailing currents
in Indias urban ecology over the last century in turn accommodating (and thus
spatializing) colonial and caste elites, a proto-nationalist public, urban mass migrants,
disenfranchized agitators and, in the form of the multiplex, a wilfully-segregated
consuming class.
The significance of the multiplex, therefore, as an intervention in the public history of
the Indian cinema lies in its capacity to separate the classes within the cinema audience,
with the intention of filtering out the undesirable elements. In the process, the carefully
considered architecture of the multiplex transforms the cinema crowd, long associated
with mob behaviour, into a marketable commodity for retailers and advertisers. This
reinvention of the public body of the cinema necessarily entails a spatial separation
between the decent crowd and the masses, from which the distinctive taste cultures of
the multiplex and the cinema hall subsequently arise. The historical perspectives drawn
from the work of S. V. Srinivas and others tell us that the tension between these two
publics is not a product of the multiplex per se, but is in fact a longstanding feature of
cinematic exhibition in India. Similarly, it is important to recognize that the ground for
spatial segregation has long been laid. Indeed, it was one of the intrinsic principles in
the formal organization of the colonial city and, in the post-socialist era, it is relatively
unsurprising to see its revival in the commercially-oriented urban redevelopment
agendas that have facilitated the multiplex boom. Taking these factors into account, we
begin to see how the multiplex has been consciously deployed in India in order to solve
the problem of the cinema from a particular set of perspectives that correspond closely
to Chatterjees reading of the current phase in the contest between the forces of civil
society and political society. In the specific case of the multiplex this process should
be further seen as part of (and a response to) the history of social contest within (and
outside) the cinema hall.
Notes on contributor
Adrian Athique is senior lecturer in Screen and Media Studies at the University of Waikato. He has
written a range of articles on the Indian media, as well as being co-author (with Douglas Hill,
University of Otago) of The Multiplex in India: A Cultural Economy of Urban Leisure (Routledge,
2010).

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